The Impact of Gender Role Norms on Mothers' Labor Supply

Cheti Nicoletti; Marco Francesconi; Danilo Cavapozzi

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.033

The Impact of Gender Role Norms on Mothers' Labor Supply

Cheti Nicoletti, Marco Francesconi, Danilo Cavapozzi

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We study whether mothers' labor supply is shaped by the gender role attitudes of their peers. Using detailed information on a sample of UK mothers with dependent children, we find that having peers with gender-egalitarian norms leads mothers to be more likely to have a paid job and to have a greater share of the total number of paid hours worked within their household, but has no sizable effect on hours worked. Most of these effects are driven by less educated women. A new decomposition analysis allows us to estimate that approximately half of the impact on labor force participation is due to women conforming gender role attitudes to their peers', with the remaining half being explained by the spillover effect of peers' labor market behavior. These findings suggest that an evolution towards gender-egalitarian attitudes promotes gender convergence in labor market outcomes. In turn, a careful dissemination of statistics on female labor market behavior and attitudes may accelerate this convergence.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	113–134
Number of pages	22
Journal	Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Volume	186
Early online date	17 Apr 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.033
Publication status	Published - 1 Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

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10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.033

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© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. . This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.
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Cite this

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abstract = "We study whether mothers' labor supply is shaped by the gender role attitudes of their peers. Using detailed information on a sample of UK mothers with dependent children, we find that having peers with gender-egalitarian norms leads mothers to be more likely to have a paid job and to have a greater share of the total number of paid hours worked within their household, but has no sizable effect on hours worked. Most of these effects are driven by less educated women. A new decomposition analysis allows us to estimate that approximately half of the impact on labor force participation is due to women conforming gender role attitudes to their peers', with the remaining half being explained by the spillover effect of peers' labor market behavior. These findings suggest that an evolution towards gender-egalitarian attitudes promotes gender convergence in labor market outcomes. In turn, a careful dissemination of statistics on female labor market behavior and attitudes may accelerate this convergence.",

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