Does the Gender Composition of an Occupation Affect Wages?
Abstrac t:
We analyze whether an increase in the female share of an occupation causally leads to lower relative wages for b oth male and female workers in that occupation by exploiting the natural ex periment of German reunification as an exogenous shock to female shares. Wh en the Berlin Wall fell, East German women were not only more likely to par ticipate in the labor market than their West German counterparts, but were also distributed differently across occupations. Using the gendered potenti al labor supply shock in an occupation caused by reunification as an instru ment for the change in the actual gender composition in the West before and after reunification, we document that an increase in the female share caus ally leads to lower wages for both men and women working in the respective occupation. The evidence is in line with the “devaluation hypothesis” devel oped in the sociological literature.
DTSTAMP:20260531T091132Z DTSTART:20230508T143000Z DTEND:20230508T160000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR