Gender Roles and the Misallocation of Labour Across Countries

This paper asks whether the gendered division of work inside and outside the home leads to the misallocation of labor. Using personnel data of a multinational firm covering 100K employees in 101 countries over 5 years together with labor force participation data we show that women are more positively selected than men: the productivity of the average female worker is higher than that of the average male worker, and this gap is decreasing in women’s participation in the labor force. Structural estimates indicate that equalising barriers to labor force participation would increase firm productivity by 32% keeping employment and the wage bill constant.

That is from a recent paper by Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni, and Víctor Quintas-Martínez.

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