Importing Gender Equality : A Technological Revolution Effect

The majority of existing studies document the effect of liberalization episodes on gender inequality. That of trade actors, though, has been largely ignored. Is gender inequality within a country affected by its trading partners? This question was examined in this paper by adopting a spatial model of trade across 123 countries from 1997-2013. We use the gender inequality index to capture global trends on gender within a country. We then disaggregated trade into technology-level products in order to identify a technology channel. Results show that higher gender equality standards abroad spills over via imports of medium, high-tech and mineral products into higher domestic gender equality standards. Such results suggest that a technological revolution affects firms, households and governments in impacting female empowerment