Women increasingly migrate as primary movers, yet how gender inequality shapes this process remains unclear due to methodological limitations. Competing theories predict that greater gender equality should facilitate women's migration by loosening norms and expanding women's aspirations, whereas...

Does gender identity affect judicial decisions? This paper provides novel evidence of in-group gender bias in the judicial decisions for almost all divorce cases in China. Exploiting the effectively random assignment of cases to judges, the analysis finds that female judges are 1.2 percentage...

"We examine differences in jobs held by men and women based on a measure not used before, the standard human resources measures of "knowledge, skills, and abilities" generated by job analyses. While there is an abundance of evidence on gender disparities in pay, we know much less in detail about...

This paper presents the results of a field experiment aimed at reducing the gender bias in teaching evaluations at a higher education institution. In the intervention, before they completed the teaching evaluation questionnaire, students were individually randomized in three groups. One third...

The rapid ascent of digital platforms and the gig economy has prompted concerns about the gender pay gap. The results show that in the gig economy, gender continues to be a crucial determinant of workers' earnings, with women earning 85% of what men earn on a monthly basis. Nevertheless, in...

We develop a framework for quantifying barriers to labor force participation (LFP) and entrepreneurship faced by women in India. We find substantial barriers to LFP, and higher costs of expanding businesses through the hiring of workers for women entrepreneurs. However, there is one area in...

Is it possible to improve women's agency by providing information about their abilities? Using a lab experiment in the field, I study how perceived abilities and gender stereotypes shape intra-household dynamics. I use an incentivized decision-making game with 525 married couples from 42 rural...

Women are severely underrepresented in American politics, especially among Republicans. This underrepresentation may result from women being less willing to run for office, from voter bias against women, or from political structures that make it more difficult for women to compete. Here we show...

Women are severely underrepresented in American politics, especially among Republicans. This underrepresentation may result from women being less willing to run for office, from voter bias against women, or from political structures that make it more difficult for women to compete. Here we show...

We conduct an incentivized experiment with a nationally representative sample to investigate gender discrimination among people receiving advice on risky investments. Participants learn about actual start-up firms they can invest in. Before deciding how much of their endowment to invest, they...

This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students' preferences, random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, we estimate the causal pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns to different fields of study. We...

This Focus Note includes illustrative examples from successful initiatives around the world that demonstrate the potential of these strategies—from digital financial solutions that respect privacy concerns to data-driven approaches that challenge institutional biases. Development actors,...

Despite significant strides toward gender equality, women around the world continue to encounter systemic obstacles that hinder their entrepreneurial success. This paper systematically reviews the literature on the barriers female entrepreneurs face and the solutions proposed to overcome these...

We propose a new approach to estimate selection-corrected quantiles of the gender wage gap. Our method employs instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent variable but, conditional on the latent process, do not directly affect selection. We provide semiparametric identification...

Using 1979-2019 Current Population Survey data, we study the effect of state and federal minimum wage policies on gender, race, and ethnic inequality. We find that minimum wages substantially reduce intergroup wage inequality at least up to the 20th wage percentile, with no evidence of adverse...

We study whether digital platforms for high-skilled professionals level the playing field or reproduce traditional gender inequalities. Using high-frequency data on physicians, we examine gender differences in labor supply, pricing, patient engagement, and platform visibility. Although the...

This paper examines the role of sibling sex composition as a potential explanation of the transmission of parental advantages to the next generation. The presence of a brother affects the family environment and parents' decisions, influencing the siblings' labour market outcomes in the long...

National payroll data reveal that men are paid more than women when they enter firms in Great Britain. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap – the wage gap that would eventually...

This article takes as its starting point the warnings issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the perverse effects of a sedentary lifestyle on people's health, resulting in additional health expenditure that diverts significant resources away from other areas of public spending. The...

How large is the gender pay gap among university professors, and how do institutional pay-setting mechanisms shape this disparity? This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the gender pay gap among professors at a renowned German university. Using detailed human resources data for the time...

This study leverages whole-of-population linked census-administrative data to examine gender gaps in educational outcomes from early primary school through early adulthood in Australia and to assess the contribution of socioeconomic factors to these gaps. We find that females outperform males...

We study whether gender-biased financial advice contributes to the gender gap in pension wealth. Using administrative records from four private pension funds in Italy, we document that women are ceteris paribus 8 percentage points less likely than men to choose stock-focused investment lines at...

Gender equality and economic growth have historically tended to move together yet identifying causal effects has been difficult. This paper uses data on the support for female suffrage in Switzerland in order to explore the impact of technology adoption on gender norms. We argue that the early...

This paper replicates and extends the evidence on the lifetime effects of school starting age on earnings by Fredriksson and Öckert (2014) for Sweden. Using German data for individuals born between 1945 and 1965, we examine a more rigid system of ability tracking in secondary education, a...

Does increased legal infrastructure empower victims to leave abusive relationships? Structural barriers often prevent victims of intimate partner violence from seeking help, with two-thirds of female victims in Europe neither reporting incidents nor accessing support. I study Germany’s 2002...

Ours is the first meta-analysis synthesizing results from econometric studies carried out in the UK to assess the size of the gender wage gap (GWG). Drawing on 90 primary studies published between 1974 and 2024 we assess trends in the gap and identify the substantive and methodological factors...

In this paper, we show that gender gaps in performance observed in high-stakes exams, relative to low-stakes exams, are partially shaped by the context of exam preparation. We examine the role of exam preparation using data from French elite STEM higher education programs. First, we document a...

Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, partly because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender...

Female students are less likely to be identified as intellectually gifted than male students when the identification process follows a two-stage procedure. We posit and quantify two mechanisms that explain this gender gap. First, at any level of IQ, but especially at high levels of IQ, male...

We propose a new approach to estimate selection-corrected quantiles of the gender wage gap. Our method employs instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent variable but, conditional on the latent process, do not directly affect selection. We provide semiparametric identification...