We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women's careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and...

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...

Currently, both men and women face the challenge of balancing their work and childcare responsibilities, which is not always straightforward. When individuals experience tensions between their work and family life, they are likely to prioritize one over the other, often facing penalties for...

This paper investigates the impact of the #MeToo movement in the workplace, drawing on French survey data on harassment behaviours and administrative data on worker flows. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, following the #MeToo movement, women began leaving high-risk...

This Brief explores how childcare responsibilities shape women’s entrepreneurial choices and business growth, drawing on data from the Women, Business and the Law project as well as complementary evidence from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Nigeria. Globally, women spend nearly three times as much...

Can college-educated women in rapidly developing economies balance career and family, or does compressed economic growth polarize their choices? This paper investigates how Indonesian women navigate these dual objectives across birth cohorts from the 1950s to the 1990s. It utilizes 38 years of...

This paper studies job preferences among women in rural and peri-urban areas in El Salvador using a discrete choice experiment. Drawing on focus group insights, the analysis varies wages and five non‑wage job attributes—contract status, experience requirements, commute safety, residential...

This paper presents a dataset and an analytical framework to study the welfare effects of tariff changes on women. The data is an extension of the Household Impacts of Tariffs (HIT) dataset, which contains harmonized household survey data for 54 low and lower middle-income countries. It includes...

In developing countries, women live longer than ever and make up the majority of older people. Many play central roles in their families and communities well into advanced ages, both as income earners and as unpaid carers of grandchildren, spouses, and even their own parents. Older women’s...

Patriarchal attitudes persistently constrain women's employment outcomes in Turkey. This study investigates individual-level determinants of preferences for employment patriarchy using the World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 7 data for the Turkish case. An ordered probit model is utilized to quantify...

Rising temperatures due to climate change pose significant challenges to how much and how effectively individuals can work, particularly in low- and middle-income countries such as India, where exposure to extreme heat is becoming more common. While existing research documents adverse effects of...

South Africa's shift to renewable energy has been characterised by significant structural changes, primarily through the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), which achieved considerable capacity by 2016. Although this green transition aligns with...

Engineering remains a highly gendered and racialised profession in South Africa, shaped by enduring historical inequalities and the imprint of institutionalised exclusion that structures women's experiences of belonging and professional legitimacy. While women's underrepresentation in STEM is...

This research improves our understanding of overeducation by highlighting its risks among middle-educated workers, especially the specific risk that motherhood may pose for job mismatch among them, compared to highly educated women. It employs random-effects and Heckman selection models with...

Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC) is viewed as reshaping labor markets, yet its implications for gender inequality in developing economies remain underexplored. This study examines these dynamics among formal wage workers in Indonesia from 2001 to 2019. Using stacked first-difference...

Despite several policies and legislation enactments to address gender inequality in the post-apartheid South African employment landscape, a significant proportion of female academics still face marginalization and underrepresentation in senior executive positions. This paper aims to investigate...

The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5, 7, and 8 aim to achieve gender equality for women, ensure affordable and sustainable energy, and promote economic growth and decent work for all, respectively. However, women remain underrepresented within the sustainable energy sector...

Can employer-side wage subsidies increase hiring women in low female labor force participation settings? This paper tests this using a randomized experiment with 1,227 Pakistani firms on a national jobs platform. Treatment firms were offered a six-month wage subsidy determined via the...

La Mujer, la Empresa y el Derecho 2026 es el undécimo de una serie de estudios anuales en los que se analizan las leyes y políticas que inciden en las oportunidades económicas de las mujeres en 190 economías. En la edición de 2026 se presenta una versión actualizada de la versión...

This paper studies the causal impact of female political representation on legislative behavior, social attitudes, and gender-based crime. Using a regression discontinuity design based on close mixed-gender electoral contests, we compare electorates that narrowly elected female versus male...

We study the part-time penalty. Using Danish register data, the Danish Labor Force Survey, and hospital personnel records, we show that the pay gap between part-time and full-time workers is sizable and increases over the career because the two groups accumulate different levels of human capital...

Official Spanish birth registry data report sex ratios well above expected levels between 1975 and 2000, peaking at 109 boys per 100 girls in the early 1980s, the highest in the world at that time. Prior research has attributed these elevated ratios to factors such as maternal age, birth order,...

Persistent gender gaps in self-promotion contribute to unequal labor market outcomes. In this study, we investigate how AI-assisted writing tools shape selfpromotion, and, as a secondary outcome, confidence and how these effects interact with gender. For this purpose, we conducted an online...

We establish a positive relationship between work from home (WFH) and fertility, drawing on our Global Survey of Working Arrangements (38 economies, N = 19,241) and our US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (N = 102,411). Respondents who WFH at least 1 day per week had more biological...

This study investigates gender differences in labor market outcomes among highly educated individuals in Japan, emphasizing heterogeneity by fields of study, with a focus on STEM. Using data from the Japanese Panel Study of Employment Dynamics (JPSED), we find that women with STEM degrees begin...

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...

We document that women strategically sort into "family-friendly" sectors characterized by lower returns to experience but lower per-child penalties before the birth of their first child. This anticipatory sorting represents an ex-ante cost of motherhood that is entirely missed by conventional...

Women's employment remains highly sensitive to childcare constraints, making childcare availability a critical lever for supporting mothers' labor force attachment. We study the effects of expanded full-day programming in Head Start, using the 2016 federal funding initiative that targeted...

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...

We investigate how fertility relates to work from home (WFH) in the post-pandemic era, drawing on original data from our Global Survey of Working Arrangements and U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Realized fertility from 2023 to 2025 and future planned fertility are higher among...