Despite significant progress over the past decades, women still earn less than men. There are many reasons for this: career interruptions due to childcare, entry into lower-paid occupations, discrimination, etc. How women react to such circumstances may depend on how much they conform to traditional gender norms: do they see themselves in a more traditional role, predominantly at home and caring for the family, or as part of a dual-earner couple with equally shared household chores?
In a recent piece of research, we try to understand such conformity with gender norms: Why do some women feel more strongly that their place is at home, and does it matter for their life choices and outcomes?
To answer this question, we used a unique data set – essays written by 11 year old girls in 1969 about what they imagined their lives to be like when they were 25. The girls who wrote the essays were part of the National Child Development Study, a cohort of children born in one week in 1958, who have been followed by researchers from birth until today. Focusing on essays written by girls, we establish how stereotypically female the words used in each essay are, by using an algorithm that benchmarks them against female associations found in books written during the same time period.
For example, girls who predominantly write about taking care of children, working as a nurse and attending to a husband are classified as conforming strongly to traditional gender norms, whereas girls who write about being dentists and living with friends are classified as conforming less to traditional gender norms. We then study how adult outcomes for such girls differ.
Girls who conform more strongly to traditional gender norms will earn less. Moving from the middle of the distribution of gender conformity to the top 25 per cent is associated with a 1.9 per cent decrease in earnings over the lifecycle, after accounting for differences in cognitive and socioemotional skills, geographic differences as well as family background during childhood.
These earnings differences arise because women who conform more to traditional gender norms tend to have lower wages and also work fewer hours which, in turn, can be explained by differences in educational attainment, earlier family formation and occupations. Women who conform more to traditional gender norms are less likely to attend university, are inclined to get married earlier and have children earlier (though there is no effect on overall marriage rates and fertility), and tend to enter more female-dominated, lower-paid occupations. All of these things together mean that they earn less over the course of their lives.
But why do some women conform more to gender norms than others? This is where our research can only give an indicative answer. Gender conformity appears to depend less on the circumstances of families than one might have thought. Children with better cognitive and non-cognitive skills tend to conform less to traditional gender norms; moreover, those who grow up in more emancipated regions, i.e. regions with a higher female share of university graduates, and higher female employment rates, conform less to traditional gender norms. In contrast, having less educated parents, as well as having a sister is associated with more conformity to gender norms, though there is more uncertainty around these estimates. We find no effect of parental age, income or whether the mother worked. The lack of importance of such family-based variables potentially indicates that conformity to gender norms are shaped by other factors, such as the media, schools or peers.
What do these results mean for policy? Our finding that gender conformity in girls, already prevalent at age 11, has a large effect on the earnings of women merits attention. Research in other contexts has shown that attitudes towards gender norms are indeed malleable until relatively late in childhood and can be modified with classroom-based interventions. Such interventions have also been successfully implemented in the UK, such as the Lifting Limits pilot in Camden.
While more evidence is needed, our research indicates that conformity with gender norms may not exclusively depend on the family environment, thus highlighting the potential importance of schools and the wider environment in shaping girls’ responses to gender norms, and ultimately their outcomes.
Watch the video:
Discover more about the research on the University of Bristol website.
Uta Bolt is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Bristol and Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Her research spans human capital development, health and gender, with a particular focus on the persistence of outcomes across generations.
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