Gendered Economic Relations in Evolution

Gendered Economic Relations in Evolution is a research project comprising five individual papers to be published in high-quality scientific journals. The overall idea of the project is to analyze how changes in legal and institutional frameworks have influenced the role of gender in the economy. The project thus studies how different dimensions of men and womens economic roles have evolved in response to changing social norms, legal frameworks, and cultural practices. Each of the five papers in the project use the most modern econometric techniques applied to recently collected microdata to analyze their respective questions. The main hypothesis in each paper is, broadly speaking, that changes in a law or social/cultural institution contributed to forming new archetypes of what it means to be a man or a woman in todays economy. The geographical context of the papers is almost exclusively western countries (Austria, Canada, and the USA). However, one paper in the project takes a more global approach, asking if the employment outcomes of female workers are better when they work in globalized versus mainly domestic firms in over 100 different countries. The paper thus asks if globalization provides new opportunities for women at work. A second paper in the project studies whether same-sex couples in the United States changed how they divide their labor (that is, how the couple distributes paid work and unpaid household- and care-work) upon having received the right to marry, file their taxes jointly, or make claims for alimony payments upon the dissolution of the union. In other words, did these new rights change the way that the couples organized their economic lives? A third paper also studies the economics of sexual orientation, analyzing whether the pay gap faced by gay men and lesbians has changed over the last 15 years, a time in which public acceptance of these individuals has grown tremendously. The fourth paper analyzes the extent to which womens increasing levels of education has translated into access to more wealth and decision-making power in their households. Education is often considered to be a critical gateway to economic autonomy and prosperity, but to what extent has this been true inside individual households? Has womens education changed the way that couples divide their resources and decision-making power? Finally, the last paper studies if a basic income grant implemented in Canada in the 1970s, in which participants were given a basic payment each month regardless of their outside income, affected couples fertility decisions. The main question here is whether access to more financial security via this basic income grant emboldened couples to get pregnant and have a child.

"Gendered Economic Relations in Evolution" studies how the relevance of gender in the economy has evolved as social norms, laws, and economic practices have changed. The project comprises several studies, each showing how economic relations and gender are deeply related - indeed, inseparable. The countries, time period, and economic outcomes studied in each of the papers is different, but the fundamental main finding shows up again and again: economic processes and outcomes are very strongly influenced by gender norms, and in turn, economic conditions affect gender-specific relations. Four research papers resulted from this project. One shows that there is gender inequality in wealth, not just overall, but also within households. About one-third of heterosexual couples in Austria reported in 2017 that the people in the couple did not have equal ownership of the wealth; in most of these households, men own more of the wealth. The gender wealth gap within Austrian households is related strongly to the education and migration background of the people in the couple. The wealth gap is highest in couples comprising an Austrian-born man and a foreign-born woman. The second paper looks at how a basic income grant - that is, a guarantee from the government that a household will receive income each month - affects fertility. In the 1970s the Canadian government offered such a program in some regions. The study in the project shows that households that received the basic income grant were more likely to have a child during the time of the experiment. The third paper shows that laws that gave same-sex couples the same rights as different-sex couples in the United States between 2000-2016 changed the way that these couples organize the work among the members of the couple. When same-sex couples got the right to marry, they increased their household division of labor. These findings imply that marriage encourages greater economic inequality within a couple, which can help us understand gender differences in income and working time in different-sex couples. The final paper asks how globalization is affecting women's economic positions in the labor market. The work shows that norms of gender equality and inequality are transferred through economic interactions. When companies have owners or customers in relatively gender-equal countries, they themselves are more likely to have more gender-equal employment structures. This is true of production and non-production jobs, but the exposure to gender equality does not make a firm more likely to have female top managers. In all of these papers, we see that gender and gender norms are present in many economic relations and economics matters for gender-specific outcomes. As laws and institutions change, as do gender relations - but inequality seems to persist.