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on Gender |
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Issue of 2026–03–23
nine papers chosen by Jan Sauermann, Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Claudia Curi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy); Andreas Dibiasi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy); Matteo Ploner (University of Trento, Italy); Mirco Tonin (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) |
| Abstract: | 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 the time of enrollment. To assess whether advisory behavior contributes to this gap, we conduct a vignette-based survey experiment among pension advisors affiliated to the four funds, randomly varying the gender of otherwise identical prospective 25-year-old clients. Advisors are 22 percentage points less likely to recommend stock-oriented portfolios to female clients, even after conditioning on advisors’ beliefs about relevant client characteristics. We further show that a simple information intervention that makes advisors aware of the documented gender bias eliminates this gap in the experimental setting. Linking advisors to real clients in the administrative data, we demonstrate that the gender gap in actual investment choices shrinks by ap proximately 60% during the five months following the intervention. This evidence suggests that gender bias in financial advice is largely implicit and that low-cost informational feedback to advisors can meaningfully reduce gender disparities in retirement wealth accumulation. |
| Keywords: | Biased advice; Gender; Pension; Implicit bias. |
| JEL: | J16 G53 J32 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bzn:wpaper:bemps118 |
| By: | Carlotta Nani; Martin Alejandro Correa; Julio Raffo |
| Abstract: | This paper examines gender disparities in intellectual property (IP) awareness and participation, using the 2023 and 2025 waves of the WIPO Pulse Survey conducted among 58, 135 individuals across seventy-four countries. Our findings reveal that copyrights are the most recognized IP forms globally, while patents, trademarks and geographical indications remain the least familiar. At the individual level, women demonstrate lower knowledge of patents and trademarks, but greater knowledge of designs and copyrights compared to men, with these differences persisting after controlling for socioeconomic factors. These patterns are consistent with gendered specialization in education, professional and household spheres where women tend to cluster in creative industries while men dominate entrepreneurship and technical sectors. Notably, we observe a cohort effect: while we identify significant differences in knowledge between men and women for older cohorts, these disappear among younger cohorts. We do not observe comparable changes by level of education or occupation of respondents. Moreover, women exhibit more positive attitudes towards IP-protected products across categories. These findings highlight the need for targeted awareness campaigns and reveal that gendered patterns of IP knowledge may contribute to innovation gender gaps through educational pathways and professional specialization. |
| Keywords: | Intellectual property, Gender equality, Gender disparities, Surveys |
| JEL: | O34 O31 J16 C83 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wip:wpaper:100 |
| By: | Adida, Claire; Kosec, Katrina; Kyle, Jordan; Mo, Cecilia Hyunjung; Arriola, Leonardo; Matanock, Aila; Adeyanju, Dolapo; Fisher, Rachel |
| Abstract: | Women’s political participation remains persistently lower than men’s worldwide. While barriers to women’s civic engagement are well documented, there is limited causal evidence on how to effectively close gender gaps in participation. This study evaluates whether a group-based training intervention can enhance women’s engagement in local governance. In a randomized controlled trial across 300 communities in rural southwest Nigeria, we recruited 3, 900 politically unaffiliated women into newly formed women’s action committees (WACs). Control WACs received a single civic education training, while treatment WACs received five additional trainings aimed at strengthening women’s collective efficacy over the course of six months. Leveraging baseline (May–July 2023) and endline (January—February 2024) surveys alongside behavioral data from a community grants competition, we find that the intervention significantly increased both the level and quality of women’s political participation. Treated communities also exhibited greater responsiveness by local leaders to women’s needs and priorities. These findings show that group-based interventions can meaningfully and scalably narrow gender gaps in civic participation. |
| Keywords: | gender; capacity building; governance; women's empowerment; randomized controlled trials; gender-transformative approaches; political systems; women's participation; Nigeria; Western Africa |
| Date: | 2025–12–31 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:180330 |
| By: | Cledwyn Fernandez (Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)); Shabana Mitra; Nency Agrawal |
| Abstract: | State financing plays a key role in driving economic growth at the sub-national level. While much is spoken about the state-centre relationship with respect to the devolution of funds, there is relatively less emphasis on the gender inclusivity of the funds. This policy brief summarises the role of centre to state financing in India, and examines the critical aspect of public finances from a gendered lens. The policy brief stems from a roundtable discussion that gathered policymakers, academicians, and practitioners together to discuss and ideate how state finances can be more gender inclusive. The key insights that emerged from the discussion was that while India has made positive strides in its legislations and policies that has improved women empowerment over the years, there is scope for more to be achieved in the future. India needs to improve and scale its gender budgeting, and it should empower participation of women in top political leadership positions that understand women issues better, so that funds can be allocated in sectors and schemes that address the needs of women. Last, it is important that women enter into productive sectors, away from agriculture. Hence, state financing should be allocated accordingly to enable the transition of women from agriculture to manufacturing and services. |
| Keywords: | budget, gender, state finances, leadership, icrier |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdc:ppaper:61 |
| By: | Barbara Boelmann (University of Cologne & RWI Leibniz Instiute for Economic Research); Carola Stapper (Johannes Kepler University Linz) |
| Abstract: | Over the past century, women have gained formal political rights, yet remain under-represented in leadership—partly due to lower demand for representation among women themselves. In this paper, we shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women’s own demand for representation. Specifically, we study how male absence during World War I affected German women’s demand for the franchise, exploiting exogenous variation in drafting intensity across regions for identification. To make demand for political representation directly measurable, we construct a newly digitised panel dataset of the universe of German suffragette clubs—a revealed-preference measure of demand, given the considerable costs of maintaining a club, especially under wartime restrictions on political activism. Our results show that women were more likely to keep suffragette clubs open in counties with greater male absence. This effect is driven by regions where women publicly led war relief efforts, pointing to agency and specifically women’s experience in visible leadership roles as the central mechanism. We further show that this demand for representation persisted after the franchise was extended, with women more likely to run for parliament and to vote in counties with greater wartime male absence and a suffragette club. |
| Keywords: | Waomen's political representation, suffrage movement, agency |
| JEL: | J16 N44 D71 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:396 |
| By: | Clara Schäper |
| Abstract: | 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 Act on Protection against Violence, which introduced residence bans in shared households and temporarily awarded victims sole use of the dwelling, summarized as “the aggressor goes, the victim stays”. Using divorce records (1998–2005), linked on the county-level to a hand-collected database of women’s shelter and counselling center openings (1970–2023), I estimate how divorce numbers changed in the period after the reform relative to the period before. I show that divorces rise markedly in the three years following the reform and decrease in the fourth. Trends are driven by female-initiated filings and are concentrated in West Germany, with increases appearing more persistent among non-German filers over time. To assess whether effects vary with support availability, I classify counties by pre-reform infrastructure of women’s shelters and counselling centers. Changes are muted where services already existed and strongest in areas lacking support infrastructure at the time of the legal change. These patterns are consistent with a two-stage model in which pre-existing support had already led abusive marriages to dissolve and/or deterred their formation, leaving a smaller stock of detectable abusive unions. |
| Keywords: | Domestic violence, gender, violence against women and girls (VAW) |
| JEL: | J12 J16 J18 K36 K42 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2159 |
| By: | Yueh-ya Hsu; Reshmaan N. Hussam; Erin M. Kelley; Gregory Lane |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates household preferences over who should work and whether these preferences are malleable. We document that men and women prefer that husbands work over wives. To understand why, we randomly assign a six-week job to either the husband or wife and document asymmetry: women’s work improves their own wellbeing but not their husbands’, while men’s work improves both partners’ wellbeing. One year later, we surprise households with a work opportunity. Both women and men in households where women were previously employed are more likely to prefer the woman take the job and express fewer concerns about women’s employment in general. |
| JEL: | D91 I31 J22 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34969 |
| By: | Francesconi, Marco (University of Essex); Nicoletti, Cheti (University of York); Surana, Khushboo (University of York) |
| Abstract: | We study the role of Gender Role Attitudes (GRA)—beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women—in marital sorting and intra-household allocations. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study and a multidimensional matching model following Dupuy and Galichon (2014), we estimate the contribution of GRA to the joint marriage utility alongside age, education, BMI, height, health, personality traits, and risk preferences. We find that sorting on GRA is quantitatively important: its contribution to the joint utility is comparable in magnitude to that of education. We apply a decomposition that identifies three main indices underlying the joint utility, with GRA loading heavily on one of the dominant indices jointly with age and education. This GRA-related index strongly predicts subsequent allocations within marriage, including spouses’ shares of housework, childcare, earnings, and paid labour. These findings indicate that GRA are a central dimension of assortative matching and play a meaningful role in shaping intra-household behaviour and gendered labour market outcomes. |
| Keywords: | marital matching, gender role attitude, intrahousehold allocations |
| JEL: | D13 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18459 |
| By: | Bagues, Manuel (University of Warwick); Villa, Carmen (University of Zurich) |
| Abstract: | 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, and differential prenatal care. We show that they instead reflect systematic coding errors by the Spanish Statistical Office. Census data reveal normal sex ratios for the same cohorts. The birth registry also exhibits implausible monthly volatility and asymmetrically distributed outliers, consistent with one-directional miscoding of females as males. Additional corroborating evidence comes from provisional birth statistics, which show significantly lower sex ratios than the finalised records, and from anomalous patterns in adjacent fields on the birth registration form. Our findings underscore the responsibility of statistical agencies to validate administrative records and cross-check them against alternative sources. |
| Keywords: | sex ratio at birth, birth registry, coding errors, missing women in Spain |
| JEL: | J16 J13 C18 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18436 |