Good Women Can’t Win: Competition, Labor Markets and Gender Norms

Throughout history, gender-based systems of labor division have determined the work activities of men and women, but implications for economic inequality between genders has varied over time and space. An important ideology used to justify economically unequal roles for the genders has been that of “separate spheres”, conceptualizing the household as a sanctified space, separate from the rest of society. To achieve this, the household had to be run by a woman, given assumptions about the different behavioral tendencies of the genders, and she had to be commensurately innocent of social and political issues, focused instead on family and kinship. For men, the ideal became a breadwinner able to fund this household. This project will document when these ideologies (and associated normative structures) gained stronghold in different societies (including Victorian England, post-WW2 United States and lower income countries) and ask whether these junctures coincided with either the arrival of better paid (but scarce) job opportunities or other social shocks.

The Scarf RAs will work with a team of researchers to (i) undertake archival work on women in Cambridge University prior to 1900 (when they were not allowed to get degrees) and the labor market they subsequently faced and (ii) data from multiple field experiments in India that evaluate how separate sphere ideologies can be challenged through well-designed financial inclusion policies and, separately, the role of cellphones in impacting normative change.