Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams

Gordon Dahl, Andreas Kotsadam and Dan-Olof Rooth

No 24351, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during boot camp. We find that living and working with women for 8 weeks causes men to have more egalitarian attitudes. There is a 14 percentage point higher fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally and a 14 percentage point increase in men who do not completely disavow feminine traits. Moreover, men exposed to mixed-gender teams are more likely to choose military occupations immediately after boot camp which have a higher fraction of females in them. But these effects do not persist once treatment stops. Treated men’s attitudes converge to those of the controls in a 6-month follow up survey and there is no long-term effect on choosing fields of study, occupations or workplaces with a higher fraction of women in them after military service ends. Contrary to the predictions of many policymakers, we do not find that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits’ performance or satisfaction with service, either during boot camp or their subsequent military assignment. These findings provide evidence that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex. But they also suggest that without continuing intensive exposure, effects are unlikely to persist.

JEL-codes: J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-hrm and nep-lab
Note: LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Published as Gordon B Dahl & Andreas Kotsadam & Dan-Olof Rooth, 2021. "Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 136(2), pages 987-1030.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24351.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams* (2021)
Working Paper: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams (2021)
Working Paper: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams (2018)
Working Paper: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24351

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24351

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().