Decomposing culture: An analysis of gender, language, and labor supply in the household

Victor Gay (), Daniel L. Hicks, Estefania Santacreu-Vasut and Amir Shoham

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Despite broad progress in closing many dimensions of the gender gap around the globe, recent research has shown that traditional gender roles can still exert a large influence on female labor force participation, even in developed economies. This paper empirically analyzes the role of culture in determining the labor market engagement of women within the context of collective models of household decision making. In particular, we use the epidemiological approach to study the relationship between gender in language and labor market participation among married female immigrants to the U.S. We show that the presence of gender in language can act as a marker for culturally acquired gender roles and that these roles are important determinants of household labor allocations. Female immigrants who speak a language with sex-based grammatical rules exhibit lower labor force participation, hours worked, and weeks worked. Our strategy of isolating one component of culture reveals that roughly two thirds of this relationship can be explained by correlated cultural factors, including the role of bargaining power in the household and the impact of ethnic enclaves, and that at most one third is potentially explained by language having a causal impact.

Keywords: Culture; Female labor force participation; Immigrants; Language structure; Grammar (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J61 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-evo, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77637/1/MPRA_paper_77637.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Decomposing culture: an analysis of gender, language, and labor supply in the household (2018)
Working Paper: Decomposing Culture: An Analysis of Gender, Language, and Labor Supply in the Household (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:pra:mprapa:77637

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().