Gender Norms, Occupational Choices, and the Innovation Gender Gap

Andreas F. Buehler, Patrick Lehnert and Uschi Backes-Gellner
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Andreas Fridolin Bühler

No 230, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: This paper analyzes how social gender norms affect the innovation gender gap, part of which stems from an underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. This underrepresentation is traceable to gender-biased educational and occupational choices. One determinant for such biased choices is social gender norms, which also directly affect the innovation gender gap. We disentangle the direct effect of social gender norms from their indirect effect via educational and occupational choices. Combining municipality-level voting data as a measure for social gender norms with patent data as a measure for innovation outcomes, we apply structural equation modeling. Our results show that more traditional gender norms are associated with a significantly lower number of patents filed by women and that the indirect effect via educational and occupational choices accounts for 5.5% of the total effect. These results are crucial for policymakers: while social gender norms are highly persistent and difficult to change in the short term, promoting greater gender equality in educational and occupational choices can be achieved more quickly and may therefore yield important short-term reductions in the innovation gender gap.

Keywords: Gender; Education; Occupational Choices; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-soc and nep-tid
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0230

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