Gender roles produce divergent economic expectations

Francesco D’Acunto, Ulrike Malmendier () and Michael Weber
Additional contact information
Francesco D’Acunto: Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Boston, MA 02467
Ulrike Malmendier: Department of Economics and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, vol. 118, issue 21, e2008534118

Abstract: Expectations about economic variables vary systematically across genders. In the domain of inflation, women have persistently higher expectations than men. We argue that traditional gender roles are a significant factor in generating this gender expectations gap as they expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives. Using unique data on the participation of men and women in household grocery chores, their resulting exposure to price signals, and their inflation expectations, we document a tight link between the gender expectations gap and the distribution of grocery shopping duties. Because grocery prices are highly volatile, and consumers focus disproportionally on positive price changes, frequent exposure to grocery prices increases perceptions of current inflation and expectations of future inflation. The gender expectations gap is largest in households whose female heads are solely responsible for grocery shopping, whereas no gap arises in households that split grocery chores equally between men and women. Our results indicate that gender differences in inflation expectations arise due to social conditioning rather than through differences in innate abilities, skills, or preferences.

Keywords: gender roles; expectations; perceptions; experiences; social conditioning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2008534118.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender roles produce divergent economic expectations (2021)
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:nas:journl:v:118:y:2021:p:e2008534118

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().