The Causal Impact of Gender Norms on Mothers’ Employment Attitudes and Expectations

Henning Hermes, Marina Krauss, Philipp Lergetporer, Frauke Peter and Simon Wiederhold

No 19800, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative. Our randomized treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who misperceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labor-market attitudes towards being more liberal—and we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are significantly more likely to plan an increase in their working hours one year ahead.

JEL-codes: C93 J16 J18 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19800 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cpr:ceprdp:19800

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19800

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().