Non-college Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment

Amanda Chuan () and Weilong Zhang ()
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Amanda Chuan: Michigan State University
Weilong Zhang: University of Cambridge

No 16089, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper explores how non-college occupations contributed to the gender gap in college enrollment, where women overtook men in college-going. Using instrumental variation from routinization, we show that the decline of routine-intensive occupations displaced the non-college occupations of women, raising female enrollment. Embedding this instrumental variation into a dynamic Roy model, we find that routinization decreased returns to the non-college occupations of women, increasing their college premium. In contrast, men's non-college occupations were less susceptible to routinization. Our model estimates that workplace routinization accounted for 44% of the growth in female enrollment during 1980-2000.

Keywords: occupations; human capital; college enrollment; gender; automation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I24 I26 J16 J23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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