EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military

Kyle Greenberg, Melanie Wasserman and Anna Weber

No 17528, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men's job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men's performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men's perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers' perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.

JEL-codes: H56 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 94 pages
Date: 2024-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17528.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military (2024) Downloads
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:iza:izadps:dp17528

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
library@iza.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte (hinte@iza.org).

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17528