Thesis
Three essays on gender and inequality
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2025
- Thesis identifier
- T17512
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202189178
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This thesis explores how gender norms and public policies shape maternal labor supply, occupational sorting, and investments in children. Across three empirical chapters, it examines the individual- and household-level mechanisms through which beliefs and institutional constraints affect economic behaviors, using evidence from the United Kingdom (UK) and France. Collectively, these three chapters contribute to the literature on labor economics, gender, and child development by uncovering the persistent influence of norms, beliefs, and economic policy on women’s labor market trajectories and family choices. The first chapter, The Motherhood Penalty: Gender Norms, Comparative Advantage, and Occupational Sorting investigates how pre-birth gender norms influence women’s labor market outcomes around motherhood in the UK. Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey, we quantify motherhood penalties in earnings and hours worked, showing that they are significantly larger for women who hold more traditional gender norms prior to the first childbirth. Our analysis further reveals that occupational sorting plays a central role in mediating these penalties. Traditional mothers are more likely to sort into occupations that allow for greater reductions in working hours after childbirth, whereas egalitarian mothers’ labor market outcomes are more strongly influenced by comparative advantage — proxied by hourly wage differentials — within the household. Occupational sorting accounts for 80% of the short-run earnings penalty gap between the two groups, and fully explains the difference in hours worked. These findings highlight the significance of anticipatory occupational choices, shaped by gender norms, in driving post-motherhood labor market trajectories. The second chapter, Beliefs on Children’s Human Capital Formation and Mothers at Work investigates how beliefs about gender roles in child-rearing influence perceptions of maternal employment and, in turn, may constrain women’s labor supply. Using a survey experiment that equalizes earnings potential across genders, we find that women are systematically perceived to hold an absolute advantage in childrearing, irrespective of comparative advantage within the household. These expectations and beliefs persist even when mothers and fathers are described as having equal time available, with mothers expected to invest more time in their children’s skill development. In addition, we show on the one hand that children’s outcomes tend to be underestimated when mothers work full-time, but, on the other hand, that providing accurate information about actual performance leads to more accurate beliefs and attenuates concerns about negative impacts. Overall, our findings illustrate how persistent misperception about children’s human capital formation under maternal employment can reinforce gendered labor market behaviors, and point to a potential of informational interventions in shifting perceptions and, in turn, attitudes. Finally, the third chapter, Universal No More? Poverty and Child Care Consequences of Means-Testing, evaluates the unintended consequences of replacing a universal child benefit with a means-tested scheme in 2015 in France. Exploiting quasi experimental variation from income thresholds based on pre-determined income from two years prior, we assess the causal impact of benefit reductions on material conditions, labor supply, and childcare use. We find that households facing reduced benefits experienced an increase in material deprivation and subjective financial hardship. Despite these financial pressures, we find no evidence of compensatory changes in parental labor supply, including among the self-employed. However, households responded by changing their use of non-parental childcare, moving away from more expensive arrangements (e.g., childminders) toward lower-cost and publicly subsidized daycare. Our findings thus indicate that even modest cuts to benefit generosity can lead to significant changes in both material conditions and the type of childcare used, even in the absence of labor supply responses. Taken together, these three papers highlight how both informal institutions, such as gender norms and beliefs, and formal institutions, notably public policies, shape parental decisions related to labor supply, caregiving, and child-rearing. By analyzing the interplay between normative expectations, belief formation and policy design, this thesis aims to advance our understanding of the structural and behavioral mechanisms driving gender inequalities in the labor market and within households.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Romiti, Agnese
- Norris, Jonathan
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Funder
Relations
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PDF of thesis T17512 | 2025-10-21 | Public | Download |