Arbeitspapier

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

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.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16089

Classification
Wirtschaft
Higher Education; Research Institutions
Education and Inequality
Returns to Education
Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Labor Demand
Subject
gender
college enrollment
human capital
occupations
automation

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Chuan, Amanda
Zhang, Weilong
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
(where)
Bonn
(when)
2023

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Chuan, Amanda
  • Zhang, Weilong
  • Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Time of origin

  • 2023

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