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

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16089

Classification and Topics

• 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

Contributors, Places and Time

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

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/272716
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET