Women hold up half the sky? Trade specialization patterns and work-related gender norms

This paper studies whether export composition differences in gender-specific skills can affect individuals' work-related gender norms. We start by identifying female-oriented and male-oriented skills at the occupation level based on literature in neuroscience and medicine. Then with industries' occupational employment share data and exports data, we are able to construct country-level gender-specific skill export intensities. They are combined with gender norm information from World Value Surveys to test the hypothesis. To establish causality, a gravity model based IV strategy is adopted to get export intensities from trade flows predicted with exogenous factors. The empirical results show that if a country exports more in industries using female-oriented skills intensively relative to male-oriented skills, individuals in that country are more likely to have equal gender norms. Mechanism tests indicate that this relationship holds because expansion in female-oriented exporting sectors improves females' probability to work and their economic contribution to the household. In addition, we find suggestive evidence that some females choose to postpone their marriage age and have fewer children to seize increased job opportunities. Besides improved economic status, females also put more emphasis on work following export expansions in female-oriented skill sectors, which also contributes to equal gender norms.