The Long-Run Effects of Male-Biased Sex Ratios on Mateship and Social Capital

We employ a natural experiment – the transport of convicts to the British colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – to examine the long-run effect of gender norms on the evolution of mateship and the formation of social capital in modern-day Australia. We find that people who live in areas in which sex ratios were historically male-biased, have higher social capital. Our instrumental variable estimates suggest that a standard deviation increase in the historical population sex ratio causes a 12.3% increase in social capital, while the reduced form estimates indicate that a standard deviation increase in the convict sex ratio causes a 5.4% increase in social capital. We show that gender norms have been transmitted within families and via marriage through assortative matching, as well as through shared remembrance in the form of war memorials in neighbourhoods in which sex ratios were historically male-biased. We explore the effect of gender norms on specific facets of social capital and find that in neighbourhoods characterised by conservative gender norms and well-defined masculinity norms due to historically high sex ratios, people are more likely to help each other, more likely to do things together and are more close-knit.