Reading Between the Lines: Gendered Narratives in Mexican Textbooks and Adult Labor Market Outcomes

Educational materials do not only teach academic content; they also convey implicit messages about social roles that children absorb during formative years. This paper studies whether exposure to gendered narratives in primary school textbooks is associated with labor market outcomes later in life. By analyzing the Mexican national textbook program and using word embeddings to quantify the narratives, the results show that a one-standard-deviation increase in exposure to narratives that link agency and cognition with men is associated with a 3.3 percentage point increase in labor force participation for men and 1.1 for women, alongside a reduction in women’s presence in female- and male-dominated occupations. For narratives that link communality and emotion with women, the exposure measure moves inversely with completed schooling and its estimated associations are dominated by the returns to education. When the measure is decomposed into its narrative and schooling components, content framing communality and emotion as feminine is associated with lower labor force participation for both genders. The findings suggest that the content of state-produced educational materials is a channel through which beliefs about gender-appropriate roles are associated with labor market behavior decades after exposure.