The Grammatical Origins of Gender Roles

We investigate the relation between gender marking in grammar and female participation in the labor market, the credit market, land ownership, and politics. Crosscountry and individual-level analyses reveal that women speaking languages that more pervasively mark gender distinctions are less likely to participate in economic and political life and more likely to encounter barriers in their access to land and credit. These findings are robust to a large set of controls and robustness checks. We also found that the impact of a language's gender structure remains after controlling for culture, for historical agricultural use of the plough.