Gender Norms, Occupational Choices, and the Innovation Gender Gap

The innovation gender gap partly stems from an underrepresentation of women in STEM occupations, which is traceable to gender-biased educational and occupational choices. One determinant for such biased choices is gender norms. However, gender norms also directly affect the innovation gender gap. We disentangle the direct effect of gender norms from their indirect effect via educational and occupational choices. We conduct a municipality-level analysis that combines voting data to measure gender norms with patent data to measure innovation outcomes. Applying structural equation modeling to disentangle the effects, our results show that more traditional gender norms in a municipality are associated with a significantly lower number of patents filed by women in this municipality and that the indirect effect via educational and occupational choices accounts for 5.3% of the total effect. These results are important for policymakers: while gender norms are highly persistent and difficult to change even in the long term, promoting gender equality in educational and occupational choices is more effective in the short term and may therefore yield important and faster reductions in the innovation gender gap.