Does Gender Matter for Economic Convergence? The OECD Evidence

This work studies the role of gender on economic convergence in a standard convergence model expanded by gender shares of labor force. The theoretical part of the paper shows the positive role of gender on economic growth. Next, the paper presents 5-year span panel data tests of the contribution of the female share in employment on economic growth for 34 OECD countries in the period 1951-2010. We find that an increase in the share of women has a positive contribution to economic convergence across OECD countries. In addition to this, we also show that there is a U-shaped curvilinear relationship between gender equality and economic growth for OECD countries in the period 1951-2010. We conjecture that this result coincides with the ‘S-shaped’ Kuznets Curve of Gender hypothesis.