We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

This chapter reviews key literature studying the effects of wars on minority and underrepresented groups in U.S. labor markets in the 20th century. These labor markets, characterized by historically pervasive barriers to entry into certain occupations and industries, promotions, and fair pay for...

Modern personnel practices, social consensus, and the Depression acted in concert to delay the emergence of married women in the American economy through an institution known as the "marriage bar." Marriage bars were policies adopted by firms and local school boards, from about the early 1900's...

We explore whether COVID-19 disproportionately affected women in the labor market using CPS data through the end of 2020. We find that male-female gaps in the employment-to-population ratio and hours worked for women with school-age children have widened but not for those with younger children....

Women earn less than men, and that is especially true of mothers relative to fathers. Much of the widening occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? To answer that question, we estimate three earning gaps: the "motherhood...

Gendered discrimination based on age and disability is a pressing issue, because this discrimination can interfere with the goal of lengthening work lives, especially for older women. In the United States, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit...

We create a dataset of 14,000 hand-coded help-wanted advertisements placed by employment agencies in three U.S. newspapers in 1950 and 1960, a time when help-wanted advertisements were divided into male and female sections, and collect information on agency ownership. We find that female-owned...

Women enter retirement having spent fewer years in market work, earned less over their lifetimes, and worked in different jobs than men of the same age. This study examines whether these differences in work-life experiences help explain why many women end up with lower levels of retirement...

Affirmative Action is not only supposed to help move minorities and females into employment, it is also supposed to help move them up the job ladder, and it is this second goal that is perhaps the more controversial. Studies of Affirmative Action during thel ate 1960's and early 1910's found it...

We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during...