The interwar inflow of women in the labor force due to WWI persisted until today through intergenerational transmission mechanisms.
The scarcity of men due to the war generated an upward shift in female labor force participation that persisted throughout the interwar period.
Married female immigrants to the U.S. who speak a language with sex-based grammatical rules exhibit lower labor force participation, hours worked, and weeks worked.
Dissertation defended at the Departement of Economics of the University of Chicago in Spring 2018.
First-generation immigrants to the U.S. from 1910 to the present are less likely to participate in the labor force if their mother tongue marks gender distinctions more pervasively.
The epidemiological approach enables to identify the relationship between sex-based gender distinctions in language and female labor force participation.
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.