Seminario CEDE - Miguel Sarzosa

Much of the recent work on gender economics explains gender gaps pointing to differences in preferences, societal gender norms and prescriptive stereotypes about what women and men should be good or bad at and what they should like or dislike. But what happens to the individuals that do not behave/choose like the gender-typical person? We address this question using longitudinal data that allows us to measure gender conformity during childhood—using a seemingly irrelevant questionnaire—and tracks individuals through their life. We find that female nonconformers have substantially better school careers, labor market outcomes and are more likely to end up in male dominated occupations as compared to their gender conforming counterparts. We find the opposite pattern among male gender nonconformers; they perform substantially worse at school, earn less as adults and are more likely to be unemployed relative to their gender conforming male peers. We also see a positive correlation between gender nonconforming boys and mental health and addiction issues later in life. Furthermore, we find that gender nonconforming girls tend to delay childbearing in adulthood and face higher incidence of divorce.