Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment
| dc.contributor.author | Chuan, A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Zhang, W. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-01-04T17:05:00Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-01-04T17:05:00Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-11-08 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Women used to lag behind men in college enrollment but now exceed them. We argue that changes in non-college job prospects contributed to these trends. We first document that routine-biased technical change disproportionately displaced non-college occupations held by women. We next employ a shift-share instrument for the impact of routinization to show that declining non-college job prospects for women increased female enrollment. Results show that a one percentage point decline in the share of routine task intensive jobs leads to a 0.6 percentage point rise in female college enrollment, while the effect for male enrollment is directionally smaller and insignificant. We next embed this instrumental variation into a dynamic model that links education and occupation choices. The model finds that routinization decreased returns to non-college occupations for women, leading them to shift to cognitive work and increasing their college premium. In contrast, non-college occupations for men were less susceptible to routinization. Altogether, our model estimates that workplace routinization accounted for 63% of the growth in female enrollment and 23% of the change in male enrollment between 1980 to 2000. | |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.17863/CAM.79368 | |
| dc.identifier.other | CWPE2177 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/331919 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge | |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Cambridge Working Papers in Economics | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/ | |
| dc.subject | human capital | |
| dc.subject | college enrollment | |
| dc.subject | gender | |
| dc.subject | occupations, automation | |
| dc.title | Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment | |
| dc.type | Working Paper | |
| rioxxterms.version | AO |