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Title: Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: Women used to lag behind but now exceed men in college enrollment. 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 these lower non-college job prospects for women increase 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 in non-college occupations for women, leading them to shift to cognitive work and increasing their college premiums. In contrast, non-college men's occupations were less susceptible to routinization. Altogether, our model estimates that workplace routinization accounted for 67% of the growth in female enrollment and 31% of the change in male enrollment between 1980 to 2000.

Url: https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/JuniorSenior_2021/chuan_a31348.pdf

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Authors: Chuan, Amanda; Zhang, Weilong

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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