Lamis Kattan
(Georgetown University in Qatar)
will give a presentation on
Gender-Based Labor Legislation and Employment: Historical Evidence from the United States
Abstract: Gender-based labor laws are designed to improve women's conditions and potentially increase their participation on the labor market, but their effects can be undermined if employers substitute away from female labor. This paper examines the impact of the rise of Seating, Regulatory and Night-work laws between 1860 and 1940 across the United States. Given that not all U.S. states adopted these laws, and the staggered nature of adoption for the ones that did, we rely on a difference-in-differences strategy design to estimate their causal effect on female gainful employment. We find that the likelihood of female employment increased upon implementation of laws regulating health and safety conditions and those limiting women's night work. The impact of these laws was however absent on male employment. An industry-specific analysis of these ``protective'' laws documents an increase in the share of women employed in manufacturing and a decrease in the share of women employed in personal services' occupations.
(joint work with Joanne Haddad (Université Libre de Bruxelles))