Gender Norms, Occupational Choices, and the Innovation Gender Gap

This paper analyzes how social gender norms affect the innovation gender gap, part of which stems from an underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. This underrepresentation is traceable to gender-biased educational and occupational choices. One determinant for such biased choices is social gender norms, which also directly affect the innovation gender gap. We disentangle the direct effect of social gender norms from their indirect effect via educational and occupational choices. Combining municipality-level voting data as a measure for social gender norms with patent data as a measure for innovation outcomes, we apply structural equation modeling. Our results show that more traditional gender norms are associated with a significantly lower number of patents filed by women and that the indirect effect via educational and occupational choices accounts for 5.5% of the total effect. These results are crucial for policymakers: while social gender norms are highly persistent and difficult to change in the short term, promoting greater gender equality in educational and occupational choices can be achieved more quickly and may therefore yield important short-term reductions in the innovation gender gap.