It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher sex ratios, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people have more conservative attitudes towards women working, women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations, and they earn lower wages. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of marriage homogamy in sustaining cultural persistence. Our results are robust to controlling for a wide array of geographic and historical controls, which determined spatial variation in the sex ratio, as well as present-day controls and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.