Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
女性友好职业对就业的影响：二战前美国邮政局长
The effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment: U.S. postmasters before World War II
摘要
I examine the effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment by exploring a unique historical setting -- the postmaster occupation during the early twentieth-century United States. Unlike many occupations that established practices to prevent married women from entering, postmasters were open to married women and offered flexible work arrangements and equal pay. With a novel dataset on postmaster appointments and census linking, I show that postmasters attracted qualified women who were not gainfully employed previously. However, the postmaster occupation offered women few benefits beyond the appointed term. Taking advantage of the fact that postmasters were presidential appointees and were rarely re-appointed after the party of the president changed, I compare the 1940 outcomes of women appointed just before and after the 1933 presidential transition in a regression discontinuity (RD) design. The RD estimates suggest that women experienced a 26.7 percentage points reduction in gainful employment after finishing their postmaster term. The negative employment effect is unique to women and does not apply to men appointed under the same circumstances. In addition, I show that women postmasters were not more likely to be employed than their women neighbors who had never been postmasters, despite their work experience. The lack of benefits for women's future employment is in part explained by state-level discrimination against married women working and the severity of the Great Depression.
中文摘要
本文通过考察20世纪初美国邮政局长这一独特的历史职业背景，探究了女性友好型职业对就业的影响。与许多通过制度性规定阻止已婚女性进入的职业不同，邮政局长职位对已婚女性开放，并提供灵活的工作安排与同工同酬。基于邮政局长任命记录与人口普查关联数据构建的新数据集，本研究发现：邮政局长职位吸引了此前未从事有酬工作的合格女性。然而，该职业除任期内的权益外，几乎未为女性提供长期职业发展优势。利用邮政局长由总统任命、且总统所属政党更迭后极少获得连任的制度特征，本文采用断点回归设计（RD），比较了1933年总统权力交接前后被任命的女性在1940年的就业状况。断点回归估计表明，女性在结束邮政局长任期后，有酬就业率下降26.7个百分点。这一负面就业效应仅存在于女性群体，在相同条件下任命的男性并未出现类似现象。此外，研究显示，尽管拥有工作经验，女性邮政局长与其从未担任该职位的女性邻居相比，就业概率并未更高。女性未来就业缺乏职业红利的部分原因，可归因于各州对已婚女性就业的歧视政策以及大萧条时期的严重经济冲击。