Gendered Labor Markets, Social Identity, and Trade Attitudes

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Abstract

In this paper, I explore a gender gap in preferences toward international trade. Scholars have argued that women’s support for protectionism is driven by women’s cultural concerns (e.g., other-regarding concerns, risk-aversion, compassion). Conversely, men are less supportive of protectionist policies due to their economic self-interest concerns (e.g., economic knowledge, employment). Thus, the gender gap in trade attitudes has been attributed to individual-level differences between women and men. However, such binary oppositions in previous studies have not accounted for the role of discrimination against women in the workforce that likely affects trade preferences. Borrowing from social identity theory, I highlight that trade policy leads to shifts in identification patterns by changing the status of the group. In addition, women's experiences in the gendered labor market affect women’s choice of social identity, which alters the way women perceive the effects of trade and maximize their perceived economic interests. I argue that gendered labor markets differentially shape women’s and men’s trade preferences, resulting in the gender gap in trade attitudes. In order to test my claim, I employ both state-level and individual-level data to challenge assumptions about the distributive effects of trade and preference formation. Drawing on data from the OECD countries, I first show that countries with high levels of gender discrimination tend to have a wider gender gap in trade preferences. Second, using survey experiments on representative samples of Americans and South Koreans, I examine whether discrimination makes women form trade preferences differently from men, even when no individual-level differences exist between women and men. Lastly, employing the mediation analysis and text analysis, I study how economic concerns and cultural concerns mediate the causal effects of discrimination on trade attitudes when women identify with the gender group. This paper finds that women facing discrimination are more likely to activate cultural concerns to maximize their perceived economic interests, which implies that social identification patterns can activate both social and economic preferences.

Author

• Soohyun Cho, Ohio State University