It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

Abstract

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 gender imbalance, women historically married more, had more children, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We discuss how these norms were beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. The underlying mechanism we propose is that cultural norms can serve reproductive fitness but may harm overall fitness in the long run. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.