Description:

Speakers: Vitaliia Eliseeva (Paris School of Economics)

Title: "Failing to forge the New Soviet Woman: Long-term effect of WW2-induced sex ratios on family formation"

Abstract: Does male scarcity empower women, or, conversely, push them to become more dependent and conform to traditional gender roles? Drawing on the episode of extreme male scarcity caused by 27 million Soviet casualties during WWII, I find that male scarcity decreases women's bargaining power in the marriage market, leading to a long-term rise in conservative gender attitudes and willingness to create a family. Based on exogenous local within-region variation in the military deaths, I identify a causal effect of a 10 percentage-point increase in female share leading to a 3.3 percentage-point increase in the share of married females today. Using survey data, I document that in historically more male-scarce localities modern-day respondents are 11 percentage points more likely to find marriage important and 20 to 40 percentage points more likely to believe in conservative gender roles in the family. To reconcile these results with the literature, I show that the effect of sex ratio skewness is more pronounced in districts where females were already a part of the labor force before the war. Overall, I show how male scarcity, when female labor force participation is high to start with, leads to more conservative and family-oriented societal norms.