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Educated women don't like globalization and trade as much
Michael Hiscox of Harvard reports:
We examine new survey data on attitudes toward international trade showing that women are significantly less likely than men to support increasing trade with foreign nations. This gender gap remains large even when controlling for a broad range of socio-economic characteristics among survey respondents, including occupational, skill, and industry-of-employment differences that feature in standard political-economy models of individuals’ trade policy preferences. Measures of the particular labor-market risks and costs associated with maternity do not appear to be related at all to the gender gap in trade preferences. We also do not find any strong evidence that gender differences in non-material values or along ideological dimensions have any affect on attitudes toward trade. The data do clearly reveal that the gender gap exists only among college-educated respondents and is larger among older cohorts. We argue that differences in educational experience – specifically, exposure to economic ideas at the college level – appear to be most plausible explanation for gender differences in attitudes toward trade. The findings suggest the possibilities of a renewed theoretical and empirical focus on the political roles played by ideas, not just among policymakers but also among the broader electorate. In practical terms, there are also implications for trade policy outcomes in different contexts and for how debates over globalization contribute to broader gender divisions in politics.
I considered titling this post "Your girls' minds are being poisoned," but I've learned repeatedly that a big chunk of you don't know when I am joking. I don't however, see selective education as the relevant difference. Perhaps education is correlated with a female (and often male) decision to adopt a self-identity as a "caring person." Given the difference between the seen and unseen, a'la Bastiat, and the imperfect state of economics education, that makes those people critics of globalization.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 30, 2007 at 04:41 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
From TCEDG:
"Remember, if you don’t like these, you probably didn’t follow my advice for what to order. Or you are to blame in some other manner, I don’t know which one, there are many possibilities. The most likely are that you simply don’t have very good taste, or perhaps you are not very bright. Too bad."
From this post:
"I considered titling this post 'our girls' minds are being poisoned,' but I've learned repeatedly that a big chunk of you don't know when I am joking."
Exactly....
Posted by: chug at May 30, 2007 6:40:29 AM
Simpler explanation: women care more than men about their offspring and
their chances of economic success, educated women have a better
understanding of the impacts of globalization on those chances.
Posted by: Chari at May 30, 2007 8:25:37 AM
Is there a possibility that educated women are more likely to be aware of the (often not so great) social and working condition of women in other countries, and therefore less likely to want to trade with those countries? In other words, is it possible that their thinking about trade isn't based on thinking about trade at all, but about thinking about oppressive political regimes/lack of access to medical care/misogynist religions/etc.etc.etc.?
Posted by: Sarah S at May 30, 2007 9:23:15 AM
Plain and simple: the relative lack of female curiosity about matters general/theoretical.
Posted by: ricpic at May 30, 2007 10:07:57 AM
Chari: So women want their children to be poorer by neglecting gains from trade and comparative advantage? That doesn't seem like very good mothering to me.
Prof. Cowen: I'm fairly willing to buy the lack of study angle, but purely out of anecdotal experience (probably a bad metric). The number of women in any economics class, at least when I was a student, was inversely proportionate to the level. There were not many women (probably 10-15 out of 120 or so) in my International Trade class and even fewer in FDI. Interestingly, the upper-division micro and macro theory classes were only about 60/40 men/women.
Posted by: Timothy at May 30, 2007 11:02:18 AM
Do I detect a note of misogyny in ricpic’s post?
As a woman, I believe that the reason many women may scorn globalization and free trade is just as the article suggests: that these women have never taken classes that would expose them to general economic principles. The majority of women have been to college in the last 40 years when one goes to college to qualify for a job, not to get a well rounded, classical, humanist education.
Even if they did have a smattering of economics in their college years, they may also be against globalization and free trade not in principle, but as it is practiced. Even the US and Europe, the bastions of free trade, wield protectionist practices throughout almost every agricultural and industrial field. Perhaps women understand free trade and globalization all too well and just aren’t happy with it as practiced.
Lastly, in many instances, women bear the brunt of the emotional and parenting problems that are the unintended consequences of globalization; the anchor in those families whose lives have been changed by globalization, from sweatshops to lost jobs to migratory lives. A husband migrates from rural India to Mumbai and is not home to raise his children; despite however much money he sends back. The family who leaves rural China for Shanghai and leaves behind the relatives and “village” that the family had to count on for support. Perhaps a husband at 50 loses his job to a factory overseas or someone with an H1-B visa, because of the high cost of healthcare to US companies, and now his whole sense of worth is gone. Who deals with his depression and provides the encouragement to find new work?
So, it could be that women who have the education and realize the consumer benefits from free trade, while only suffering marginally from its ill-effects may be all for free trade. Perhaps there are just too many at this time who either haven’t had access to an economics education (sad), who are unhappy with the practice of said principle (frustrated) or are at the wrong end of free trade (tragic) to overtly promote it.
Posted by: TE at May 30, 2007 11:56:37 AM
The negative effects of increasing trade falls mostly on those who do not have college education whether they are young, old, male or female so it is not surprising that the well educated views trade for favorably. Woman do most or the shopping in households and older women after years of doing so have accumulated more evidence of the real effects increasing trade has had on consumers, than have men of young women. The authors acknowledge this, but then fail to consider that this is the reason for the difference. The simple explanation is that men and young college educated women, who have less experience shopping and buy more high tech items, see more gains from trade than older women and so will be more positive about increasing trade. There is a bias in research that when men and women exhibit different behavior they rarely ascribe the difference to more knowledge of women.
Posted by: Joan at May 30, 2007 12:06:41 PM
Women are more likely than men to major in crap subjects.
Professors of crap subjects are more likely than professors of non-crap subjects to spend a lot of time whining about globalization.
I think "your girls' minds are being poisoned" does sum it up pretty well.
Posted by: Jacqueline at May 30, 2007 12:43:45 PM
You are getting an AMAZING amount of comment spam at the moment.
Did somebody crack the "Turing test"?
Posted by: jens at May 30, 2007 12:50:09 PM
LA:
60 % of college students are women
90% of faculties are left wingers
Most women are conservatives and against free market
Posted by: Mja at May 30, 2007 2:06:40 PM
Why crack the Turing test when you can just hire thinking human beings in low wage countries to post comment spam for you instead? Hooray, globalization. :D :D :D
Posted by: Jacqueline at May 30, 2007 2:13:53 PM
Jacqueline hits the nail on the head. Women are too busy taking Women's Studies classes to learn about complex subjects like economics.
Here's a challenge for you: find a woman (in real life, not some internet relationship) who is interested and capable of discussing economic policy intelligently, who is NOT an economist. Good luck. The only one I can find is my sister.
Posted by: Christina at May 30, 2007 2:17:31 PM
My wife discusses trade and economic policy intelligently, and she isn't an economist.
She does have a Masters in Commerce, does that count?
Posted by: doctorpat at May 30, 2007 8:11:48 PM
I teach principles of economics at the community college. Even though the student body is 56% female, women rarely make up more than a third of my students. Often they are less than a quarter and in a few sections there haven’t been any. My experience is typical of other instructors’ sections.
For whatever reason, women aren’t taking economics courses in anywhere near the numbers that men do.
If college level economics courses increase the acceptance of globalization and trade, then the simple answer appears to be not enough women taking economics. If taking an economics course doesn’t affect attitudes on globalization and trade, then we’ll need to look elsewhere.
Posted by: Scott at May 30, 2007 10:41:07 PM
Tyler, Bryan Caplan points out where you went wrong
Posted by: TGGP at May 30, 2007 10:43:53 PM
Even if you have a hard time granted that there are winners and losers in the way globalization is unfolding, I think it's pretty easy to see that there are those gaining considerably more than others. The "bigger winners" in globalization tend to be those who already have resources. Every day people get cheaper goods, but the businesses providing those cheaper goods are selling them at larger profits than ever. And those heading those businesses are not as likely to be women - even women with an equal level of education. Trade globalization has the potential to be a gender equalizer, but it isn't yet.
The underlying assumption of your post is that trade globalization is universal good and that only a stupid person would not trust it.
As a woman with a social science degree - yes, I have studied economics. I think there's a lot to be said for breaking down tariffs. But when you start talking about "non-tariff barriers to trade" like laws in Columbia that recognize that many new mothers are illiterate and see Gerber labels as misleadingly telling them that formula is better than breast milk (and yes, it did lead to an increased use of formula), I do start to get a little suspicious. Does this mean that free trade is a universal evil? Nah. But it does bring into question that it's a universal good.
Or do we want to start arguing about what free trade really is and if a foreign company negotiating with the governments of Southeast Asian countries (that are less than representative democracies) to sell out their populations as cheap labor actually counts as free trade as much as lifting the tariffs on bananas coming to the country or ending farm subsidies are.
Posted by: Allison at May 31, 2007 6:33:20 PM
Many females around me discuss about trade and globelisation with a great intellect.So this post is ruse.
Posted by: Smart Card Development Solutions Consultancy at Jun 1, 2007 5:52:15 AM
If many mothers would not had the capabiity to analyise what trade and globlisation is there would never have been such great economist.
Posted by: Outsourced Product Development Center at Jun 1, 2007 5:58:15 AM
"This gender gap remains large even when controlling for a broad range of socio-economic characteristics among survey respondents, including occupational, skill, and industry-of-employment differences that feature in standard political-economy models of individuals’ trade policy preferences."
This is very apt for the various analysing powers of individuals irrespective of either being a male or a female.
Posted by: Offshore Software Product Testing at Jun 1, 2007 6:12:18 AM
Not much of a mystery to me. With the exception of the few who come from Third World countries, the men in my globalization course identify with the new billionaires of the corporate aristocracy, while the women tend to identify with the sweat-shop women on whose backs the billionaires make their fortunes.
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