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Gender Study: Work, Care, Firms, and Labor-Market Inequality

Gender Study is a 10-week flagship special-topic course on how gender shapes labor-market allocation, career dynamics, workplace authority, policy incidence, and worker welfare. The course is built as a labor-economics field offering: each week starts from work, wages, hours, care, hiring, promotion, sorting, mobility, institutions, or safety, then asks what theory and evidence can explain the observed gendered patterns.

The course exists as a separate labor special topic because gender is not a single residual wage gap. Gender enters labor economics through household allocation, fertility and care work, human-capital investment, occupational and firm sorting, hiring and promotion systems, pay-setting, workplace authority, norms, violence and safety, policy design, and the measurement of identity itself. A serious course needs to integrate these margins rather than scatter them across family economics, personnel economics, public policy, and discrimination lectures.

Prerequisites

What Students Will Be Able To Do

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

  1. measure gendered labor-market outcomes without collapsing wages, hours, earnings, authority, safety, and welfare into one statistic;

  2. connect household allocation, care work, fertility, human capital, sorting, firm behavior, norms, and policy in one labor-economics framework;

  3. distinguish worker-side mechanisms from firm-side, institutional, and policy-incidence mechanisms;

  4. evaluate evidence on gender, work, and inequality using credible designs and appropriate counterfactuals;

  5. formulate research questions that are labor-focused, empirically disciplined, and attentive to evolving gender measurement.

Course Format

This is a 10-week advanced special topic for PhD students and strong advanced MA students. It is organized as weekly modules rather than a broad survey, and it is intentionally reading-heavy and research-oriented. Weekly chapters use the portfolio’s layered format: Bridge, Field Core, Research Lab, Methods Box, reading ladder, exercises or discussion prompts, reproducibility note, and slide companion note.

The course is cumulative. It begins with concepts and measurement, moves through household and worker-side mechanisms, enters firms and institutions, studies policy and comparative evidence, then closes with frontier methods and student research design.

Connection To Labor I And Labor II

Labor I supplies the worker-side foundations: labor supply, households, human capital, discrimination, amenities, mobility, inequality, and worker-targeted policy. Labor II supplies the firm and market architecture: personnel economics, search, wage-setting, monopsony, regulation, enforcement, worker voice, and institutional response. Gender Study uses those foundations to ask how gender changes the mechanisms, identification problems, and welfare objects that labor economists study.

Weekly Sequence

The main numbered sequence remains ten weeks. The optional LGBTQ+ lecture is an unnumbered module placed after Week 9 and before Week 10 in the book navigation.

  1. Why gender matters for labor economics. The course opens with concepts, measurement, gender gaps, identity, and the limits of treating the field as a wage-gap exercise.

  2. Labor supply, care work, fertility, and household allocation. Students study how paid work, unpaid work, fertility, and household bargaining shape labor supply and earnings over time.

  3. Education, skills, aspirations, and occupational sorting. The course links early investments, expectations, field of study, skills, and occupational choice to later labor-market outcomes.

  4. Hiring, promotion, pay-setting, and firm-side gender gaps. The focus moves inside firms to recruitment, evaluation, promotion ladders, pay premiums, negotiation, and workplace authority.

  5. Social norms, bargaining, and institutions shaping gendered work. Students study how norms, identity, collective arrangements, and institutional settings shape choices and constraints.

  6. Gendered policy incidence. Childcare, leave, taxation, quotas, transparency, equal-pay rules, and workplace protections are studied as labor-market interventions with heterogeneous incidence.

  7. Violence, safety, mobility, and labor-market access. The course treats safety and harassment as labor-market constraints affecting work, commuting, occupation choice, mobility, and welfare.

  8. Comparative and global gender in labor-market development. Students compare gendered labor mechanisms across development settings, welfare states, care regimes, and institutional environments.

  9. Frontier methods, new data, and evolving measurement. The methodological capstone covers administrative data, matched employer-employee data, experiments, text and job-posting data, identity measurement, and emerging research designs.

Optional module between Week 9 and Week 10: LGBTQ+ identities, work, discrimination, and labor-market institutions. This optional long lecture sits after Week 9 and before the final synthesis lecture. It covers measurement, employment, earnings, hiring discrimination, workplace climate, legal protections, benefits, transgender and nonbinary evidence, and frontier research opportunities.

  1. Synthesis, frontier questions, and student research designs. The final synthesis lecture converts the sequence into research proposals with clear mechanisms, counterfactuals, identification strategies, welfare objects, and portability claims.

Course Map

Optional LGBTQ+ Lecture

The course includes one optional long lecture on LGBTQ+ identities, work, discrimination, and labor-market institutions after Week 9 and immediately before the final synthesis week. It is labor-focused and substantial: the module centers measurement, employment, earnings, hiring discrimination, workplace climate, legal protections, benefits, and institutional design rather than treating LGBTQ+ issues as a brief add-on to a male-female-gap course.

Research Orientation

Gender Study is designed to feel frontier-facing from the beginning. Canonical anchors matter, but each week should also ask what new data, designs, institutional settings, or measurement choices have changed the research frontier. The goal is to train students to build gender-and-labor projects that are precise about mechanism, credible about evidence, and clear about welfare.

Gender Study
Why Gender Matters For Labor Economics