Introduction to the Symposium of the Economics of Gender

The field of gender economics has exploded in recent decades and often spans many other subfields, such as development economics, health economics, feminist economics, household economics, and even macroeconomics!People with non-male gender identities play important roles in economies but due to institutional structures, discrimination, and social norms, just to name a few, they often face constraints to fully participating in economic activities.Increasingly, policymakers around the world are paying attention, and are thinking more carefully about gender inequities and the inefficiencies they create for households, firms, and nations.In this Special Issue of the Eastern Economic Journal, we include five papers on various topics in gender economics.The papers cover a range of issues exploring how gender affects elections, pay gaps, veterans' earnings, household addiction, and care work.In the lead article, Owen and Wei (2024) study sexism among voters in the 2016 presidential election between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.Using Google Trends data (and based on previous work), they develop an index that measures hostile sexism using a dictionary of 16 sexist queries for specific geographic areas (refer to Owen and Wei (2021) for more details).They estimate the effects of the index on Clinton's share of votes as a percent of all votes for Clinton and Trump, controlling for a range of other factors, including the presence of Trump rallies, regional demographic characteristics, unemployment rates, and democratic vote shares in previous elections in each area.They find that sexism has a significant negative effect on Clinton's vote share, under various empirical specifications, though the magnitude of the impact falls as more control variables are considered.In addition, Owen and Wei find that the impact of sexism on the Clinton vote share was larger in areas that held at least 10 Trump rallies before the election.Thus, the role of sexism in the 2016 Presidential election varied across the counties, and was pronounced in states that held more Trump rallies.