TY  - JOUR
AU  - Black,Sandra E.
AU  - Brainerd,Elizabeth
TI  - Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9110
PY  - 2002
Y2  - August 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9110
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9110.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Sandra Black
Department of Economics
 University of Texas
Austin, TX  78712
Tel: 512-475-8519
E-Mail: sblack@austin.utexas.edu

Elizabeth Brainerd
E-Mail: Elizabeth.Brainerd@williams.edu
AB  - While researchers have long held that discrimination cannot endure in an increasingly competitive environment, there has been little work testing this dynamic process.  This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased competition resulting from globalization in the 1980s forced employers to reduce costly discrimination against women.  The empirical strategy exploits differences in market structure across industries to identify the impact of trade on the gender wage gap:  because concentrated industries face little competitive pressure to reduce discrimination, an increase in competition from increased trade should lead to a reduction in the gender wage gap.  We compare the change in the residual gender wage gap between 1976 and 1993 in concentrated versus competitive manufacturing industries, using the latter as a control for changes in the gender wage gap that are unrelated to competitive pressures.  We find that increased competition through trade did contribute to the relative improvement in female wages in concentrated relative to competitive industries, suggesting that, at least in this sense, trade may benefit women by reducing firms' ability to discriminate.
ER  -