Can robots reshape gender role attitudes?

Abstract

In this paper, we study the impact of robotization on gender role attitudes in China. We show that robot adoption promotes egalitarian gender role attitudes; and the impact is statistically larger for women, urban, and younger generation subsamples. We provide evidence to show that the reshaping of gender role attitudes is mainly due to the improvement and rationalization of women's employment performance: robot adoption increases females' non-agricultural employment opportunity and their wage, and also improves females' relative economic status both in the workplace and in the household.