Abstract
This paper studies the effects of firms’ investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) on their demand for female and skilled workers. Using the gradual liberalization of the broadband Internet sector across provinces from 2006 to 2009 as a source of exogenous variation to identify the causal impacts of ICT, we find evidence from the country’s comprehensive enterprise survey data that firms’ adoption of broadband Internet and other related ICT increased their relative demand for female and college-educated workers. The effect of ICT on firms’ female employment is particularly strong among the college-educated workers, and is stronger in industries that are more dependent on highly manual and physical tasks. These results suggest that ICT can lower gender inequality in the labor market by shifting the labor demand from highly manual, routine tasks in which men have a comparative advantage toward more nonroutine, interactive tasks in which women hold a comparative advantage. However, the effect of ICT is weaker in industries relying more on complex and interactive tasks, suggesting that gender differences in education may have limited female labor supply for the most innovative industries that require highly technical skills to complement ICT.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) across the world have substantially changed the way people live, work, and interact
The effect of ICT on firms’ female employment is strong among the college-educated workers, and is stronger in industries that are more dependent on highly manual and physical tasks. These results suggest that ICT can lower gender inequality in the labor market by shifting the labor demand from highly manual, routine tasks in which men have a comparative advantage toward more nonroutine, interactive tasks in which women hold a comparative advantage
Before discussing the 2-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates, we report the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of (1) to show the correlation between firms’ ICT and shares of female employment
Summary
Since the 1990s, advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) across the world have substantially changed the way people live, work, and interact. The effect of ICT on firms’ female employment is strong among college-educated workers, and is stronger in industries that depend more on highly manual and physical tasks, according to the United States (US) Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*Net) task database for occupations in the US These results suggest that ICT may have shifted the relative demand for different tasks, in which male and female workers have different comparative advantages. Females often face greater disadvantages of accessing formal employment opportunities leaving them more vulnerable to poverty These disadvantages arise from perceived gender roles that limit job access, differences in levels and types of education and training, and a higher degree of labor-intensive firms employing highly manual and physical processes.
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