"What Happened at Work Today?": A Multistage Model of Gender, Employment, and Political Participation

Abstract

This paper proposes a multistage, interactive model that takes into account selection processes into nonpolitical institutions, processes by which participatory factors are allocated within institutions, and the forward linkage to political activity to explain the small but persistent gender gap in political participation. Using OLS regression and simulation to analyze a large-scale survey containing detailed measures of both workplace experiences and political participation, we find that women are less likely than men to accumulate participatory factors on the job because they are less likely to be in the workforce at all, to be in the workforce full-time, or to be in high-level jobs. The net effect of these processes is that a substantial fraction of the gender gap in political activity can be explained by gender differences in workplace experiences.