America’s fertility rate continues its deep decline

I you want more babies, let in more women and help them work.  For the Economist.

The cost of rescinding work permits for spouses of immigrants on H-1B visas

Piece on Trump administration getting rid of work authorizations for spouses of H1-B visas, for the Economist.

The gender equality toolbox: The areas of society that still need work, and how to do it

A piece on what Canada could do to further global gender equality for OpenCanada.org.

 

How protests can affect elections

Me in the Economist hoping the women's marches portend a landslide in the midterms.

The IMF: Crawling the Walk on Gender?

A CGD policy note with Tanvi Jaluka and Michael Brown on IMF Article IV negotiations since gender was declared 'macrocritical.' In short, there has been increased attention to the issue as reflected in word counts and discussion of women’s labor force participation, but there is still a long way to go.

Norms and Reform: Legalizing Homosexuality Improves Attitudes

A paper by Dev Patel and me for CGD.  This analysis examines the relationship between legal reform and social norms surrounding homosexuality. We document three main findings. First, about a fifth of the variation in individual preferences can be explained at a country level. Second, using a difference-in-differences strategy, legalizing homosexuality improves how individuals view the tone of their communities. Third, we provide further evidence supporting a legal origins argument by examining former colonies. Countries that were colonized by the British Empire have significantly worse legal rights for samesex couples than those under other colonial powers. We conclude that adopting legal reform can improve societal attitudes.

We can honour the sacrifice of our troops by deploying more women peacekeepers

For Irin news, with Tanvi Jaluka.

Gender Laws, Values, and Outcomes: Evidence from the World Values Survey

A CGD Working Paper with Dev Patel.  This paper analyzes six waves of responses from the World Values Survey to understand the determinants of beliefs about women’s roles in society and their relationship with the legal system and outcomes. Using survey data for 300,000 individuals, we find that characteristics of an individual’s home country only explain about a fifth of the variation in values, and a single individual can report strongly different norms about women’s equality across different domains. There is a strong correlation between norms, laws and female labor force participation and between norms and the proportion of legislators who are women—but not between norms and relative female tertiary education. There is some suggestive evidence that laws may be more significant than norms in determining female employment outcomes, but the available evidence does not allow for strong causal statements at the cross-country level.

An economist warns that the next generation of feminists will feel even more frustrated

For Quartz.  The original title, still in the weblink, gave me a panic attack.

Expanding Women’s Role in Developing Technology: Increasing Productivity, Improving Lives

A CGD note with Megan O'Donnell, accompanied by a blog looking at the private sector's record of involving women in innovation (car companies: awful, biomed: better).  It is a shocking waste of talent that women are just 15% of listed inventors on patents worldwide.  There are things we could do to make that better.

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