<scp>SJPE</scp> Gender Norms Special Issue Introduction

This special issue brings together seven international papers which combine to explain the current state of the knowledge generated by economists on gender norms and push the frontier forward with new and original research. The papers were presented in the workshop on Gender Norms at the University of York, UK in 2024. In the first paper in the issue, Shelly Lundberg reviews the growth of research into Gender Norms within the Economics discipline. The article charts how norms have entered theoretical Economic models, provided puzzles for experimental economists and enabled empirical research to understand gender equality in the labour market and at home, including violence towards women. Shelly highlights the ‘extreme persistence’ of social norms and reviews the economic models of cultural transmission through which gender norms form a template for expected behaviour of individuals. Despite this persistence, the article digs into the literature asking the question of can and should policy attempt to change gender norms. Finally, Shelly's paper discusses the gaps in our current evidence knowledge leading the way for future research. In the second paper, Abi Adams and Daksh Walia provide a comprehensive overview of how data on workplace sexual harassment is collected across psychology and economics and the implications the data collection method has for its reported prevalence. This paper on the measurement of sexual harassment at work is the first in its kind to document the measurement difficulties. They highlight the differences between direct queries and behaviourial lists, two commonly used data collection methods, and present their own empirical evidence gathered from a novel data collection to support the discussion of the relative merits of each method. Given their findings, Abi and Daksh advocate for more transparency in how data on sexual harassment is collected and used by researchers, which is important given the increasing prominence of the topic across the social sciences in a post-#MeToo world. The next article in the special issue by Paula Gonzalez takes a global perspective over the gender norms present in 111 countries, using novel data collected from Facebook to study the commonalities and heterogeneity in gender norms across the world. The authors link one's own gender norms to their realised labour market and domestic behaviours and to the perceived gender norms of those around them. Estefania Galvan and Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa contribute to the issue by linking gender norms to female labour supply and housework activities after childbirth—finding that relatively high-earning women reduce their earnings less, but increase housework more after childbirth, than lower relative-earning women. The context of Malte Sandner and Ipek Yükselen is Germany, where the authors strikingly find large gender gaps already present in the first job straight from university. In the subsequent years, the female graduates engage in firm and occupational changes, to close this starting gap. Christian Bredemeier, Patrick Ndlovu, Sunčica Vujić and Roland Winker provide a theoretical model in which gender norms help to reconcile the higher job satisfaction which accompanies the lower wage of secondary earners. Finally, Steven Bosworth, José Ignacio Giménez Nadal and Almudena Sevilla end the special issue by investigating how the steep educational gradient in parental time investments can be partially explained by different gender norms and socially formed identities, with consequences for mothers' well-being. The SJPE Special Issue on Gender Norms is dedicated to Dr. Anita Ratcliffe, a friend and colleague who very sadly passed away in 2024, leaving behind her husband Nick and two children. Anita was an applied economist whose research focused on broad topics relating to inequalities. She was embarking on new analysis into the different choices made by women and men to study for STEM subjects, research that would have pushed our knowledge of gender norms further. Anita will be remembered for bringing her kindness to the economics profession.