Globalization and the gender gap in mental well-being

Working with business partners in distant countries often requires operating outside standard working hours, potentially harming workers’ mental well-being—especially for women balancing professional and family responsibilities. This hypothesis is investigated using matched employer–employee data from Denmark merged with information on workers’ use of prescription antidepressants (AD) and firms’ import and export transactions. The analysis exploits variation within job spells and controls for both unobservable firm-year heterogeneity and for the average differential in annual AD use among men and women. The results indicate that a decline in the business hours overlap between a Danish firm and its foreign trading partners leads to an increased AD use among women relative to men. This effect is economically meaningful, largest for college-educated workers under 45 and more pronounced for single mothers. In addition to the gender effect, workers in occupations that requires establishing relationships with others are more strongly affected than those in other occupations.