The Effect of a Woman-Friendly Occupation on Employment: U.S. Postmasters Before World War II

Sophie Li, Boston University

I examine the effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment by exploring a unique historical setting -- the postmaster occupation during the early twentieth-century United States. Unlike many occupations that established practices to prevent married women from entering, postmasters were open to married women and offered flexible work arrangements and equal pay. With a novel dataset on postmaster appointments and census linking, I show that postmasters attracted qualified women who were not gainfully employed previously. However, the postmaster occupation offered women few benefits beyond the appointed term. Taking advantage of the fact that postmasters were presidential appointees and were rarely re-appointed after the party of the president changed, I compare the 1940 outcomes of women appointed just before and after the 1933 presidential transition in a regression discontinuity (RD) design. The RD estimates suggest that women experienced a 26.7 percentage points reduction in gainful employment after finishing their postmaster term. The negative employment effect is unique to women and does not apply to men appointed under the same circumstances. In addition, I show that women postmasters were not more likely to be employed than their women neighbors who had never been postmasters, despite their work experience. The lack of benefits for women's future employment is in part explained by state-level discrimination against married women working and the severity of the Great Depression.

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 Presented in Session 110. Organizing the Professions