Imagine your life at 25: gender conformity and later-life outcomes

Published on 22 February 2025

This Working Paper is an update of Imagine your life at 25: Gender conformity and later-life outcomes

We analyse thousands of essays written by 11-year-old girls in 1969 to assess conformity with gender norms and its implications for future outcomes.

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Using thousands of essays written by 11-year-olds in 1969, we construct an index measuring girls’ conformity to gender norms. We link this index to outcomes over the life-cycle. Conditional on age-11 covariates, a one standard deviation increase in our index predicts a 3.4% decline in lifetime earnings, due to lower wages and fewer hours worked. Education, occupation and family formation mediate half of this decline. Holding skills constant, girls who conform less to gender norms live in regions with higher female employment and university attendance, highlighting the role of the environment in which girls grow up.

    Authors

    Uta Bolt
    Uta Bolt

    Research Fellow University of Bristol

    Uta is an IFS Research Fellow and University of Bristol lecturer with an interest in the development of inequalities over the lifecycle.

    Eric French
    Eric French

    CPP Co-Director

    Eric is the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Economics at UCL.

    Cormac O'Dea
    Cormac O'Dea

    Research Associate Yale University

    Cormac is a Research Associate of the IFS, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale University and Research Fellow at the NBER.

    Working Paper details

    DOI
    10.1920/wp.ifs.2025.0925
    Publisher
    Institute for Fiscal Studies

    Suggested citation

    Ayyar, S et al. (2025). Imagine your life at 25: gender conformity and later-life outcomes. 25/09. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/imagine-your-life-25-gender-conformity-and-later-life-outcomes-1 (accessed: 26 March 2025).

    Grant

    ESRC Institute for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy

    Datasets used

    National Childhood Development Study (1958)

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