Where Women Work: How Labor Market Competition Affects Gender Conservatism

The changing roles of women in the labor force represent a major structural transformation across advanced industrial democracies. How does this transformation shape political behavior? We argue that as women enter industries historically dominated by men, men experience heightened labor market competition that generates material grievances and fosters more conservative gender attitudes. Using variation in women’s and men’s employment across Swiss industries from 2001 to 2020, we develop a shift–share design linking national feminization trends to local exposure and combine it with longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel. We find that ``industry feminization'' reduces men’s employment and earnings and leads to more conservative egocentric—but not sociocentric—gender attitudes. In sum, men’s private grievances show little evidence of translating into broader political change, perhaps reflecting limited politicization of gender issues in this context. While labor market competition can foster gender conservatism, its political expression might be context-dependent.