household income and a higher bargaining power of female household members as female earnings increase. In all these cases, by affecting relative factor prices, trade alters the costs and benefits of restricting female participation in the labor force; countries that exhibit a larger comparative advantage in the brain sector will tend to discriminate less against women, since such practice comes at a larger cost.

We take the two main theoretical predictions of the model to the data. First, all else equal, countries where gender discrimination is less severe have a comparative advantage in exporting goods that are more intensive in the use of female labor. Second, under trade, countries with comparative advantage in female intensive sectors will reduce the severity of gender discrimination. To test these predictions, we use industry-level export data for 61 manufacturing sectors in 146 developed and developing countries over 45 years. We measure a sector’s female-labor intensity by its average ratio of female to total employment among countries with full data coverage, and test whether, consistent with the first prediction, countries where women are more empowered tend to export relatively more of the female-labor intensive goods. Next we follow the methodology of Almeida and Wolfenzon (2005), and use a country’s export shares in different sectors to aggregate the industrylevel measures of female labor intensity into a country-level measure of _female-labor needs of exports_ that captures a country’s comparative advantage in female-labor intensive sectors _._ We use this measure to test the second prediction: that gender discrimination is less severe in countries with a comparative advantage in female-labor intensive sectors. In testing both predictions, we recognize the possibility of endogeneity of our explanatory variable that comes from the model itself and address it using instrumentation strategies. In the first case, since the share of a country’s exports in a sector that is female-labor intensive may affect its attitude towards gender, we instrument the attitude towards gender by a measure of the distribution of religions in the population. In the second case, since the comparative advantage of a country in female-labor intensive sectors depend on its attitude towards gender, we follow the methodology of Do and Levchenko (2007), and instrument for the female-labor needs of exports by a measure of a country’s exogenously determined comparative advantage in these sectors using export weights predicted by sector-level gravity equations. These instrumentation strategies are described and justified in more detail in section 2 below.

The results support the main empirical predictions of the model. Countries with higher degrees of women’s empowerment, whether it is measured by higher female labor force participation, lower fertility, or higher female educational attainment, have a significantly larger export shares in sectors that are intensive in the use of female labor, controlling for industry and country fixed effects. This finding is specially strong in two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions that instrument for the possible endogeneity of gender attitudes with respect to export composition. Moving from the 25th to the 75 percentile in a gender gap variable increases the export share in a sector at the 75th percentile of female intensity by between 0.7 and 1.89 percentage points more compared to a sector at the 25th percentile of female intensity, depending on the gender gap measure. Similarly, countries that have a comparative advantage in the production of female-labor intensive goods tend 2