If a company wants to sell products to a country where women work, they’re basically forced to stop being sexist at home.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
Learning from International Trade: Asymmetric Cultural Transmission and Gender Discrimination
SSRN · 6440398
The Takeaway
We usually think of international trade as just moving cargo. This paper shows that trade actually exports social values: Chinese firms that do business with gender-equal nations end up hiring more women as they learn that discrimination is bad for business.
From the abstract
This paper investigates how trade partner affects the employment composition of firms. We document novel empirical patterns using Chinese Customs data linked to the industrial firms survey: Chinese firms trading with more gender-equal countries hire a higher fraction of female workers, but not when they trade with less gender-equal countries. The effect is more pronounced for new firms and for high-skilled female workers. We propose a model of learning that is consistent with the empirical findi