Nina Buchmann

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Paternalistic Discrimination

Women in Bangladesh struggle to access the labor market in general and male-dominated occupations in particular, despite recent progress in education and training. We propose a field experiment to identify a novel form of labor market discrimination, "Paternalistic Discrimination," the preferential hiring of male workers to protect female workers from jobs perceived as harmful or difficult. We observe real application and hiring decisions for a night-shift job in Bangladesh and experimentally vary whether hiring managers or workers are informed about safe employee transport home, thereby observing both supply and demand responses to perceived increases in female employee welfare. We complement the experimental results with survey data to analyze i) the effect of paternalistic discrimination on horizontal and vertical gender segregation, ii) the degree to which paternalistic preferences restrict women’s labor potential and work readiness, and iii) which counterfactual policies can increase women’s employment across different industries in Bangladesh.

Nina Buchmann, Department of Economics

Nina Buchmann is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University. Her areas of interest include development economics and behavioral economics and she is particularly interested in issues related to gender, sexual assault and domestic violence. Prior to coming to Stanford, Buchmann worked as a research associate at JPAL/the Duke Development Lab and analyzed the impact of a large randomized control trial aiming to reduce child marriage and increase female empowerment in Bangladesh. 

Buchmann has also worked as a consultant at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the European Central Bank researching and evaluating the relationship between finance and development. Buchmann holds a BA in economics from Harvard University and an MA in development economics from Yale University.

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