Equal in private, unequal in public? Coeducation and sexism across social spheres

In 1954, the Soviet Union shifted from single-sex to coeducation throughout all urban areas. We show that the resulting desegregation effects are persistent over time, consistent across attitudes and behaviours, but not generalizable across social spheres. Coeducation persistently decreased attitudinal sexism towards gender roles in the private sphere, concerning household roles, while having no effect on sexism towards gender roles in the public sphere, concerning leadership roles. Consistently, treated women reallocated productive work from household chores to labour supply without changing their political participation. We detect no effects in a placebo analysis of comparable cohorts in comparable but unaffected areas, including rural areas in the Soviet Union or urban areas in Soviet satellite countries. Our findings suggest that economic empowerment does not translate into political influence. Instead, desegregation’s potential in reducing sexism is limited to non-zero sum games in which individuals anticipate engaging given early socialization patterns.

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