How were gender norms blurred because of the Gold Rush

Does the mining-driven scarcity of women affect gender norms? Do gender norms persist over time? We explore the Gold Rush in Western United States in the late19th-century as a natural experiment to answer these questions. We use a geographic difference-in-difference methodology, exploiting the location and discovery of the gold deposits and its influence on sex ratios, to understand short term and persistent changes in women’s labor market participation and marriage market opportunities. Gold mining, through the oversupply of marriageable men with income, increased (decreased) marriage rates among women (men). Women married older men with higher prestige occupations. In parallel, the Gold Rush created a market based service sector economy, potentially catering to men with money but poor marriage prospects. Using all subsequent censuses up until 1940, we show that the effects persist over time.

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