Gender distinction in language and gender occupational segregation

Many studies such as Santacreu-Vasut & Shoham (2012) have proposed that grammatical gender distinctions in language can be an exogenous instrument of culture, which solves the problem of endogeneity in studying the influence of culture in economic factors. We test the hypothesis that gender distinction in language fosters more gender occupational segregation, regardless of male or female predominance. We test this hypothesis with a similar model by the said authors using ILO data of eight occupational categories across 175 countries with various gender distinction indices adapted from Gay, Santacreu-Vasut, & Shoham (2013). We find that countries that exhibit higher grammatical gender distinction also exhibit higher gender occupational segregation, all things equal, even with controls and robustness checks for certain occupational categories that reach a certain minimum threshold of segregation