Becoming 'Co-Ed' : A Protestant Gift to China

The Protestant missionaries started the trend to educate women in the 19th century China, paving Chinese women’s way into higher education and professional services. Using various measures of Protestant activities by 1920 and a hand-collected dataset of college students from 1928-1938, we show that the Protestant missions improved gender equality in higher education. By exploring the timing of Protestant activities, we find counties with earlier missionary settlements had higher levels of gender equality. Because early missionary settlements followed closely with the opening of treaty ports, we adopt an IV strategy that exploits the quasi-random variation in counties’ distances to treaty ports opened by 1880. Finally, we find that the increase in educational attainment led to a higher number of female doctors and civil servants in the short run and a higher gender ratio in skilled occupations in the long run