A winning strategy? The employment of women and firm longevity during industrialisation

Why do certain firms prosper and grow old while other firms fail? Established knowledge tells us that longevity is related to the firm's ability to adapt to market conditions, through product diversification, learning-by-doing and adopting new strategies regarding technology, human resources and management. By estimating duration models using new data covering the entire Swedish tobacco industry, we find that firms employing more women were considerably less likely to fail than other firms. Industry feminisation may be seen as the outcome of a competitive process where more feminised firms as a result of their extended longevity came to dominate the industry.