Amy Burnett Cross, an economics PhD candidate at American University set to graduate in May 2025, has dedicated her research to uncovering how military policy affects civilian women workers. Her job market paper, “Women’s Entry into Nontraditional Occupations: Impacts of the Gender Desegregation of the U.S. Army,” recently edited by the Standard Error team, explores the long-term impacts across the civilian economy of integrating women into Army occupations closed to women during the volatile time of the Vietnam War. In fall 2025, Cross will continue her work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Born in Colorado, Cross took herself to Washington, DC, after her undergraduate studies in economics to work on policies on women in the labor market at the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor. She soon became restless, feeling that “the scope of the issues that we worked on was a bit too narrow to really make a big impact on the women where I’m from.” She opted to take her interests to graduate school: “I started to think about what kind of policy, what kind of institutions would actually impact women in the conservative parts that I’m from, and I decided with my dissertation advisor that if I could examine how military policies impacts women, I could make a unique contribution.”

How did gender desegregation in the Army change American workplaces?

In 1972, as a response to the end of the Vietnam War draft, the US Army officially allowed women into all noncombat occupations, formerly reserved to men, expanding enlisted women’s roles beyond their traditional nursing and clerical positions. Enlisted women promptly proved themselves to be capable of considerably more than society had long imagined. Cross’s research examines the long-term effects of this policy change outside the Army, revealing that the inclusion of women in male-dominated military occupations opened doors for women in the civilian labor market.

Economists and people who work with data can continue to be clever about how we pursue the creation of datasets, even in the absence of the ability to point-and-click. It’s going to be on us to make sure we find ways to answer the important questions as we move forward.

By analyzing historical records and labor data sets, Cross traces how this shift challenged restrictive gender norms. She finds that the Army’s occupational desegregation showed civilians that women could wield technical and leadership skills long believed to fall within the exclusive domain of male workers. This “information treatment” on civilian labor markets had ripple effects across industries and helps account for the doubling of women’s presence in traditionally male-dominated careers between the 1970s and 1990s.

Uncovering hidden data

Cross’s commitment to illuminating gender-related questions with novel data has drawn her well-earned attention, including from 2023 economics Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin, with whom Cross collaborated during her doctoral studies under the auspices of an NBER fellowship on gender in the economy. In 2023, Cross won the W. Donald Bowles Best Graduate Paper Award from American University Library for extensive use of libraries and archives and collaboration with librarians to locate and digitize physical records not readily available online. She is also an Economic History Association dissertation fellow.

Cross notes that a diligent approach to original data collection can support researchers faced with intensifying challenges related to the availability and integrity of administrative data: “Economists and people who work with data can continue to be clever about how we pursue the creation of datasets, even in the absence of the ability to point-and-click. It’s going to be on us to make sure we find ways to answer the important questions as we move forward.”

Can history help us prepare for future workforce challenges?

“My research speaks to what happens when there are manpower crises, when the military cannot meet its current demand for men workers without doing something different,” Cross explains. “I examine the impact of drafts and the impact of changing manpower policies to be more inclusive of women and how those things impact the civilian labor force.”

Her research documents how workforce policies can unintentionally accelerate or moderate social change. In another chapter of her dissertation, Cross examines how draft deferments in WWI were unevenly applied for men with financially dependent wives and children. This selective application, in turn, spilled over to shape married women’s labor market participation. In other words, during a historical era when single women’s activity in paid labor was generally rising, the fact that some men could avoid the draft on the basis of being breadwinners slowed this process down.

We at Standard Error are pleased to celebrate Amy Burnett Cross’s contribution to our understanding of women’s  economic history and its centrality for the shape of our society today.

While her research is historical, Cross notes that the lessons from past policies may prove highly relevant in today’s rapidly changing economic and political landscape. “We really don’t know what the policy space is going to look like in two years,” she notes. “Right now, my work is relatively academic, but you could imagine in a slightly different world that may not be too far off that we could have a situation where my research is no longer a footnote of economic history, but actually very relevant to a world we actually live in.”

For Cross, not only history but also global conflict is of inherent interest for researchers and policymakers concerned with social change: “Continuing to think about how social norms are disrupted by large global conflict events is a fruitful avenue for policymakers today. This is what motivates me to do my work.”

In short, as policymakers and employers confront modern workforce and economic challenges, Cross highlights the importance of spillovers of military policies to civilian gender roles. Both the uneven application of draft deferments during WWI and the gender desegregation of the Army in 1972 shaped broader societal dynamics—in the first case moderating women’s move from the home into the workforce and in the second offering new information to civilians about women’s capabilities as skilled workers. We at Standard Error are pleased to celebrate Amy Burnett Cross’s contribution to our understanding of women’s  economic history and its centrality for the shape of our society today.

—Hannah Hancock contributed to the development of this blog post.