Seminar Vol. 104

Title: Gender-Targeted Job Ads in the Recruitment Process: Evidence from China

Speaker: Kailing Shen, Australian National University

Time: September 29th, 2018 13:30-15:00

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building

Abstract:

Explicit requests for applicants of a specific gender are widely used in emerging-economy labor markets.  The extent to which these requests affect the allocation of workers to jobs depends on two factors:  how much workers comply with firms’ requests in their application decisions, and how much firms enforce their own requests when they encounter gender-mismatched applicants.  Using internal data from a Chinese job board, we show that both compliance and enforcement are substantial, but compliance accounts for the vast majority of the gender segregation and gender wage gap associated with employers’ explicit gender requests.  Ad-level regressions using job title and firm fixed effects suggest that employers’ explicit gender requests have causal effects on where workers direct their applications.  Application-level regressions using job title and worker fixed effects suggest that gender labels predict how employers will treat identically-qualified applicants when they apply for a job.