What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?
American Economic Review
vol. 113,
no. 4, April 2023
(pp. 1013-48)
Abstract
When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of callbacks to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 61 (146) percent. The removal "worked" in this sense because it generated a large increase in gender-mismatched applications, and because those applications were treated surprisingly well by employers, suggesting that employers' gender requests often represented relatively weak preferences or outdated stereotypes. The job titles that were integrated by the ban, however, were not the most gendered ones, and were disproportionately lower-wage jobs.Citation
Kuhn, Peter, and Kailing Shen. 2023. "What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?" American Economic Review, 113 (4): 1013-48. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20211127Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- J23 Labor Demand
- J41 Labor Contracts
- J63 Labor Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
- J71 Labor Discrimination
- M51 Personnel Economics: Firm Employment Decisions; Promotions
- P31 Socialist Enterprises and Their Transitions