Gender, Parenthood, and Hiring Intentions in Sex-Typical Jobs: A Survey Experiment

Gabriele Mari and Ruud Luijkx

No kwdyp, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: We ran a survey experiment with Dutch employers to investigate hiring discrimination in sex-typical jobs. We ask if women are especially discriminated against when they have children, whether discrimination applies similarly in different occupations, and whether statistical discrimination or status-characteristic theories best account for discriminatory practices (if any). Employers rate fictitious candidates for either a female-typical job (primary-school teacher) or a male-typical job (software engineer). Employers are found to display a slight preference for female candidates when filling a teacher post, although such bias is less strong for female applicants with children. No such ranking is found for a software engineer vacancy, nor do we find different salary offers across candidates and across vacancies. Employers do not appear to favour men over women for positions likely to be on the career track, as predicted by statistical discrimination theories, nor do they expect women to be less capable than men, as posited by status-characteristic theory. Female candidates with children, however, are expected to be less committed to their job and work fewer hours, especially in the teacher experiment. Such expectations seem to have small consequences for the hiring decisions and salary offers Dutch employers make in our study.

Date: 2020-01-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5e26cc1f675e0e01ab6b7d9a/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:kwdyp

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/kwdyp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF (contact@cos.io).