Taryn versus Taryn (she/her) versus Taryn (they/them): A Field Experiment on Pronoun Disclosure and Hiring Discrimination

Taryn Eames

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the first large-scale correspondence study estimating hiring discrimination against applicants who disclose pronouns. A resume audit design is leveraged, where two fictitious resumes are sent in response to each job posting: in each pair, the treatment resume contains pronouns listed below the name and the control resume does not list any pronouns. Two treatments are considered: nonbinary "they/them" pronouns and binary "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns congruent with the sex implied by the applicant's name. Strong evidence is found that disclosing "they/them" pronouns reduces positive employer response: discrimination estimates are robust to the Heckman-Siegelman critique and magnitude is statistically larger compared to those disclosing "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns. Further, there is suggestive evidence that discrimination is higher in Republican than Democratic geographies. By comparison, there is limited evidence that disclosing "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns results in discrimination.

Keywords: field experiment; correspondence study; resume audit study; discrimination; pronouns; nonbinary people; labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J15 J16 J23 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2024-01-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-exp and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-766.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-766

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().