Gender-targeted job ads in the recruitment process: Facts from a Chinese job board

Peter Kuhn, Kailing Shen and Shuo Zhang

Journal of Development Economics, 2020, vol. 147, issue C

Abstract: We study how explicit employer requests for applicants of a particular gender enter the recruitment process on a Chinese job board, focusing on two questions: First, to what extent do employers’ requests affect the gender mix of a firm’s applicant pool? Second, how ‘hard’ are employers’ stated gender requests-- are they essential requirements, soft preferences, or something in between? Using internal data from a Chinese job board, we estimate that an explicit request for men raises men’s share in the applicant pool by 14.6 percentage points, or 26.4%; requests for women raises the female applicant share by 24.6 percentage points, or 55.0%. Men (women) who apply to gender-mismatched jobs also experience a substantial call-back penalty of 24 (43) percent. Thus, explicit gender requests do shape applicant pools, and signal a substantial but not absolute preference for the requested gender.

Keywords: Search; Discrimination; Gender; China; Segregation; Job board (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J63 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387820301061
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:147:y:2020:i:c:s0304387820301061

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102531

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().