How Tinted Are Your Glasses? Gender Views, Beliefs and Recommendations in Hiring

Anna Hochleitner (), Fabio Tufano (), Giovanni Facchini, Valeria Rueda () and Markus Eberhardt
Additional contact information
Anna Hochleitner: Norwegian School of Economics at Bergen (NHH)
Fabio Tufano: University of Leicester
Valeria Rueda: University of Nottingham

No 17813, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the gendered impact of recommendations at different stages of the hiring process. First, using a large sample of reference letters from the academic job market for economists, we document that women receive fewer `ability' and more `grindstone' letters. Next, we conduct two experiments --- with academic economists and a broader, college-educated, population ---analyzing both recommendation and recruitment stages. These confirm that recommendations are gendered and impact recruitment. We elicit gender views and beliefs about the effectiveness of different letter types, uncovering that gender attitudes and strategic behavior based on erroneous beliefs explain referees’ choices. Finally, we decompose gender recruitment gaps into two components: one capturing differences in treatment of candidates with identical qualities, the other reflecting recruiters’ failure to account for gendered patterns in recommendations. We show that recruiters' failure to recognize the gendered nature of reference letters undermines visible efforts to improve diversity in hiring.

Keywords: diversity; recruitment; gender; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 D9 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17813.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Tinted Are Your Glasses? Gender Views, Beliefs and Recommendations in Hiring (2025)
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:iza:izadps:dp17813

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().