Gender Discrimination in Job Ads: Theory and Evidence / Peter J. Kuhn, Kailing Shen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kuhn, Peter J.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Shen, Kailing.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17453.

NBER working paper series no. w17453

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Gender Discrimination in Job Ads

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2011.

Summary:

We study firms' advertised gender preferences in a population of ads on a Chinese internet job board, and interpret these patterns using a simple employer search model. The model allows us to distinguish firms' underlying gender preferences from firms' propensities to restrict their search to their preferred gender. The model also predicts that higher job skill requirements should reduce the tendency to gender-target a job ad; this is strongly confirmed in our data, and suggests that rising skill demands may be a potent deterrent to explicit discrimination of the type we document here. We also find that firms' underlying gender preferences are highly job-specific, with many firms requesting men for some jobs and women for others, and with one third of the variation in gender preferences within firm*occupation cells.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2011.