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American Economic Review Vol. 113 No. 4 2023

What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?

Peter Kuhn1; Kailing Shen2

1 UC Santa Barbara, NBER, IZA and CES (email: ) · 2 Australian National University, IZA (email: )

Abstract

When employers' explicit gender requests were unexpectedly removed from a Chinese job board overnight, pools of successful applicants became more integrated: women's (men's) share of callbacks to jobs that had requested men (women) rose by 61 (146) percent. The removal “worked” in this sense because it generated a large increase in gender-mismatched applications, and because those applications were treated surprisingly well by employers, suggesting that employers' gender requests often represented relatively weak preferences or outdated stereotypes. The job titles that were integrated by the ban, however, were not the most gendered ones, and were disproportionately lower-wage jobs.

DOI
10.1257/aer.20211127
Volume
113
Issue
4
Pages
1013-1048
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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