Continued export trade, screening-matching and gender discrimination in employment

Abstract

The screening mechanism of export trade facilitates enterprises to increase their recruitment threshold, which in turn has a biased impact on the employment of heterogeneous individuals. Incorporating export trade, screening-matching and gender discrimination in employment into a unified analysis and applying propensity score matching estimation on the basis of the theoretical framework of micro-enterprise and the optimized behavior of job seekers, this paper examines the relations between export trade of industrial enterprises and female labor employment levels in China during 2005–2007. The results indicate that: (1) the number and ration of female employees are increasing with the size and growth of the enterprise export, regardless of enterprise exports continuity. It demonstrates that export expansion does play a critical role in mitigating gender discrimination in employment. (2) For the enterprise with higher export continuity, there is a significant effect toward improving the number and proportion of female employees, conversely the worse effect. Thus, it is significantly meaningful to mitigate gender discrimination in employment by ensuring the continued export capacity of enterprises. (3) Comparing to the promoting effect of growth in the number of female employees, export has limit effect up on increasing the proportion of female employees. Therefore, it is rather difficult to resolve the issue of gender discrimination in employment by relying completely on exports expansion. Based on research findings, this paper discusses the policy implications in terms of easing gender discrimination in employment and promoting employment equity.