Discrimination in Hiring Based on Potential and Realized Fertility: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Sascha O Becker,Ana Fernandes,Doris Weichselbaumer

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3390298

Abstract

Due to conventional gender norms, women are more likely to be in charge of childcare than men. From an employer’s perspective, in their fertile age they are also at “risk” of pregnancy. Both factors potentially affect hiring practices of firms. We conduct a largescale correspondence test in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, sending out approx. 9,000 job applications, varying job candidate’s personal characteristics such as marital status and age of children. We find evidence that, for part-time jobs, married women with older kids, who likely finished their childbearing cycle and have more projectable childcare chores than women with very young kids, are at a significant advantage vis-avis other groups of women. At the same time, married, but childless applicants, who have a higher likelihood to become pregnant, are at a disadvantage compared to single, but childless applicants to part-time jobs. Such effects are not present for full-time jobs, presumably, because by applying to these in contrast to part-time jobs, women signal that they have arranged for external childcare.

Highlights

Females and males still have very different experiences in the labor market, for example with respect to wages, career paths or assignment of tasks
The same pattern of female advantage is found at the country level. These sex differences in callback rates resonate with other studies surveyed in Riach and Rich (2006) and Rich (2014) concerning discrimination of men in female dominated jobs, and of women in male dominated activities
When we split the sample by occupation, we find the same ordering of family types for applications to part-time jobs: married and childless women have lower callback rates than single childless women, and women with two old kids perform better than women with two young children

Summary

Introduction

Females and males still have very different experiences in the labor market, for example with respect to wages, career paths or assignment of tasks. Kleven et al forthcoming recently showed that, despite considerable gender convergence, in Denmark the presence of children accounts for most of the remaining earnings inequality between men and women in the labor market. Their empirical approach was adopted by Kleven et al (2019a) who examined child penalties in different countries and found negative effects of children on earnings in the German-speaking countries that are examined in this study. Already the early human capital literature (especially the work of Mincer, 1962 and Mincer and Polachek, 1974) emphasized that choices concerning childcare, labor supply, occupation and human capital investments of (future) mothers could generate the same patterns in the data. As a result, numerous endogeneity issues (e.g., concerning effort at work, selection into work) occur in non-experimental data (e.g., Kunze, 2008) that make the identification of discrimination in wage setting difficult

Methods

Results

Conclusion