Abstract
During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across race and gender. This work explores the role of soft skills in job advertisements by drawing on methods from computational science as well as on theoretical and empirical insights from economics, sociology and psychology. We present a semi-automatic approach based on crowdsourcing and text mining for extracting a list of soft skills. We find that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and jobs in female-dominated professions. Our work shows that soft skills can serve as partial predictors of the gender composition in job categories and that not all soft skills receive equal wage returns at the labour market. Especially “female” skills are frequently associated with wage penalties. Our results expand the growing literature on the association of soft skills on wage inequality and highlight their importance for occupational gender segregation at labour markets.
Highlights
When it comes to jobs and careers, technical abilities and professional qualifications are important factors both from the perspective of an employer and of a new employee
Jobs that entail a high degree of authority occupy a strategic position in the labour market: by monitoring their subordinates, employees in leadership positions are ensuring that a firm produces surplus
5 Discussion and conclusions This study examined soft skills in the labour market and showed that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and male-dominated professions and may potentially perpetuate labour market inequalities
Summary
When it comes to jobs and careers, technical abilities and professional qualifications are important factors both from the perspective of an employer and of a new employee. As pointed out by recent studies [1,2,3], more and more attention is focused on soft skills, i.e. qualities that do not depend on the acquired knowledge and that are harder to quantify due to being related to one’s emotional intelligence and personality traits. They are extremely important because they facilitate human connections [4]. Observational studies have shown (2019) 8:13 that social features potentially related to soft skills (e.g. the variety of friendship connections and position diversity within a community) are positively correlated with economic outputs [8, 9]
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