INAS 2018: Gender discrimination in the labor market

Gunn Birkelund will speak at the INAS 2018 Conference at Stanford this week. The topic for her talk will be the field experiments of hiring processes across the world.

Gunn Birkelund. Photo: UiO

Across the world, women are disadvantaged in terms of wages, career prospects, and access to authority positions (OECD 2017). In this talk Gunn Birkelund will discuss one aspect of the matching process in the labor market – discrimination. The best way to measure discrimination is through real-life experiments, and randomized field experiments of hiring discrimination measure employers response to identical fictional male and female job applicants.

Experiments conducted in a number of countries between 1996-2017 show that the gender gap in callbacks are positively associated with occupational sex segregation, in such a way that men are more likely to be discriminated in female-dominated occupations than women are in male-dominated occupations.

The finding of a reversed gender gap seems robust, and future research should explore the mechanisms associated with this (reversed) gender gap in hiring discrimination.

Published June 7, 2018 8:35 AM - Last modified Feb. 7, 2024 2:10 PM