Past research shows that decision-makers discriminate against applicants with career breaks. Career breaks are common due to caring responsibilities, especially for working mothers, thereby leaving job seekers with employment gaps on their résumés. In a pre-registered audit field experiment in the United Kingdom ( N = 9,022), we show that rewriting a résumé so that previously held jobs are listed with the number of years worked (instead of employment dates) increases callbacks from real employers compared to résumés without employment gaps by approximately 8%. A series of lab studies (an online pilot and two pre-registered experiments; N = 2,650) shows this effect holds for both female and male applicants—even when compared to applicants without employment gaps—as well as for applicants with less and more total job experience. The effect is driven by making the applicant’s job experience salient, not as a result of novelty or ease of reading.

Becoming a mother and taking care-related leaves from work contribute to economic gender inequality: Employers' gender role stereotypes ascribe mothers less qualification and ambition (i.e., agency), which are reinforced by employment gaps in their résumé. We integrate the judgment and decision-making literature to redesign mothers' résumés in a way that reduces mothers' barriers to work re-entry. More specifically, integrating signal detection theory, we theorize that by replacing employment dates with the number of years the applicant worked in each job, applicants can better convey their relevant professional abilities and ambition to employers (i.e., signals) without disclosing these distracting employment gaps (i.e., noise). In a large-scale randomized field experiment (N = 9,022), results showed that mothers with this redesigned resume´ received more callbacks than those whose résumés showed employment dates. In an online experiment (N = 667), we replicated and extended these findings to show explicit evidence of our theorized mechanism: applicant agency. By integrating these literatures, we proposed and tested a cost-free, low-effort intervention to reduce inequality by reducing mothers' résumé gap-related agency penalties and facilitating their return to work.

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