Gender Preferences in Job Vacancies and Workplace Gender Diversity

Abstract

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Can wage transparency alleviate gender sorting in the labour market?

“…Besides preferences, discriminatory behavior of employers, who favor male applicants for jobs with higher pay, can also contribute to gender di↵erences. Card et al (2021) provide evidence that gender preferences are common among employers in Austria even though explicit references cannot be made anymore in job advertisements. Yet, it is unlikely that the gender wage gap is entirely driven by discriminating employers.…”

What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?

“…In Austria's case, these laws took the form of the Austrian Equal Treatment Act (AETA), which became effective on July 1, 2004. Card, Colella andLalive (2021) demonstrate that stated gender preferences declined precipitously during the three subsequent years, and were essentially absent by 2008.…”

“…The most closely related research to our paper is Card, Colella and Lalive (2021), who study the effects of Austria's prohibition of stated gender preferences in worker recruitment in 2004. One advantage of their setting relative to ours is that they observe several hiring outcomes -specifically, which workers were hired, the wage they earned and their job durations.…”

The Impact of Restricting Fixed-Term Contracts on Labor and Skill Demand

“…Lastly, this paper is also relevant to a recent and rapidly expanding literature that utilizes highly detailed data from online job vacancies to investigate various labor market issues. These include: (i) variations in job tasks and skill requirements across geographical locations, as well as between and within narrowly defined occupations (Atalay et al, 2023;Deming and Kahn, 2018); (ii) changes in labor and skill demand in response to minimum wage increases (Clemens et al, 2021), computerization (Dillender and Forsythe, 2022), business cycle fluctuations (Modestino et al, 2016;, and severe shocks such as the Great Recession (Hershbein and Kahn, 2018) and the Covid-19 pandemic (Chetty et al, 2020;Forsythe et al, 2020;; (iii) the role of job postings' semantic content for the process of search and matching (Marinescu and Wolthoff, 2020), also in relation to gender and age discrimination in recruitment (Card et al, 2023;Helleseter et al, 2020;Kuhn et al, 2020;Kuhn and Shen, 2013;; (iv) labor market concentration and its mediating role on the employment effects of minimum wage increases (Azar et al, 2020;; and (v) trends in the demand for AI skills, and the interplay between AI adoption and various firm and labor market outcomes (Acemoglu et al, 2022;Alekseeva et al, 2021;Babina et al, 2022a;2022b). Our contribution to this body of literature lies in providing evidence on the effects of a policy reform concerning labor contracts on the demand for labor and skills.…”