Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedGender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 649255; the Research Council of Norway, grant number 287016; The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), (016.Vidi.185.041)Peer reviewe

Women and social class Towards a more complete picture

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:9349.227(97-2) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The GEMM Study: A Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment on Hiring Discrimination

The GEMM Study (N=19,181) employs an innovative field-experimental research design that allows for the comparative analysis of hiring discrimination across 53 ethnic groups in five strategically selected countries: Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway and the Netherlands. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 649255 (GEMM Project)