Diana Roxana Galos

Since 1983, more than 70 employment audit experiments, carried out in more than 26 countries across five continents, have randomized the gender of fictitious applicants to measure the extent of hiring discrimination on the basis of gender. The results are mixed: Some studies find discrimination against men, and others find discrimination against women. We reconcile these heterogeneous findings through a “meta-reanalysis” of the average effects of being described as a woman (versus a man), conditional on occupation. We find a strongly positive gender gradient. In (relatively better paying) occupations dominated by men, the effect of being a woman is negative, while in the (relatively lower paying) occupations dominated by women, the effect is positive. In this way, heterogeneous employment discrimination on the basis of gender preserves status quo gender distributions and earnings gaps. These patterns hold among both minority and majority status applicants.

Unequal gender outcomes in occupational success unravel through different channels in higher education. Using the AlmaLaurea dataset comprised of 80% of Italian graduates and 98 fields of study, this article investigates whether men and women receive similar returns on employment and earnings when choosing the same field of study. Two complementary perspectives are applied – Kanter’s theory of relative numbers and the status theory of gender – to examine the quantitative and qualitative differences between fields. The results show that the most gender ‘balanced’ fields of study are the most gender unequal in terms of earnings and employment. Separate analyses demonstrate that the status of a field interacts with its gender composition, and gender gaps in female-intensive nurturing fields shrink faster with an increasing proportion of women, albeit at higher absolute levels compared with non-nurturing fields. Therefore, nurturing fields of study should not necessarily be considered as levelling gender inequality in the labour market.