Are women who are expected to take maternity leave soon or are limited at work due to parenthood less likely to be invited for job interviews? The answer to this question seems simple - yes, they are. But what if the contrary were true and men of the same age and qualifications received fewer invitations?
Research on this topic was carried out and recently published by Vojtech Bartos, a researcher at the Institute for Democracy and Economic Analysis (IDEA), a project of the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. In addition to behavioral and developmental economics, Bartos performs experiments focused on discrimination in labor markets. His latest study is entitled (Non)discrimination against female job applicants for maternity-related reasons. The research was conducted between October 2014 and February 2015.
Vojtech Bartos used the method of a correspondent experiment. He created detailed fictional CVs of men and women of the the ages of 29 and 41 who had the same qualifications without children or with two children. Then he sent the CVs to 599 Czech companies which had been offering jobs in the fields of administration, banking and finance, economics and corporate finance, purchasing, insurance, sales and trading, telecommunications and customer service.
Women received more positive responses
It turned out that discrimination against women in the phase of receiving invitations for job interviews did not exist. While men received a total of 7.3% of positive responses, women received 9.2% positive responses to their CVs. In addition, for skilled positions, employers strongly preferred women (both without children and with two children) at the age of 41 to men of the same age. For younger applicants, there was no noticeable difference.
"The concerns that women in various stages of motherhood - expectation and subsequent motherhood - are discriminated against by employers have proved unconfirmed at this stage of the labor market," says Vojtech Bartos. However, he also raises the question of how to explain the existing difference in employment rates and the large difference in wages of men and women.
Bartos see the apparent discrepancy between the existing gender differences on the Czech labor market and the results of his experiment as the consequences of the Czech government's family policy (especially the long maternity leave) and in the different preferences of men and women.
He also explains that the experiment only showed employers' behavior in the first phase in the process of applying for a job. "The experiment can't show whether the behavior of recruiters at a job interview will be different, or whether employers will not create different working conditions for women and men. Neither it can show the answer whether the resulting salaries for men and women will be the same," concludes Vojtech Bartos.
The entire study is available for download on the Institute for Democracy and Economic Analysis (IDEA) website here (in Czech only).
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