Gender Discrimination College Graduates’ Labor Market

1. Gender Discrimination College Graduates’ Labor Market Presenter: Ge Yuhao

2. Structure • Motivation; • Literature; • Experiment Design; • Empirical Results; • Conclusions;

3. Motivation • Three kinds of gender discrimination: • Employment opportunity; • Wage or salary; • Industry (or occupation) distribution; • This paper focuses on employment opportunity in the labor market of college graduates. • Much attention in news papers and TV programs. • Few empirical research from scholars.

4. Literature • Gustafsson & Li (2000). Discrimination accounts for 52.49% in the raw gender wage gap in 1988, and rises to 63.20% in 1995. • Kuhn and Shen (2013). Explicit gender discrimination is much more often on positions requiring low levels of skill. • Bertrand and Mullainathan(2004). Fake resumes by managing names.

5. Experiment Design • Construct the resume template （Please see the attachment）. • Choose the experiment sample and implement the training. • Every participant is asked to make a resume according to his\her true information, but the name is an exception. • Every participant is asked to make a fake resume by changing gender, height and weight.

6. Experiment Design • The participants put these two resumes on the job websites. • Set the deadline to collect the information of the number of the offer. • At last, 95 participants, 190 observations. • Suggestions are welcomed.

7. Discrimination Coefficient • Discrimination Coefficient: • Y: the number of the offer.

8. Table 1

9. Total sample • On average, male applicants get 40% higher offers than female. • High degree of discrimination.

10. By different subsamples • Almost all the difference is positive and significant. Discrimination again by sample! • Party member. party_no <party_yes • Edu_level. Undergraduate<graduate • GPA. GPA_bad<GPA_normal<GPA_good • English. EN_bad<EN_normal<EN_good

11. What is the wrong with the world? • Female applicants face more serious discrimination when they seems more successful. • Why?

12. Possible Explanation • Statistical discrimination theory; • The employers assume the relation of true productivity (TP) and observable human capital score (S, such as edu_level, GPA, english) is that: • is the mean of for the group where the applicant belong to.

13. Possible Explanation • The employers assume: • Then:

14. Possible Explanation • The employer still want to recruit the applicants with high productivity. • Female applicants are discriminated because there is information asymmetry and they can not persuade the employers that they have high productivity.

15. Practice • Back to Table 2. • practice_no> practice_yes; • Practice serves as a signal to solve the problem of information asymmetry; • Practice could alleviate the negative effect of discrimination for female college graduates.

16. Conclusions • First, there is serious discrimination against female applicants in labor market of college graduates, and the degree of discrimination rises as applicants’ human capital level increase. • Second, practice could alleviate the negative effect of discrimination. • Third, the reason of discrimination in labor market of college graduates may be the information asymmetry.