Gender discrimination in China: Experimental evidence from the job market for college graduates

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Highlights

  • We examine the gender discrimination in the initial stage of hiring for college graduates in china using the correspondence method.

  • We find a female applicant is 7.6% less likely to receive a callback than a male applicant, other things being equal.

  • The gender discrimination in the occupations of computer and mathematics, architecture and engineering, and sales appear to drive our results.

  • While this study offers some evidence to support a taste-based discrimination view, we do not have enough evidence to support a statistical discrimination view.

Abstract

This paper examines employment-related gender discrimination during the initial stages of a hiring process. It specifically focuses on recent college graduates in China. By examining firms’ responses to fictitious resumes with randomly generated information on gender and other key attributes of applicants (e.g., school reputation, student's academic achievement, and leadership experiences), this study is able to separate the effect of gender on a student's potential for getting an on-site interview from the confounding effects of other factors. The findings reveal that, with all other factors remaining constant, female applicants, on average, are less likely to be invited by hiring firms to on-site interviews as compared with their male counterparts. Furthermore, gender discrimination in computer and mathematics, architecture and engineering, and sales occupations appears to be driving the results of this study. The qualitative evidence based on interviews with firm recruiters suggests that the findings of this study are generally consistent with the role congruity theory of prejudice in psychology literature. While the finding that the quality of a job candidate (academic achievement and leadership experience) does not reduce gender discrimination offers some evidence to support a taste-based discrimination view, we do not have enough evidence to support a statistical discrimination view.

Introduction

Gender discrimination is common in China (Fincher 2013; Steinfeld 2014), and it manifests itself in various forms (e.g., discriminatory hiring practices, wage discrepancies, limited promotion opportunities, unfair dismissals, early compulsory retirement ages, and sexual harassment). Approximately 50% of Chinese women have indicated that they experience gender discrimination at their workplaces regularly (Wang 2016), and urban Chinese women earn, on average, only 67% of the wages men earn (All-China Women's Federation 2011). Although China has enacted a series of laws to address these discriminatory practices (i.e., based on its constitutional gender equality principle), these laws have generally been ineffective in combating discrimination against women (Bulger 2000; Han 2001; Yang and Li 2009). Therefore, gender discrimination continues to be pervasive in Chinese society.

Despite the existence of many studies on wage discrepancies between men and women in China (Meng and Miller 1995; (Meng, 1998); Gustafsson and Li 2000; Bishop et al., 2005; Demurger et al., 2007), only a few delve into the subject of gender discrimination in the hiring process. Kuhn and Shen (2013) examined explicit gender discrimination in ads posted on an online Chinese job board. Their results show that (i) only 11% of approximately 1000,000 job ads display a gender preference (while 89% do not) and (ii) gender-targeted job ads favor women as often as men. This implies that gender discrimination mainly exists in the hiring process in China in a subtle and implicit way (Steinfeld 2014). This explains why the majority of studies on employment-based gender discrimination in developed and developing countries have predominately focused on implicit gender discrimination (Kuhn and Shen 2013).

In seeking to understand the reasons behind gender discrimination in the hiring process, existing literature generally offers two alternative explanations: taste-based discrimination and statistical discrimination. The taste-based discrimination theory, pioneered by Becker (1957), argues that employers have a distaste for hiring members of certain groups (e.g., females, blacks, or other minorities). Therefore, employers may refuse to hire certain groups of people because of this distaste, and if they do hire them, they are likely to pay them lesser than other equally productive employees. In contrast, the statistical discrimination theory argues that employers tend to have imperfect information on potential employees’ productivity (Phelps 1972; Arrow 1973; Aigner and Cain 1977). They use group-specific membership to infer potential employees’ productivity. As such, when faced with two applicants having the same unobservable productivity but belonging to two different groups, an employer will rationally favor the applicant belonging to the group with a higher expected productivity, thereby resulting in discrimination.

This paper examines implicit gender discrimination (i.e., against females) in the hiring process involving job-seeking college graduates in China. At this stage, hiring firms solicit job applicants through job fairs and/or online job boards before screening them for on-site interviews. These two channels are the main avenues through which firms hire employees in China. More specifically, this study explores the role of gender in screening and inviting applicants for an on-site job interview. To achieve this, it examines the different responses of firms to male and female college graduate applicants and further discusses the possible mechanisms underlying gender discrimination against females at the initial stage of hiring. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine implicit gender discrimination in the hiring process in China.

To investigate the existence of implicit gender discrimination in the hiring process in China, the authors conducted a correspondence study that examined employers’ responses to randomized, fictitious resumes. The correspondence method was employed because it overcomes both the omitted variable and self-selection biases plagued with the utilization of observational data (Neumark et al., 1996; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Petit 2007). The omitted variable bias arises if part of the measured difference in outcome variables is due to unobserved differences between the two groups (unknown to researchers), while the self-selection bias arises if there are different self-censorships in job applications between the two groups (e.g., female college graduates may choose to only apply to prospective employers who are less discriminatory against women). The correspondence method is considered the most rigorous approach to studying gender or racial discrimination in labor markets. Under this method, gender or racial discrimination is assessed by comparing hiring firms’ response rates (whether or not a mock applicant is invited for an on-site interview) to fictitious resumes, wherein applicants’ gender (or race) and other key attributes (such as school background, academic performance, etc.) are randomly created. As the gender and key characteristics are randomly assigned, they are all independent from each other and are uncorrelated with the hiring firms’ characteristics. Therefore, the effect of gender on an applicant's likelihood of receiving an on-site interview can be separated from the confounding effects of other factors. Despite this obvious advantage of the correspondence approach in studying employment-based gender discrimination, the number of studies that have used this method, although growing, is still small.

To conduct a correspondence study, we created identical, fictitious resumes in which gender and several other characteristics (i.e., commonly perceived as important in obtaining a job) were randomly assigned. These fictitious resumes were then submitted to recruiting firms. As such, the omitted variable and selection biases were controlled. The correspondence approach has been employed in a number of studies measuring discrimination by studying employers’ reactions to identical resumes with randomly assigned gender, ethnicity, or race (e.g., Levinson 1975; Riach and Rich 1987; Neumark et al., 1996; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Riach and Rich 2006; Booth and Leigh 2010; Edelman et al., 2017; Chen 2020; Hou et al., 2020).

Our study yields several important findings. First, with all factors remaining constant, female (vs. male) applicants, on average, receive fewer callbacks from hiring firms. More precisely, the probability of a female applicant obtaining an on-site interview is only about two-thirds that of a male applicant. This means that a female applicant, on average, will have to submit 55% more applications to receive the same number of callbacks. Second, a high level of academic achievement of a female applicant (e.g., excellence in academic performance, student leadership, and strong English skills) does not narrow the gender disparity in hiring. This implies that hiring firms do not compromise their gender preference even when faced with a high level of achievement of a female applicant. Third, gender disparity appears to be heterogeneous across firm sizes, ownership types, industries, and occupations. Private firms and relatively large firms (i.e., with more than 100 employees) tend to prefer male applicants; however, there is no statistically significant gender disparity for other types of firm ownerships and relatively small firms (i.e., those with less than 100 employees). Gender disparity is the most striking among industries such as the manufacturing, wholesale and retail trades, information technology, and to a lesser degree, leasing and commercial services.

This study further explored the possible mechanisms underlying the gender discrimination results. The findings revealed that for computer and mathematics, architecture and engineering, and sales occupations, females are, on average, less likely to receive callbacks, with all other factors remaining constant. These three occupations account for 43% of the total sample. As such, they appear to be driving this study's findings that females are discriminated against in receiving callbacks based on the full sample. Other main occupations do not show such high levels of discrimination against females. To further reveal the underlying reasons for gender discrimination, we conducted a qualitative analysis by interviewing 20 firm recruiters. The interview results revealed that recruiters perceive the existence of incongruity between the requirements for these occupations and the stereotyped roles of women. As a result, female applicants are less likely to be recruited for these occupations. These findings are in fact consistent with the role congruity theory of prejudice in psychology literature (Eagly and Karau 2002; Eagly and Carli 2003; Koenig and Eagly 2014). While this study offers some evidence to support a taste-based discrimination view, we do not have enough evidence to support a statistical discrimination view.1

Literature on gender discrimination tends to focus on developed countries and finds that gender and racial discriminations are widespread in developed countries (in the U.S.: Levinson 1975; Neumark et al., 1996; in Australia: Riach and Rich 1987; Booth and Leigh2010; in England: Riach and Rich 2006). However, even though gender discrimination in developing (vs. developed) countries is more pronounced, very few studies, especially those that have adopted the correspondence method approach, have examined how gender discrimination affects job applicants in developing countries. In this respect, this study makes an important contribution to the gender discrimination literature, as it is the first study to use the correspondence method to ascertain gender discrimination in hiring in the Chinese job market and also one of the very few such studies focusing on developing countries.2

Kuhn and Shen (2013) studied explicit gender discrimination in the hiring process in China. They find that although it is legal to express gender preferences in job ads, the share of ads favoring men versus those favoring women is roughly equal. They further find that as job skill requirements increase, the share of ads stipulating a preferred gender decreases. Kuhn and Shen also show that despite firms’ idiosyncratic gender preferences for particular jobs, a firm's gender preferences can be overridden by factors such as a thinner labor market or a greater incentive to search broadly for the best candidate. However, our study differs from Kuhn and Shen's (2013) study in several ways. First, their study specifically explores explicit gender discrimination in the Chinese labor market, while our study examines implicit gender discrimination during the early hiring stage. Our study finds that even in an environment where it is legal to express gender preferences in hiring, female applicants are discriminated against for job positions that do not specify gender preference and do not necessarily require gender-specific skills. Second, our study finds that there is a systematic implicit discrimination against female applicants, while Kuhn and Shen (2013) do not find a systematic explicit discrimination against a particular gender. Third, our study suggests possible mechanisms underlying the systematic implicit discrimination against female applicants, while Kuhn and Shen's study does not seek to explain explicit discrimination against a particular gender. Instead, they seek to understand why the frequency of the explicit gender requirement appearing in job ads (female or male gender) may vary in contrary to the job's skill requirement. In summary, although both the studies explore gender discrimination in the labor market, the phenomena the two studies seek to understand and explain differ.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the experimental design. Section 3 presents the experimental results and focuses on the role of gender in obtaining on-site interviews. Section 4 examines the mechanism driving the gender discrimination results revealed herein. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Creating randomized fictitious resumes

In our designed experiment, each hiring firm receives one fictitious resume.3

Testing for randomness and independence of the experiment

While using experimental data, it is important to check the quality of the randomization design. Based on this study's data, the randomization achieved balance, and the realized outcomes of the randomized components are as expected. First, as described above, this study adopts a between-subject experimental design, wherein the subjects of the experiment are assigned to different conditions, with each subject experiencing only one experimental condition. Table 1 presents the actual realization

Interview findings from firm recruiters

In the econometrics analysis, we have consistently shown the existence of significant overall gender discrimination in receiving callbacks for job interviews, and it can be seen that the results are mainly driven by certain occupations (i.e., sale, computer and mathematics, and architecture and engineering occupations). One may then ask “Why is there gender discrimination against females in these occupations, while there is not much discrimination in occupations such as business and financial

Conclusion

This paper has examined employment-related gender discrimination at the hiring stage with a focus on college graduates in China. We were able to control for the omitted variable and selection biases associated with job application by examining the responses of firms to randomized fictitious resumes. This paper finds that with all other factors constant, female applicants, on average, receive far fewer invitations from hiring firms for on-site interviews. Gender discrimination in the occupations

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      Citation Excerpt :

      Empirically, our study has three implications for the reduction of gender discrimination. First, although women’s status has improved remarkably in the 21st century, the gender hierarchy is still significant worldwide and has been documented in a large scope of contexts, including the labor market context (Goldin & Rouse, 2000; Kuhn & Shen, 2013; Neumark, Bank, & van Nort, 1996; Zhang, Jin, Li, & Wang, 2021), the bargaining context (Ayres & Siegelman, 1995; Castillo, Petrie, Torero, & Vesterlund, 2013), and the academics context (Card, Vigna, Funk, & Iriberri, 2020; Dupas, Modestino, Niederle & Wolfers, 2021; Mengel, Sauermann & Zolitz, 2019; Sarsons, Gerxhani, Reuben & Schram, 2021; Wu, 2020). Our study provides an explanation for why gender discrimination persists even though considerable resources have been devoted to solve this problem.

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    The authors thank Changqing Guo, Wei Han, Jing Ma, Rong Pang, Jingchao Wei, Dongfang Yan, Junbin Zhu for excellent research assistance. The authors also thank Zhen Chen, Fei Di, Hongfeng Lei, Jian Li, Guangtao Yu and Xiaoni Zhang for facilitating a survey and interviews with firm recruiters. Songqing Jin gratefully acknowledges financial support from Michigan State University AgBioResearch (MICL02608) and Tao Li is grateful for support from the Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program (Grant No.: BJJWZYJH01201910034034).

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