# **I. Introduction**

A striking feature of the Indian labor force and job market is the low participation rate of women. With only 27 percent in the labor force, India is among the lowest in the world. The global average is 52 percent and in South Asia it is 29 percent. Increased female education and decline in fertility failed to put any dent in this low level of participation, indicating the presence of deep-rooted gender imbalance in preferences, stereotypes and practices in the overall job market. Analyzing a sample of 830,929 job advertisements over the period between 2011 and July 2017, this study identifies employers’ preferences that explain demand-side factors contributing to low female labor force participation. Data were obtained from an Indian online job portal, “Babajob (merged into QuikrJobs in June 2017)”, that covers both formal and informal sector jobs. Job advertisements that allow mentioning the preferred gender of the incumbent employee provide us with a unique window to shed light on employers’ gender preference and demand for a specific gender, irrespective of applicants’ qualifications, in frequently advertised occupations.

The key contribution of this paper is that this study uses a unique data source to investigate the gender gaps in demand for workers and the salary specified in ads in both formal and informal sector occupations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of employers’ explicit gendered demand for labor analyzing profiles of online job ads in India. This study analyzes job recruitment advertisements listed in an online job portal only. Though the online job portal provides us with access to an enormous amount of data, it needs to be mentioned that the ads we analyzed may not represent the overall Indian labor market. But it provides a broad and reliable picture of urban Indian employers’ gender preference at hiring. The explicit gender analysis has been possible as it is not illegal in India to hire workers based on their gender and employers often exercise their right to impose explicit gender-specific restrictions on job advertisements. Gender preference at hiring can be reflected at various stages of the hiring process: requesting a certain gender through job ads, offering gender-discriminatory wages, and systematically hiring one gender over the other irrespective of their qualifications. In this paper, we focus on the first two sources of gender bias and investigate mainly to answer two sets of questions: First, does systematic gender bias by occupation exist among employers in the Indian labor market? If so, which gender is preferred in which occupation categories? Second, do gender-targeted jobs offer higher salary? What does the gender gap in specified salary look like?

Our findings show gender targeting and discrimination are quite common in the Indian job market. For example, one-third of the job ads listed in the portal identifies either men or women as preferred candidate. Like Kuhn and Shen, 2013 and Anand 2013, we also found a negative skilltargeting relationship - occupations requiring high level of skills are less likely to prefer a certain gender. As one would expect, there exists high occupational gender segregation in the demand side. Like many other labor markets, in India too women are more preferred in teaching, clerical, and low-level jobs. Lower salary is offered if the ad targets women for all occupational categories except for clerical positions. For teaching, business process outsourcing (BPO), and service jobs, even though demand for women is higher, yet lower salary is specified in those ads targeting women compared to those targeting men.

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