# **II. Related Empirical Literature on Gender Discrimination in Job Advertisements**

Demand for a particular gender for certain jobs indicates the existence of gender preference in the Indian labor market and the employers’ inherent lopsided perception regarding men and women’s capability, skills and productivity to perform the same job. Statistical discrimination theory<sup>3</sup> based on stereotypes might explain some of these lopsided perceptions and the rest can be due to taste or preference.<sup>4</sup> According to statistical discrimination theory, an employer can be unprejudiced but still prefer to hire members of certain demographic group due to lack of information about the workers from the other group’s ability. Similarly, the gender gap in wage for performing the same task reflects a gap in productivity in some cases, but in many cases in perception. However, demand for a particular gender for jobs elicits the deep-rooted perception and culture about who should do what and who, a man or a woman, should perform the task irrespective of their qualifications and contributes to occupation segregation.

Empirical research on explicit/overt gender preference in job hiring is rare due to the issue of legality and lack of data on employers’ gender preference of the incumbent employee. In most developed countries hiring based on gender let alone mentioning preferred gender in a job advertisement is illegal. In the United States, explicit/overt gender discrimination was legal until 1964 before the enactment/introduction of the Civil Rights Act (1964). Examples of discriminatory advertisements from leading U.S. newspapers in 1960 were documented by (Darity & Mason, 1998). Goldin studied historical gender gaps and both explicit and implicit discrimination in the U.S. labor market using individual and firm level data collected by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor. Data on firm policies in the 1920s and 1930s reveal explicit discrimination against women, particularly married women. Jobs restricted for ‘women only’ were often the deadend jobs that did not lead to advanced positions; on the other hand, ‘men only’ jobs were the advanced positions. Goldin explains that asymmetric information concerning women’s productivity and patriarchy are the reasons behind this job segregation created by employers, who in almost all the cases were men (Goldin, 2006) (Goldin, 1990).

Intriguing empirical evidence of explicit gender bias in job hiring in the Chinese job market has been recently analyzed and documented by Kuhn & Shen, 2013, and Kuhn & Shen, 2011. To our knowledge, these two are the only articles that undertook statistical analysis on explicit gender preferences in job hiring using a large sample of online job advertisements. Analyzing data acquired from advertisements on a Chinese Internet job board, they found a negative relation between gender preference and jobs’ requirement of higher levels of skill. Employers’ relative preferences for either male or female employees are occupation- and job-specific and more strongly related to the employers’ preferred age, height, and beauty of the potential employee than to their job skill levels in China. Gao, 2008 also analyzed Chinese job ads from ChinaHR.com based on Beijing. Analyzing 1,000 ads, he found that women are preferred in clerical and sales

> 3 The theory, based on stereotypes, was pioneered by Phelps, 1972 and Arrow, 1973. According to this theory, inequality may exist and persist between demographic groups as economic agents’ perception may be based on the average behavior of the discriminated group.

> 4 Taste-based model of discrimination was introduced by Becker, 1957.

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