joblessness or long-term unemployment in most countries. While there is no consensus on the existence of gender discrimination in hiring (see Bertrand and Duflo, 2017 for a review), there is ample evidence on the existence of a gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn 2017, and Ñopo, Daza and Ramos 2012), and that, among other factors, such gender wage gap may, to some degree, be explained by the differences in socioemotional skills between men and women (Palomino and Peyrache, 2010; Cobb-Clark and Tan, 2011). Furthermore, gender differences in preferences and actions are important in labor market outcomes. Research has shown that differences in competitiveness and risk aversion may lead to more unfavorable labor market outcomes for women compared to men, not only because women shy away from asking for more favorable outcomes, but also because employers expect them to have less competitive preferences.<sup>3</sup> Signaling socioemotional skills may thus be a way for women to mitigate employers’ potential biases arising from these socially ascribed qualities based on gender.

On the other hand, if the same socioemotional skills are valued differently in the labor market for women and men, there may be more unfavorable labor market outcomes for women who signal the socioemotional skills that are rewarded for men, as noted in research related to the gender double bind (see e.g. Armstrong, 1988). The bind refers to the trade-offs women face due to being perceived differently in relation to certain skills or attributes than men. For example, features associated with leadership, such as assertiveness, can be perceived as a positive attribute for a man but a negative attribute for a woman (Rudman et al 2012, Gipson et al 2017); similarly, for women, being perceived as personable can be associated with an assumption of lower competence, while the same does not hold for men (Phelan et al 2008).<sup>4</sup> In this paper we conduct a correspondence audit study to assess the effects of an explicit socioemotional skill signal in a CV during the hiring process. We do so by introducing signals of socioemotional skills in fictitious male and female CVs and sending these CVs to real vacancies. We record employer selection behaviors at various stages of the hiring process, including whether the employer selects our candidate for a longlist, whether our candidate’s profile is clicked on, and whether the candidate gets a callback (i.e. invitation for an interview). These outcomes enable us to assess (1) the extent to which employers favor men or women in the hiring process, (2) whether employers value socioemotional skills, and (3) whether there is any differential value of such skills for men and women.

To address these questions, we use a two-by-two experimental design, where the first dimension is the existence of socioemotional skill signals in the CV, and the other is gender. By randomly assigning socioemotional skills and gender, we can compare employer selection across otherwise equivalent candidates, isolating the effect of gender and socioemotional skills on hiring. For the socioemotional skills treatment, we carefully define and match socioemotional skills for four different occupational clusters: accounting, marketing, sales, and IT. We use precise skills requirements from the definitions of tasks in

> 3 For example, individuals’ own perception of “male” traits are linked to entry into male-dominated study fields and occupations (Antecol and Cobb-Clark, 2010), and there is evidence that women negotiate wages less often compared to men (Babcock and Laschever, 2009). Studies also show that women are more risk-averse, less likely to prefer competition, and are less likely to overestimate their qualities, whereas men are more overconfident compared to women (Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007; Croson and Gneezy, 2009; Dohmen and Falk, 2011; Ludwig et al., 2017). 4 This also applies to other characteristics, such as being married or having children, which might be positively evaluated for men but not for women (Riach and Rich 2002, Petersen and Togstad 2006).

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