of .0965 indicates that difference in endowments request accounts for half of the wage gap, meaning half of the gender wage gap would disappear if women are not targeted for low-quality, low-skill jobs. The second part ‘difference in coefficients’ quantifies the change in offered women’s wages when applying men-targeted ads’ coefficients to the women-targeted jobs’ characteristics. Thus, 59 percent of the wage differential comes from this unexplained source. The third part is the interaction term that measures the simultaneous effect of differences in endowment request and coefficients, which is -8 percent.

Table 5: Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of Male-Female ad-specified (log) wage differential

||Coefficient|Std. Err|Percentage|
|---|---|---|---|
|Male-female offered log wage<br>differential|0.197***|(0.00171)||
|Difference in endowments request|0.0965***|(0.00304)|49%|
|Difference in coefficients|0.116***|(0.00205)|59%|
|Interaction|-0.0155***|(0.00325)|- 8%|

# **VIII.  Discussion and Conclusion**

The findings of this study demonstrate strong and persistent existence of gender bias among Indian employers in hiring for various job positions across sectors. Like other studies on job recruitment ads, we also found lower presence of gender-targeting in occupations that require high skills. Based on the patterns of gender preference for particular jobs, we claim that the demand side of the job market represents and reinforces the existing societal gender norms and occupational segregation. This finding supports the existing research that argues women are more preferred in low-quality, low-status, typically low-paid informal jobs (Heintz, 2006) (Goldin, 1990) (Gregory, 2003).

In India, recent technological changes and advancement in communications and networking infrastructure have given rise to new types of jobs that are not traditionally associated with any particular gender. Based on the theory on female labor force participation, women’s level of participation is expected to increase with the rise of any new technological advancement as it shifts production and labor demand from physical- to mental-intensive tasks where men do not have a comparative advantage (Goldin, 1990). Jobs in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and the IT sector fall in such category of new types of jobs. India’s BPO industry has experienced rapid growth with 30 to 40 percent average annual growth rates from 2000 to 2008 (National Association of Software and Service Companies, NASSCOM, 2009). By bringing new types of jobs on the table, this growing sector is expected not to show any particular gender preference and as one would expect we do see that the ads for BPO jobs are the most gender neutral, half as likely to be gender-targeted compared to ‘other’ jobs. This suggests with the rise of new technologies and sectors, gender preference in hiring in those new types of jobs is expected to decline.

Gender stereotyping and bias further lead to salary discrimination. To answer the question about how Indian employers value potential men versus women employees, the answer is, in general men are valued more by employers. Thus, employers are willing to offer higher salary when they target men over women. Half of the mean salary gap _ceteris paribus_ between male- and female17