O*NET, the occupation dictionary widely used in labor market research. By carefully tailoring skills to occupations, we aim to capture the heterogeneity of skills requirements for different jobs in the labor market.

To investigate whether including socioemotional skill signals in CVs might help women’s job prospects, we selected a labor market with a traditionally low representation of women. The experiment is run in the two largest cities of Turkey, a country with a labor market characterized by the lowest female labor force participation and among the highest female unemployment rates among the OECD countries.<sup>5</sup> We consider the high-skilled segment of the Turkish labor market, where women with a university degree form almost a quarter of the total unemployed population in Turkey, while representing less than 7 percent in total population.<sup>6</sup> Altogether we applied for 2,687 real vacancy ads using 10,748 CVs. The vacancy ads were posted on a large online job portal in Turkey. A unique feature of this job portal is that it allows us to track employer behavior at different stages of candidate screening.<sup>7</sup> The first stage is the longlist, formed when the employer filters applicants using hard criteria based on the candidates’ profile (age, gender, experience, city and neighborhood, sector, occupation or other keyword search). The second stage, the shortlist, is when the employer clicks on some of the candidates’ profiles to view their CVs, and, the third and final stage is when the employer contacts the shortlisted candidates to invite them to an interview, which is the stage evaluated in all other correspondence studies.<sup>8</sup> We are thus able to pinpoint at which screening stage, if any, different CV characteristics, including gender and socioemotional skills, come into play.

Examining selection at various stages of the hiring process, we do not find strong evidence of gender discrimination. There is suggestive evidence of a small bias in favor of women during the longlisting process, but this effect is only marginally significant. Furthermore, we find that employers value socioemotional skill signals positively only when they specifically ask for such skills in the vacancy ad. On the other hand, when socioemotional skill signals are not solicited in the ad, employers do not appear to value them; indeed, in these cases, job seekers may even face a penalty (i.e. lower probability of callback) for including such signals on CVs . This particular penalty for signaling unrequested socioemotional skills is only observed for female candidates, however. The gender-specific penalty for signaling unsolicited socioemotional skills suggests that such signals on CVs may be interpreted differently for men and women.

The following section provides details on the design of the experiment and the collected data, Section 3 presents the results, and Section 4 concludes the paper.

> 5  The 2017 national estimate of labor force participation for women aged 15 and above was 34 percent, the lowest female labor force participation rate among the OECD countries. Unemployment levels among working-age women were at 14 percent, almost double the OECD levels (Source: World Bank World Development Indicators).

> 6 Source: Calculated using Turkey Household Labor Force Micro Dataset 2016.

> 7 To our knowledge, the only other study using a similar data set, albeit with a smaller sample, is Balkan and Cilasun (2018), which investigates whether gender discrimination plays a role in the low female labor force participation in Turkey.

> 8 See Neumark (2018) for a survey of audit studies in the labor market.

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