As national-level analysis has pointed out (World Bank, 2011), in MP too, women aspire to market work. When asked whether they would be willing to do paid work outside their homes, about 38 percent of working age women in urban MP sampled for the NSS (68th round) responded ‘yes’. Aspirations were higher among younger women: almost half the women under the age of 30 said they would like to work outside the home, with their aspirations for work having risen over time. Given the fact that about 20 percent of women in MP complete high school, and that half of all young women want to work outside the home, there is clearly a disjunct between women’s aspirations, their skills and their reality (World Bank, 2012).

<mark>The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section presents a short review of the literature on how attitudes held by employers about women may shape the latter’s options for work. Section 4 describes the data collected from employers in MP, the sampling strategy, the survey instrument used and the challenges in measuring norms and attitudes. Section 5 provides a brief profile of the enterprises in the sample. Section 6 describes the hiring process used by firms, employer attitudes towards hiring women, and whether these differ by the gender of the respondent. Section 7 presents the multivariate results and Section 8 concludes.</mark>

# **3. Attitudes and discrimination in the labor market**

There is a rich body of empirical literature on bias in hiring, which encompasses both implicit and explicit bias along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, place of residence, among others. certain - Evidence on discrimination along the lines of gender in the labor market shows that gender biases affect both the demand and supply of female labor. The case of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is salient, as women are hugely underrepresented even in countries where larger proportions of them acquire STEM skills. A recent study in the US shows that women are considered intellectually inferior for jobs in science and technology and are therefore less likely to be referred than men for work that requires ‘brilliance’, ‘superior reasoning skills’ and ‘natural intelligence’ (Bian, Leslie and Cimpian, 2018).

What underlies discriminatory attitudes against women in the labor market? At the heart are often social norms that dictate the ‘place’ of women versus that of men. The former is widely perceived as having primary responsibility of the home and children with low ‘attachment to the labor market’. Even within the labor market, women are concentrated in traditionally ‘female’ occupations, those that are usually extensions of their role at home (e.g. teaching, cooking or nursing). Employers may prefer to hire women in quintessentially ‘female’ jobs – such as in office jobs or those that require more ‘feminine skills’ (i.e.: jobs that require social conversation like customer support or call center jobs). Jobs involving authority, technical knowledge and physical strength, on the other hand, are considered more appropriate for men, resulting in occupational sex segregation. Data on large US law firms in the mid-1990s indicate that when selection criteria include a greater number of stereotypically masculine characteristics, women constitute a smaller proportion of new hires (Gorman, 2005).

The distinction between the demand and supply of female labor is often obfuscated and this is reflected in the fact that the norms of each side often intersect. Take for instance 4