no implication that these would affect their own families or firms. So, most agree that boys and girls should be equally educated, women should work after marriage and men and women should be equally compensated for equal work. At the multivariate level, employers who do not believe in wage equality are also less likely to have a female employee as are those who believe women should <u>not work after marriage. The</u> variation across attitudes becomes much more inegalitarian when employers are questioned about the relative role of women and men as breadwinners, with over half saying that men have greater claim on jobs when jobs are scarce. There is similarly greater variation in the attitude that men make better employees than women do and that some jobs are better suited to men (or to women). The last attitude bears out in specific terms, where employers tend to reinforce the prevailing norms of occupational sex segregation.

It is of course the case that firms are often bastions of occupational sex segregation and they internalize a discriminatory culture, such that individual employer attitudes do not need to matter for hiring. Hence, as pointed out earlier, there is no watertight distinction between culture and attitudes on the one hand, and firm characteristics on the other. Each reinforces the other in different and complex ways. Another caveat in these results relates to the measurement of attitudes. As pointed out earlier, attitudes are infamously difficult to measure, and we often do not know what we are really capturing. Regardless, this survey is the first of its kind for a large cross section of private firms and the results may be considered counter-intuitive. It tells us that future studies need to refine the measurement of attitudes to assess the extent to which they matter for hiring women in different contexts.

We have three additional findings that deserve reiteration and have implications for policy and action. The first of these relates to the hiring process. We find that social networks matter much more than formal avenues of job search, especially for small and micro enterprises. This disadvantages more women compared to men, because the former have fewer networks, are less likely to move in circles where information about jobs is shared, and possibly less likely to be on electronic media. Women are also less likely to actively search for jobs in situations where they may have a starting disadvantage or may feel that they have a disadvantage. Another finding is that the characteristics employers look for in male and female candidates vary by occupation. While most employers rate years of experience, job related skills and a right work ethic as the top qualities they would look for in a female employee, they rate a woman’s willingness to work long hours as the third most important quality – one that they do not consider as being important for men. Finally, we find that hardly any of the firms offer maternity leave or childcare. In fact, a little over one-fourth of the firms in our sample offered any benefits at all, and those that did, provided bonuses, incentives and/or food, and tended to be large and medium enterprises.

What are the implications of these findings and what can policy, associations of industry or lobbies that promote women’s employment do? It is likely that incentives such as transportation, childcare and paid maternity leave to women could improve the chances that more women would be employed, but small and micro firms may not be able to afford this and still stay profitable. Hence, there may be a case for fiscal or other incentives by government to firms to encourage hiring of women.

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