contained gender requirements and 28 percent included age requirements. Though there were usually no explicit gender requirements in vacancy announcements for more male-dominated occupations (including IT specialists, welders, and drivers), the wording in Uzbek and Russian commonly referred to applicants as “he” or “him.” Annex 1 provides a summary of requirements specified by employer in online job ads (Spot, 2019).

The following sections proceed as follows. Section I includes an overview of the relevant literature, section II describes data, experimental design, and empirical approach. Section III summarizes survey findings, and section IV closes with discussion and policy recommendations related to the results.

# I. Audit and Correspondence Studies

Discrimination occurs when there is differential treatment of otherwise identical individuals from different social groups, such as age or gender (Bohren et al, 2019). Audit and correspondence studies are two common and closely related methods used to explore discrimination in hiring. Audit studies were first introduced in the 1960s to identify discrimination in the labor market that is difficult to conclusively establish with observational data. Such studies make it possible to measure the source and strength of employer preferences across demographic attributes such as gender, age, and other characteristics (Gaddis, 2018). The approach typically relies on real testers or auditors who physically meet their potential employer.

However, there are several limitations to direct audit studies, discussed in detail in Heckman and Siegelman (1993) and Heckman (1998). The main weakness of the approach is that job applicants from different groups may not appear identical to employers for reasons other than the characteristic being studied. Another prominent critique of audit surveys is that they are not double-blinded. As Bertrand and Dufflo (2017) note, auditors are aware of the purpose of the study and may have a belief that employers treat minorities differently, which can result in measured differences in treatment.

Correspondence surveys largely address these weaknesses by using fake resumes or digital applicants for which the qualifications are by design exactly identical across groups. This method overcomes both the omitted variable and self-selection biases present in observational data (Neumark et al. 1996, Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004, Petit 2007, Zhang et al. 2021). By monitoring “callbacks” from employers, unequal treatment based on single characteristic (gender, race, age, or ethnicity) can be identified and given a causal interpretation (Gaddis 2018). The majority of correspondence studies are inspired by the work of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) who showed that the scope of employers’ racial discrimination drives large observed gaps by race in the United States.

We conducted a correspondence study to explore potential gender discrimination in the hiring process in Uzbekistan. The approach focused on examining employers’ patterns of responses to randomly assigned fictitious resumes. The extent of gender discrimination was estimated by comparing hiring firms’ response rates to resumes in which only the candidates’ gender differed. Due to random assignment, gender is independent and uncorrelated with hiring firms’ characteristics, and the effect of gender on an applicant’s probability of obtaining an interview can be separated from the effects of other factors.

A large literature attests to widespread discrimination in labor, credit, and housing markets around the globe. Correspondence studies measuring discrimination by studying employers’ reactions to identical 5