Gender discrimination in recruitment: lessons from a large-scale Testing

Gender inequalities are a defining feature of the labour market: they result in lower participation rates among women, lower pay compared with men, and less upward career progression / professional trajectories. The extent to which conditions affecting access to employment contribute to these occupational inequalities remains poorly understood. To gain a better understanding of gender-based discrimination in hiring, a large-scale experiment was carried out, involving the submission of fictitious CVs in response to several thousand job offers across eleven different occupations. These CVs differed only in the candidate’s surname, so as to eliminate the effect of the quality of the applications on the likelihood of being contacted during the first stage of the recruitment process. Applications from both women and men with first names of French origin were generally treated in the same way by employers: one-third were contacted, half received no reply, and the rest were rejected. Significant differences nevertheless emerged depending on the level of qualification, with women being at a disadvantage in low-skilled roles, whilst the opposite was observed for managerial positions. Including information in CVs about family circumstances (whether the applicant has children, marital status) or indicating a period of inactivity does not result in any significant difference in treatment between female and male applicants.