For Love or Money? Gender Differences in Approaches to Getting a Job

• In Event: 429 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Session. Gender at Work

Abstract

The role of supply-side behaviors in explaining gender differences in hiring outcomes is under-examined. Extant supply-side theories conclude that women and men act differently by applying to different jobs but are unable to explain gender differences in applying to the same job. By comparison, demand-side theories have developed theories to explain between and within job hiring differences. We correct this by considering gendered approaches to the hiring process. We propose that applicants focus on entering an exchange relationship by emphasizing either the relational or the transactional aspects of a job and that this affects whether they are hired. By relational, we mean that the job seeker focuses on developing a connection and fairness with their employer. By transactional, we mean taking a more aggressive stance and focusing on more quantitative aspects of the job. We expect women to be more relational and men to be more transactional during the hiring process. We examine behaviors in an online external labor market for graphic designers, elance.com where we find that women are more likely to be hired than men by about 9.5%. Quantitative text analysis on the unstructured written job proposals reveals that women (men) adopt more relational (transactional) language in their applications. These different approaches affect a job seeker’s likelihood of being hired and attenuate the gender gap we identified. Attenuation suggests that how one approaches the hiring process matters but that it isn’t gender per se that affects being hired, but rather its correlations with a particular preferred approach.

Authors

• Weiyi Ng, University of California - Berkeley

• Ming De Leung, University of California-Berkeley