Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Gender Inequality in Reemployment during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Interplay between Remote Work, Referrals, and Gender

• In Event: Workplace Gender Inequality

Abstract

Whereas recent U.S. recessions disproportionately affected men’s employment, the economic downturn caused by the pandemic generated a larger percentage decline in employment for women. A striking feature of this gender gap is that it persisted for twelve months. We show that this persistence is partially driven by gender differences in referral-based hiring. Pandemic induced reductions in mobility encouraged firms to rely more on referrals, which created gender inequality in reemployment among workers who left job positions with a high incidence of referrals during the pandemic. Analysis of pre-pandemic data corroborates that our findings are driven by gender differences in referral-based hiring and suggests that they have implications for a post-pandemic labor market in which remote work will likely be pervasive. We show that, prior to the pandemic, firms with more generous remote work policies relied more on referrals, and that referral-based hiring reduced the representation of women in interview pools.

Authors

• David Hendrik Erkens, China Europe International Business School

• Fiona Yingfei Wang, National University of Singapore

• Mark Young, University of Southern California