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Gender Gaps in Job Search and Employment

Speaker
Nina Roussille - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date
Wed, Oct 9 2024, 3:30pm - 5:00pm PDT
Location
GSB MBA Class of 1968 Building, C102
665 Knight Way, Stanford

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Joint Applied Micro Seminar
Co-authors: Oriana Bandiera and Amen Jalal

Abstract
We study why women's educational gains are not reflected in labor market progress in the context of Pakistan. Leveraging surveys of about 2,400 students fielded the month before their graduation from college, we first show that women's self-assessed likelihood of working six months later is similar to their male peers', at 77%. By contrast, we uncover large employment gaps six months post-graduation: only 38% of women were employed, v.s. 64% of men. We find that the pipeline from education to employment only leaks at the very last stage: the decision to accept a job offer. Then, we shed light on one key predictor of this decision for women: job search timing. Specifically, we find that whether a woman applied promptly after graduation is highly predictive of her future employment, while that is not true for men. To causally estimate the effect of timing, we experimentally shift the job applications of the next cohort of students closer to graduation. The intervention increases women’s employment by 22% (7.5ppt) six months post-graduation and has no effect on men. The experiment also provides suggestive evidence on the mechanism underlying women’s overoptimism: their lack of foresight about the competing forces of the marriage market.