Margaret Maurer-Fazio and Sili Wang
The purpose of this paper is to explore whether single and married female job candidates’ un/employment histories differentially affect their chances of obtaining interviews…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore whether single and married female job candidates’ un/employment histories differentially affect their chances of obtaining interviews through China’s internet job boards, and to consider whether firms’ discrimination against, and/or preference for, candidates who are un/employed vary with the duration of unemployment spells.
Design/methodology/approach
Resumes of fictitious applicants are carefully crafted in terms of realistic work histories and educational backgrounds. Candidates’ experiences of unemployment and the revelation of their marital status are controlled. Over 7,000 applications are submitted to real job postings. Callbacks are carefully tracked and recorded. Linear probability models are employed to assess the roles of particular characteristics.
Findings
The marital status of female candidates affects how recruiters screen their applications. While current spells of unemployment, whether short or long term, significantly reduce married women’s chances of obtaining job interviews in the Chinese context, they strongly increase the likelihood that single women will be invited for interviews. Chinese firms appear to “forgive” long-term gaps in women’s employment histories as long as those gaps are followed by subsequent employment.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to explore how marital status affects the ways that firms, when hiring, interpret spells of unemployment in candidates’ work histories. It is also the first to explore the effects of both marital status and unemployment spells in hiring in the context of China’s dynamic internet job board labor market.
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Margaret Maurer‐Fazio, James W. Hughes and Dandan Zhang
The purpose of the paper is to examine observed differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and to decompose these differences into…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to examine observed differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and to decompose these differences into treatment and endowment effects.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from the three most recent population censuses of China are employed to explore differences in the labor force participation rates of a number of China's important ethnic groups. Gender‐separated urban labor force participation rates are estimated using logit regressions, controlling for educational attainment, marital status, pre‐school and school‐age children, household size, age, and measures of local economic conditions. The focus is on the experience of six minority groups (Hui, Koreans, Manchu, Mongolians, Uygurs, and Zhuang) in comparison to the majority Han. The technique developed by Borooah and Iyer is adopted to decompose the differences in labor force participation rates between pairs of ethnic groups into treatment and endowment effects.
Findings
Sizeable differences are found between the labor force participation rates of prime‐age urban women of particular ethnic groups and the majority Han. Men's participation rates are very high (above 95 percent) and exhibit little difference between Han and ethnic minorities. For almost all pairwise comparisons between Han and ethnic women, it is found that differences in coefficients account for more than 100 percent of the Han‐ethnic difference in labor force participation. Differences in endowments often have substantial effects in reducing this positive Han margin in labor force participation. Roughly speaking, treatment of women's characteristics, whether in the market or socially, tend to increase the Han advantage in labor force participation. The levels of these characteristics on average tend to reduce this Han advantage.
Research limitations/implications
The paper analyses only one aspect of the economic status of China's ethnic minorities – labor force participation. It would be useful also to examine income, educational attainment, occupational attainment, and unemployment.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to and expands the scant literature on ethnicity in China's economic transition.
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Margaret Maurer-Fazio and Lei Lei
The purpose of this paper is to explore how both gender and facial attractiveness affect job candidates’ chances of obtaining interviews in China’s dynamic internet job board…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how both gender and facial attractiveness affect job candidates’ chances of obtaining interviews in China’s dynamic internet job board labor market. It examines how discrimination based on these attributes varies over occupation, location, and firms’ ownership type and size.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors carry out a resume audit (correspondence) study. Resumes of fictitious applicants are first carefully crafted to make candidates appear equally productive in terms of their work histories and educational backgrounds. The authors control gender and facial attractiveness. The authors establish the facial attractiveness of candidate photos via an online survey. In total, 24,192 applications are submitted to 12,096 job postings across four occupations in six Chinese cities. Callbacks are carefully tracked and recorded. Discrimination is estimated by calculating the differences in the rates of callbacks for interviews received by individuals whose applications vary only in terms of facial attractiveness and gender. The authors reuse the same resumes repeatedly through this project such that names and photos of each of the candidates: attractive man, attractive woman, unattractive man, and unattractive woman is attached to each resume hundreds of times for each occupation in each city.
Findings
The authors find sizable differences in the interview callback rates of attractive and unattractive job candidates. Job candidates with unattractive faces need to put in 33 percent more applications than their attractive counterparts to obtain the same number of interview callbacks. Women are preferred to men in three of the four occupations. Women, on average need put in only 91 percent as many applications as men to obtain the same number of interview callbacks.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis of this paper focusses on only four different occupations. Its scope is also limited to exploring only the first part of the hiring process – obtaining a job interview. Furthermore, its fictitious applicants are all young people, approximately 25 years old. It would be useful to explore how gender and facial attractiveness affect candidates’ chances of landing a job after getting an interview.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to and expands the literature on hiring through China’s internet job boards. It also contributes to the literature on the role of facial attractiveness in hiring.
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Nikolaos Askitas and Klaus F. Zimmermann
The purpose of this paper is to recommend the use of internet data for social sciences with a special focus on human resources issues. It discusses the potentials and challenges…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to recommend the use of internet data for social sciences with a special focus on human resources issues. It discusses the potentials and challenges of internet data for social sciences. The authors present a selection of the relevant literature to establish the wide spectrum of topics, which can be reached with this type of data, and link them to the papers in this International Journal of Manpower special issue.
Design/methodology/approach
Internet data are increasingly representing a large part of everyday life, which cannot be measured otherwise. The information is timely, perhaps even daily following the factual process. It typically involves large numbers of observations and allows for flexible conceptual forms and experimental settings.
Findings
Internet data can successfully be applied to a very wide range of human resource issues including forecasting (e.g. of unemployment, consumption goods, tourism, festival winners and the like), nowcasting (obtaining relevant information much earlier than through traditional data collection techniques), detecting health issues and well-being (e.g. flu, malaise and ill-being during economic crises), documenting the matching process in various parts of individual life (e.g. jobs, partnership, shopping), and measuring complex processes where traditional data have known deficits (e.g. international migration, collective bargaining agreements in developing countries). Major problems in data analysis are still unsolved and more research on data reliability is needed.
Research limitations/implications
The data in the reviewed literature are unexplored and underused and the methods available are confronted with known and new challenges. Current research is highly original but also exploratory and premature.
Originality/value
The paper reviews the current attempts in the literature to incorporate internet data into the mainstream of scholarly empirical research and guides the reader through this Special Issue. The authors provide some insights and a brief overview of the current state of research.
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Stijn Baert, Ann-Sofie De Meyer, Yentl Moerman and Eddy Omey
The purpose of this paper is to study the association between firm size and hiring discrimination against women, ethnic minorities and older job candidates.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study the association between firm size and hiring discrimination against women, ethnic minorities and older job candidates.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors merge field experimental measures on unequal treatment with firm-level data. The resulting data enable the authors to assess whether discrimination varies by indicators of firm size, keeping other firm characteristics constant.
Findings
In contrast with the theoretical expectations, the authors find no evidence for an association between firm size and hiring discrimination. On the other hand, the authors do find suggestive evidence for hiring discrimination being lower in respect of public or non-profit firms (compared to commercial firms).
Social implications
To effectively combat hiring discrimination, one needs to understand its driving factors. In other words, to design adequate policy actions, targeted to the right employers in the right way, one has to gain insight into when individuals are discriminated in particular, i.e. into the moderators of labour market discrimination. In this study, the authors focus on firm size as a moderator of hiring discrimination.
Originality/value
Former contributions investigated this association within the context of ethnic discrimination only and included hardly any controls for other firm-level drivers of discrimination. The authors are the first to study the heterogeneity in discrimination by firm size with respect to multiple discrimination grounds and control for additional firm characteristics.