New Publication: "Hiring intentions at the intersection of gender, parenthood, and social status. A factorial survey experiment in the UK labour market"

"Gender, parenthood, and social status appear to be crucial aspects affecting recruiters’ decision-making."

In their latest study on the question of how recruiters make decisions regarding a candidate, Anna Zamberlan, Filippo Gioachin and Paolo Barbieri present the results of a factorial survey experiment conducted on the British labour market. In the existing literature gender, parenthood and social status are considered to be crucial factors influencing hiring preferences and behaviours of employers. The study investigates whether and to what extent the combination of these characteristics leads to specific forms of hiring discrimination. Therefore it examines whether the labor market (dis)advantages related to those influencing factors occur in an additive or interactive relationship.

More than 2,500 UK-based individuals took part in the survey experiment. The respondents had recruiting experience and were asked to rate the profiles of fictitious candidates for various vacancies. The use of a large sample of recruiters enhances the external validity of this study and the experimental manipulation of the various signals ensured valid causal testing of discriminatory intentions.

Figure 1: Average marginal effects, overall and by occupation.

Significant and substantial discrimination against mothers was found. This indicates a cummulative disadvantage between being a woman and having children. High status candidates were more avourably positioned, albeit with noteworthy differences depending on how social status was signalled. For high-status candidates motherhood penalty was significantly reduced (up to almost half). This suggests a compensatory effect of signaling a high status.

These new findings in the British context highlight the importance of considering the intersection of various dimensions of discrimination and inequality.

The full publication in the European Sociological Review is available here.