Essays in Labor Economics

Abstract

I study the impact of gender in the labor market. My dissertation examines gender gaps in economic outcomes and provides insights on the underlying mechanisms. Chapter 1, co-authored with Alison Stein, examines whether women are discouraged from applying to job postings because they believe they must meet all the listed qualifications. To test this hypothesis, we ran a randomized controlled trial on a sample of 60,000 potential applicants to over 600 of Uber's corporate U.S. job postings. We find that job seekers are responsive to removing optional qualifications and softening language about the intensity of the required qualifications. Our treatment increased the total number of applications. It also closed the gender skill gap: while female applicants in the control group are more likely to have graduate degrees than men applying for the same job, men and women in the treatment group are equally likely to have graduate degrees. In Chapter 2, I use proprietary data from an employee performance management software company to examine gender differences in over 20,000 performance evaluations for a sample of approximately 200 companies. I find gender differences in the way that females and males publicly present themselves in formal evaluations: women rate themselves significantly lower than males after accounting for manager beliefs. This gender gap is larger for workers with lower tenure, who have had less time to build their reputation. Chapter 3, co-authored with Matthew Gibson, provides evidence on the gender wage gap using a proprietary dataset of online self-reports from Glassdoor.com. These data allow us to control for detailed occupation and employer fixed effects, typically not permissible in publicly available data. Estimates of the gender wage gap range from 6 to 8 percent, smaller than in prior studies. Our analysis using Glassdoor reviews data finds that females are less likely than comparable men to list pay as a negative factor when providing anonymous feedback about their company. In addition to being paid less than their male counterparts, women seem to be less vocal about salary concerns.