Hiring Discrimination Against Women: Distinguishing Taste Based Discrimination from Statistical Discrimination

Abstract

We propose a new method which allows for measuring separately taste based discrimination from statistical discrimination in the hiring process. We consider two types of statistical discriminations against women: first, when a recruiter doubts the productivity of the workers; second, when a recruiter anticipates a maternity leave. We have collected experimental data from which we obtain optimal estimates of the discrimination components. The method is applied to three construction jobs: masonry, plumbing and electricity. We find that each job exhibits a different discrimination type. Furthermore we find that the most obvious forms of discrimination may not be the most harmful.

Keywords: Hiring Discrimination, Field Experiments, Gender, Asymptotic Least Squares, France

JEL Classification: C51, C93, J16, J24, J71