Unemployment Scarring and Gendered Occupations: Evidence from a Cross-Country Factorial Survey

The experience of early unemployment has been linked to a wide range of subsequent
outcomes such as lower levels of well-being, lower wages and a host of other disadvantages
in the labor market ("unemployment scarring"). As youth unemployment continues to
be one of the main challenges of our time, it is important to anlayse the determinants affecting transitions to employment for young individuals. Empirical evidence from recent
experimental studies emphasizes the long-neglected role of recruiters in the reintegration of individuals into the labor market. However, these studies rarely address potential
gender differences in unemployment scarring by employing experimental designs that do
not allow for extensive gender comparisons - potentially leaving important mechanisms
behind recruiters' role in the reproduction of gender inequalities widely unexplored.
Moreover, these studies differ in the context in which they were conducted making it
difficult to draw conclusions regarding the extent to which unemployment might have
different consequences for men and women. We extend the previous literature by examining how unemployment and gender interactively shape recruiters' evaluation of young
applicants' hiring chances.
Speci fically, we aim at addressing the shortcomings of previous research by comparing
the hiring chances for young male and female jobseekers between different occupations
and national contexts. Drawing on established labor market theories and social psychological theories about gendered role expectations and their impact on the evaluation
of behavior ("role congruity theory"), we expect to find differences in unemployment
scarring across gender. In particular, we expect that the gendered stereotypes associated with certain occupations affect recruiters' evaluation of unemployment for men
and women. Recruiters might use unemployment as justifi cation to discriminate against
workers when applying for gender-atypical jobs (e.g. women applying for traditionally
and culturally male-typed jobs). On the other hand, recruiters might apply a more lenient standard towards the opposite-sex unemployed worker in order to overcompensate
for the low share of e.g. women in male-typed jobs.
To test our hypotheses, we use data from a large-scale factorial survey experiment
among recruiters in four European countries and different occupational sectors. We focus
on a male-typed and a female-typed occupational sector (mechanics and nursing, respectively) to explore the workings of gendered stereotypes. The multifactorial experimental
design of the factorial survey allows us to compare different types of unemployment
(timing and duration) and to hold unemployment orthogonal to other factors (e.g. education). Employing linear multilevel regression models, we fi nd, overall, heterogeneous
scarring effects of unemployment across gender. Especially current unemployment spells
seem to negatively affect the hiring chances for men applying for nursing jobs.
Our preliminary findings constitute new evidence on gender differences in scarring
due to unemployment. Moreover, they demonstrate that ignoring contextual factors in studying heterogeneous scarring effects across gender potentially leaves important mechanisms in recruiters' hiring decisions undetected. This study further contributes to
the literature on transitions to employment as well as on gender inequalities in the labor
market more generally by studying the demand-side mechanisms leading recruiters to
discriminate against men and women in gendered-occupations.