Gendering the Job:

Gender segregation of jobs plays a central role in current research on gender and labor markets, and understanding the mechanisms driving the gender segregation has become a key focus of study. While the literature on gender segregation of jobs often invoke gender sorting mechanisms that operate pre-hire, the data that are used to empirically examine these processes are almost always collected on post-hire populations. In this paper, we explore the workings of pre-hire mechanisms that are alleged to sort men and women into different jobs. We study a research setting that is unusually well suited for identifying and empirically isolating these social processes: we analyze unique data on the recruitment and hiring process starting with the pool of applicants for an entry-level customer service representative (CSR) job at a telephone customer service center of a large bank. We find that all of the factors we examined— pre-application choices, pre-application gender homophily of networks, and screeners’ choices--played significant and distinct roles in the gender segregation of the CSR job. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of our