Do Employers Prefer Fathers? Evidence from a Field Experiment Testing the Gender by Parenthood Interaction Effect on Callbacks to Job Applications

In research on fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties in career-related outcomes, employers’ discriminatory behaviours are often argued to constitute a possible explanation for observed gender gaps. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence of such discrimination. Utilizing a field experiment design, we test (i) whether job applicants are subject to recruitment discrimination on the basis of their gender and parenthood status, and (ii) whether discrimination by gender and parenthood is conditional on the qualifications required by the job applied for. We applied for 2,144 jobs in the Swedish labour market, randomly assigning gender and parenthood status to fictitious job applicants. Based on the rate of callbacks, we do not find that employers practise systematic recruitment discrimination on the basis of the job applicants’ gender or parental status, neither in relation to less qualified nor more highly qualified jobs. We know that, in general, men are advantaged over women in the labour market, and that fathers are advantaged over mothers (Charles, 2011). In research on gender differences, fatherhood premiums, and motherhood penalties in the areas of wages and other career-related outcomes, employers’ discriminatory behaviours are often argued to be a possible explanation of observed gender gaps (Mandel and Semyonov, 2006; Gangl and Ziefle, 2009; Bygren and G€ahler, 2012). However, there are no studies showing conclusive evidence of systematic employer discrimination. This is because discriminatory behaviours are not identifiable in large-scale quantitative data. While qualitative studies suggest that gender discriminatory attitudes and behaviours are prevalent among at least some employers (Bekkengen, 2002; Kugelberg, 2006), a sceptic could easily dismiss this as anecdotal evidence, and argue that in quantitative studies, a residual effect of gender, or of gender in interaction with parenthood, might just as easily be a consequence of productivity-related characteristics observed by the employer but not the researcher. We utilize a field experiment design in which fictitious job applications are sent to real job vacancies (i.e. correspondence testing) to directly investigate whether mothers and fathers are subject to discrimination in the Swedish labour market. By discrimination we mean a negative or VC The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected] European Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, 337–348 doi: 10.1093/esr/jcx051 Advance Access Publication Date: 25 May 2017