Gender and Race Sorting at the Application Interface Roberto

We document gender and race sorting of candidates into various jobs at the point of initial application to a company. At this step of the hiring process, the firm has implemented a policy whereby organizational screeners’ discretion has been eliminated such that there is no opportunity for contact between hiring agents and applicants. Thus, the job choices studied here offer unique insight as they are uncontaminated by screeners’ steering of candidates toward genderor race-typed jobs. Even in the absence of steering, we find clear patterns of gendered job choices that line up with gender stereotypes of job roles. Moreover, these gendered patterns recur both within individuals and within race groups. Comparing our findings to the pattern of job sorting in the external local labor market, we find that supply-side factors do not fully account for the levels of race and gender segregation observed in the open labor market. Although probably not the entire story, it is clear that supply-side gender sorting processes cannot be ruled out as important factors contributing to job sex segregation. Much recent scholarship has been devoted to documenting the patterns and trends of gender and race job segregation (Charles and Grusky 2004; Jacobs 1989; McCall 2001; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). This attention is justified because gender and race segregation of jobs has important consequences for inequality in wages. Many studies have shown that men earn more than women, and that whites earn more than minorities, even after controlling for human capital factors. These wage differences, however, are significantly diminished once men and women, or whites and minorities, doing the same job are compared (e.g., England et al. 1994; Petersen and Morgan 1995; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). As a consequence, understanding the mechanisms that lead to gender and race differences in job assignment has become a top priority in current labor market research. A key debate in the research on job segregation has been the degree to which gender and race sorting is attributable to demand side factors—e.g., employers’ actions and attitudes (e.g., Fernandez and Sosa 2005; Graves 1999; Kaufman 2002; Kmec 2005; Moss and Tilly 2001; Mun 2010)—or reflects a feature of labor supply, e.g., the skills and preferences of individual job seekers (England 1982; Grodsky and Pager 2001; Neal and Johnson 1996; O'Neill 1990; Okamoto and England 1999; Polachek 1981; Tam 1997). This issue is of substantial practical importance, since the idea that demographic groups differ in their degree of interest in jobs has emerged as an employer’s legal defense against charges of discrimination (Nelson and Bridges 1999; see the discussion of the controversial "lack of interest" defense in Schultz and Peterson