Economics research seminar: Sacha Becker, Monash University

Presenter

Sacha Becker, Monash University 

Topic

So Far Away? Hiring Discrimination against Female Commuters - (Sascha O. Becker (Monash U & U Warwick); Ana Fernandes (BFH Berne); Nurlan Jahangirli (Monash U); Doris Weichselbaumer (Johannes Kepler U Linz)

abstract

Women’s inferior status in the labor market is well established in the literature. In this paper, we test one previously underexplored dimension of potential gender-based employment discrimination: commuting time from place of residence to place of work. The literature on spatial mismatch argues that employers may not hire potential employees if they live far away because they fear that long commutes make them less productive. Employees might be more tired, more likely to be late because of the unpredictability of public transport and/or traffic jams, or more likely to be absent. Furthermore, employers may assume that workers who “have to apply” to a far-away job have been unable to find a job closer to home and interpret this as another signal of low productivity. While most of these arguments should not differ between men and women, gender stereotypes may drive a wedge between the treatment of men and women who have a long commute. If employers believe that women have more demands on their time (Burda et al. 2013), they may be seen as both potentially less-productive and more likely to quit their job due to a long commute, making it less attractive to hire them in the first place. Gender differences in hiring may be even stronger for parents, given that the presence of children often increases the heterosexual division of labor in the household, causing women to spend more time on care work which increases overall demands on their time. In this study we extend a correspondence experiment by Becker, Fernandes, and Weichselbaumer (2019) that documented discrimination in hiring based on gender as well as potential and realized parenthood in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.