Past event
Applied Microeconomics Seminar with Professor Jennifer Hunt, Rutgers Do Female--Owned Employment Agencies Mitigate Discrimination and Expand Opportunity for Women?
Jennifer Hunt is a Professor of Economics at Rutgers University and a Research Associate of the NBER. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard and her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT. From 2013-2015, while on leave from Rutgers, she served first as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomic Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2011, she held positions at McGill University, the University of Montreal and Yale University. She has published in Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and many others. Her current research focuses on the geographic spread of technology, discrimination, and unemployment, while her past research has also encompassed immigration, wage inequality, the science and engineering workforce, the transition from communism, crime and corruption.
Abstract: We create a dataset of 14,000 hand–coded help–wanted advertisements placed by employment agencies in three U.S. newspapers in 1950 and 1960, a time when help–wanted advertisements were divided into male and female sections and collect information on agency ownership. We find that female–owned agencies specialized in vacancies for women, thereby expanding the access of female jobseekers to agency services, including for positions in the majority–of male occupations. Female–owned agencies advertised more skilled occupations to women than did male–owned agencies, leading to a 5.5% higher wage for women. On the other hand, female–owned agencies had a greater propensity to match male jobseekers to clerical jobs, contributing to 21% lower male wages than for male–owned agencies. The results are consistent with female proprietors having had a comparative advantage in female jobseekers and clerical occupations or with client firms having trusted female proprietors only with vacancies for women and homogeneous, lower–skill occupations. However, in choosing to establish an agency and to specialize in female jobseekers, female proprietors may have sought to mitigate employer discrimination against female jobseekers; their higher propensity to advertise majority–male occupations among professional, technical, and managerial advertisements for women may also reflect discrimination mitigation.