Do female-owned employment agencies mitigate discrimination and expand opportunity for women?

Hunt, Jennifer and Moehling, Carolyn (2024) Do female-owned employment agencies mitigate discrimination and expand opportunity for women? CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP2004). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.

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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 majority-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.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion...
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
JEL classification:	N - Economic History > N2 - Financial Markets and Institutions J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies > J63 - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J1 - Demographic Economics > J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
Date Deposited:	24 Feb 2025 11:12
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2025 11:18
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126844

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