CLAS Lecture Series: Double Discrimination: Do Discriminating Job Ads Discriminate in Callbacks?

Double Discrimination: Do Discriminating Job Ads Discriminate in Callbacks? with Dr. Eva O. Arceo-Gomez (a joint work with Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez)

Job ads often narrow their searches using gender or age requirements. These narrow searches, which we label explicit discrimination, do not rule out the existence of post-application discrimination. We test for such biases using a correspondence experiment in Mexico City. Some job advertisements explicitly discriminated against males, females, asked for beauty or requested a photograph. The experiment consisted on sending fictitious resumes responding to job advertisements with randomized information of the applicants, which included photographs representing three distinct phenotypes: white, mestizo and indigenous. Although, discriminating ads have a higher callback among women, we found that explicitly discriminating firms tend to discriminate more against indigenous-looking females and against married females.

Dr. Eva O. Arceo-Gomez is an assistant professor of economics at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Before joining CIDE in 2010, she was a postdoctoral fellow at El Colegio de Mexico. Her main fields of research are labor economics, demographic economics and development economics. She has won several awards in Mexico such as the Victor Urquidi Economics Award from El Colegio de México. She has published various articles in prestigious journals such as the American Economic Review, The Economic Journal, and others. She's currently interested in studying gender and racial discrimination in Mexico.