Staff Report
LAHORE
A study by the Asian Development Bank has revealed that Pakistani firms are less likely to encourage females to seek jobs and that gender gaps in employment are larger than gender gaps in job search.
The study titled ‘Barriers to Entry: Decomposing the Gender Gap in Job Search in Urban Pakistan’ assembled administrative data from a job matching platform and surveys from surveys of job seekers and employers in Lahore, combining this analysis with an incentivized resume rating experiment to shed light on how firms decide between female- and male-named CVs.
The report noted that demand-side constraints are much more significant than supply-side factors at low education levels.
“Employers’ gender restrictions are a larger constraint on women’s job opportunities than supply-side decisions,” it said. However, the report noted that the gender gap in both work and willingness to search narrows as education levels rise.
At higher levels of education, demand-side barriers relax, allowing women to qualify for more jobs but at lower salaries. On the supply side, educated women become more selective in their search
‘Gender criteria more binding for women than men’
The study found that women are 53% less likely than men to satisfy the explicit gender requirements for any given vacancy. “In fact, in the set of vacancies where individuals satisfied all basic criteria and were eligible to apply, women apply at a higher rate than men,” it added.
Firms’ explicit gender criteria reflect existing firm-level gender segregation as well as requirements of the job perceived unfriendly to women, such as long and late working hours
Number of opportunities linked with education
Another key finding is that the demand-side gap in the number of job opportunities substantially closes as education levels rise, while on the supply side, women become more selective.
“At higher levels of education, women become more selective; they are less likely than men to choose the occupation of a given dyad or to apply to a given match,” the report noted. However, demand-side factors constrain the quality of job opportunities available to women at the highest education levels.
The gender gap in satisfying the gender criteria for a position shrinks by 70pc for the minority of women with secondary education and effectively disappears for the third of women with a tertiary education.
It found out that vacancies with “blue collar” characteristics such as manual labor and longer and late work hours are more likely to exclude women and more common among jobs with low education requirements, even conditional on industry and occupation fixed effects.
The report suggests that while supply-side decisions are important, alleviating demand-side constraints to female employment might have larger impact.