As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Rafael Lalive, Professor of Applied Economics and Econometrics at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. He will present his research entitled

Can Outlawing Stated Gender Preferences Reduce Gender Segregation Across Firms?, coauthored with David Card and Fabrizio Colella.

Abstract: Job ads used to be gendered, and still are in some contexts. We study how stating a gender of a possible recruit affects gender segregation across firms studying for the first time a ban to such feature. We take advantage of the Austrian Equal Treatment Act (AETA) that abolished stating gender preference to study its role in recruiting and discrimination. We document heterogeneity in the preferred gender by occupations, a very high compliance rate for gender profiling job ads, and a negative education gender targeting relationship. We show that firms use stated gender preference mainly to reinforce the gender stereotype of a job, but also to go against it. By analyzing the ban on posting positions exclusively for men or women provided by the AETA, we find that abolishing stated gender preference contributes to the reduction of the gender segregation across firms.

Rafael Lalive is Professor of Applied Economics and Econometrics at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. He is also managing co-editor of the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, and direct a research group at NCCR LIVES. His research is both academic and applied, and focuses on social economics, labor economics, public economics and microeconometrics. His main research topic is labor market and the effects of public policies on the individual behavior.