A field experiment to study sex and age discrimination in the Madrid labour market

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a field experiment carried out in Madrid which aims to analyse gender and age discrimination in hiring in the labour market of Madrid. A set of five pairs of fictitious man–woman curricula was sent in response to 1062 job offers in six occupations which were advertised on Internet over an eight-month period. It was quantified subsequently the extent to which the different firms contacted more or less the candidates of different sex, age and marital status. No discrimination is detected against women in terms of access to job interviews; however, discriminatory conduct is seen regarding the phenomenon of occupational gender segregation, in the sense that there is a continuance among employers of stereotyped views on the greater suitability of women for certain tasks. No evidence is found to indicate firms showing relative discrimination against married women with children in the first phase of hiring process. And a clear evidence of discrimination is obtained on the basis of age: firms show a substantial fall in interest over interviewing 38-year-old candidates (compared to those aged 24 or 28). This would imply that the tendency to discriminate against older workers may be high, and, what is more, it may start at a surprisingly young age.

Keywords:

• age discrimination
• correspondence test
• field experiments
• gender discrimination

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Instituto de la Mujer of Spain and Fondo Social Europeo (Spanish Plan Nacional I+D + I 42/04). Álvaro Herráez and Miguel Infestas provided excellent research assistance. The authors thank Paloma Almodóvar, Rogelio Biazzi, Adrián Domínguez, María del Carmen Gutiérrez, José Ángel Jorge, Tania Martínez, Rebeca Mella, Myriam Menéndez, Eva del Pozo, Javier Saiz-Briones and María Obdulia Samamed for their help and collaboration in this research.

Notes

 1. Field experiments methodology is an alternative to the most usual (and indirect) way of estimating discrimination by using standard surveys and the Oaxaca–Blinder type of methodology (Blinder 1973; Oaxaca 1973).

 2. They also have just been carried out the same kind of experiment for Spain (Riach and Rich 2007), obtaining very similar results to that's of France.

 3. Except age and professional experience, which is lengthier in the case of the oldest candidate, at least in the two or three experiments quoted. On this question further comment will be made in the next section.

 4. The married candidate, also, had a child when he/she was 28 and two when he/she was 38.

 5. Since the groups of curricula with different ages are non-equivalent, and therefore, they were rotated within each age, and not among different ones, it could happen that the different interest evinced in the oldest candidates by firms might be due in part, to how well or badly the curriculum models for those with the greatest experience had been designed. In any case, when six occupations are analysed, any involuntary skewing of this type in the curriculum design could not give rise to the same sign in all of them. If in the six occupations it appears that firms call on 38-year-olds significantly less that would constitute clear evidence of discrimination against older candidates.

 6. If the discrimination were statistical (Arrow 1972; Phelps 1972), the slight interest in hiring women would be based on the fact that employers believe that if they have small children the mothers may try to make paid work compatible with housework to a greater extent than fathers (so that this would have a more negative effect on their productivity than in the case of fathers); and in this case it would be clearly seen that women would be called relatively less often for job offers when they are married (and have children). However, if discrimination against women were seen to be the same for all ages and different marital status considered, then it could be proof that discrimination could be of the ‘a taste for discrimination’ type as mentioned by Becker (1957).

 7. Many job offers of this type are also published in the press or the firm's own website (if they are large companies). Nonetheless, in almost all these cases the advertisement appears in Infojobs.

 8. For the job of sales rep the category closest to it, recorded in the CNO-94 (Clasificación Nacional de Ocupaciones, which is the Spanish adaptation of the International Standard Classification of Occupations, ISCO-88), in three digits, is ‘trade reps and sales technicians’, which shows 20.83% of women in the second half of 2005 (according to the Encuesta de Población Activa, EPA). For the job of marketing technician there is no clear correspondence with any category of the CNO-94, and if it were assimilated to managers of sales or marketing departments of firms, in that case it would be included in the chapter of ‘Management of specialised areas and departments’ where women account for 29.57%.

 9. According to the EPA, for the second half of 2005, in the category of ‘assistants to accountants and financiers’ (CNO-94-three digits) women accounted for 46.4% of the total number of workers. Moreover, accounting professionals are encapsulated in the category of ‘professionals in organisation and business administration’, where the percentage of women is 48.75%.

10. According to the EPA, in the category of ‘information employees and office receptionists’ the percentage of women is 70.33, whereas in the category of ‘professionals in support of administrative management’ where most secretaries are classified, women account for 66.93% (if separate data were available for the category of ‘executive secretary’ the percentage would be much higher.

11. After a trial period (a month), it was observed that most offers made through the written press were only for sales technicians, and that many of these offers were made indirectly via recruitment companies, that were out of the scope of our experiment. Our interest was centralised in those hiring selection process realised directly by the very firm. In this way, in order to be able to obtain enough job offers for the six occupations analysed, and also with the purpose of replying to the adverts more comfortably, it was decided to centre attention on offers published on Internet. About the recruitment via Internet in Spain see Pin Arboledas, Laorden, and Sáenz-Díez 2002.

12. It should be noted that calls received on each of the 10 mobile phones enabled identification to be made of at least the candidate's age, marital status and sex.

13. The curricula also contained the postal addresses of the candidates (street and house number, but the floor and letter number of the flat were not specified). They corresponded to two inner-city districts of Madrid (Chamberí and Argüelles). These are middle-high economic range. No follow up was made of possible contacts made by firms by letter to those addresses. Nevertheless, nowadays, firms hardly use this method of contacting candidates, and even less when they advertise job offers on the Internet.

14. In some case, extra information has been recorded by using the System of Analysis of Iberian Balance Sheets (SABI) database.

15. In fact, there were 472 firms which made contact with at least one candidate, and of them, 276 were perfectly identified, whereas the other 196 could not be identified. In terms of individuals, of the 1355 individuals detected, 931 could be identified (69% of the total individual contacts). The reason why not all the firms contacting the candidates could be identified is that the contacts were by phone and, in some cases, particularly when the firms left a message on the answer phone, they did not give any identification.

16. 1062 firms multiplied by 10 curricula submitted to each of them.

17. Iglesias and Llorente (2008) maintain that for the period 2002–2007 gender occupational segregation in Spain has continued to grow. This constitutes a differential trait in the Spanish labour market, since this situation is not seen in other countries in the area around Spain.

18. It must be recognised, in any case, that, despite the shortcomings presented by the Spanish EPA to be able to know exactly the percentages of men and women in the occupations analysed here, the existing informal evidence on the Spanish labour market leads one to believe that the occupations of assistant/receptionist and secretary are more segregated in favour of women than are the occupations of sales rep and marketing technician in the case of men. And that, logically, is also being registered in the findings of the present experiment.

19. This would not be happening in some occupations highly characterised by risk or the physical strength demanded, such as labourer, car mechanic, plumber, taxi driver, etc., (and even so, women are making more and more inroads in some of them, for example, the army.

20. A phenomenon that would not be as intense for men in female-dominated occupations.

21. For example, in the case of secretaries, employers may be influenced by a series of typical stereotypes of women and their supposed abilities, such as those mentioned by Anker (1998, p. 23): caring nature, greater honesty, physical appearance, greater willingness to take orders, and greater willingness to do monotonous/repetitive work.

22. If this age analysis is carry out for men and women, the results are practically the same (Table 6).

23. It should not be strange that when passing from 24 to 28 years of age, firms, on the whole, maintain or even raise their interest in the 28-year-old candidates, given that the latter are still young and, what is more, have experience.

24. A computerised program filled randomly the period of work experience of each candidate from a data base of possible jobs. This enabled two curricula models to be rotated between the two candidates.

25. Moreover, the increased availability of young workers as a result of a strong flow of immigration to Spain could also be on strengthening the companies' preference for younger candidates (Martín 2008).

26. With the exception of the accountants: in this case to be 38 years old significantly reduces the probability of being contacted with respect to the candidate that is 24 years old.