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.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We are very grateful to our research assistants – Jessica Madeira, Amit Singh, Kihwan Bae, Marcelo Jaimes–Lukes, Fiona Ambrosio, Dev Devnani, David Hom, Samuel Fang, Somya Jain, Meghna Dutta, and Tshahi Mombrun – and the staff at the New York County Clerk’s Office for help gathering the data. For valuable insights into agency operation in the 1970s and accounting–related occupations in the 1950s, we thank an anonymous female agency owner and John Hunt respectively. We thank Laura Gee, Ryan Nunn, Martin Saavedra and seminar participants at Kings College London, Rutgers University, the London School of Economics, the University of Milan, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Sydney, the University of Zurich, the 2019 Engelberg SKILS conference and the IZA 25th Anniversary Conference in Berlin for comments. Jennifer Hunt is also affiliated with the CEPR (London), and the IZA (Bonn). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w32383
- Published in
- United States of America
