Culture as a Hiring Criterion: Systemic Discrimination in a Procedurally Fair Hiring Process

Arbeitspapier

Criteria used in hiring workers often do not reflect the skills required on the job. By comparing trainee performance for newly hired workers conditional on competitive civil service examination scores for hiring French public sector workers, we test whether women and men with the same civil service examination score exhibit similar performance in a job-related trainee programme. Both the civil service examination and trainee scores contain anonymous and non-anonymous components that we observe separately. We find that by the end of the trainee programme (first year of employment), women are outperforming men on both anonymous written and non-anonymous oral evaluations, a finding that holds both conditionally and unconditionally for the civil service examination results. According to further analysis, however, it is the anonymously graded "essay on common culture" civil service examination that, unlike the other CSE components, disadvantages women in this particular context.

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• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 14148

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Public Administration; Public Sector Accounting and Audits ; Public Sector Labor Markets ; Labor Discrimination ; Personnel Economics: Firm Employment Decisions; Promotions
• Subject: recruitment ; disparate impact ; systemic discrimination ; audit

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Meurs, Dominique ; Puhani, Patrick A.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2021

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/232900