This study examines the organizational determinants of hiring discrimination based on care responsibilities using data from a harmonized cross-national factorial survey experiment carried out in Germany, Norway, Poland, and Romania. In the factorial survey, fictional job candidates were presented to individuals with recruitment experience, who were then asked to indicate the probability that the candidates would be hired at the organization they recruit for. By randomly varying a set of dimensions, including gender, partnership status, and having children, we can identify whether, and how, parenthood affects employers’ hiring propensities towards different types of candidates. The survey also includes a range of questions about organizational features and job demands such as recruitment and screening practices, work arrangements, and diversity policies.
The working paper is organised as follows. In Section 2, we present the preregistered hypotheses, the theory and prior work from which they are derived. In Section 3, we describe our data, the factorial survey experiment and the survey context. Finally, we present descriptive statistics. In Section 4 we present our empirical strategy. Then, we present our results and robustness checks in Sections 5 and 6 and conclude by discussing the implications of the findings in Section 7.
Authors: Dominik Buttler, Vegar Bjørnshagen, Marta Palczyńska, Iga Magda, Katarzyna Lipowska, Ona Valls, Rosa Maria Radogna