Who Shortlists? Evidence on Gender Disparities in Hiring Outcomes
研究将筛选候选人的任务从招聘经理转移到人力资源部门如何影响女性新员工比例，发现这一转移增加了女性被录用人数，对减少招聘中的性别差异有启示。
A substantial body of research examines the relevance of hiring as a source of gender disparities in organizations. However, there is limited evidence on how different sets of key organizational decision makers contribute to gender disparities in hiring outcomes. To address this research gap, we exploit the staggered adoption of a new hiring process in a multinational corporation, which transferred from hiring managers to HR departments the task of shortlisting: narrowing a large pool of candidates to a more manageable set before final decision making. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the transfer of shortlisting responsibility increased the share of newly hired women. Additional tests based on quantitative and qualitative data are largely consistent with our finding that the transfer of shortlisting from hiring managers to HR departments led to fewer gender disparities in hiring outcomes given the increased expert knowledge in evaluating candidates and reduced opportunity costs for conducting such evaluations. Our setting offers a unique opportunity to help isolate key organizational decision makers’ role in contributing to gender disparities in hiring outcomes, and our findings have implications for how to alleviate gender disparities in employment.