Gender differences in preferences for flexible work hours: Experimental evidence from an online freelancing platform
在一个国际在线自由职业平台上进行实验，发现女性和男性都偏好灵活工作时间，但女性的响应弹性是男性的两倍，且灵活工作吸引了更多高质量女性申请者。
We conducted an experiment on a major international online freelancing platform to examine how increased flexibility in daily work hours affects female participation. We post identical job advertisements (for 320 jobs) covering a wide range of tasks (80 distinct tasks) that differ only in flexibility and the wage offered. Comparing the numbers of applicants for these jobs, we find that, while both men and women prefer flexibility, the elasticity of response for women is twice that for men. Flexible jobs attracted 24% more women and 12% more men than inflexible ones. Importantly, these increases did not compromise the quality of the applications. In contrast, there is suggestive evidence that flexible jobs attracted higher-quality female candidates. Our findings have significant implications for understanding gender disparities in labor market outcomes and for shaping equity-focused policies of organizations. • We study how flexibility in choosing work hours affects the elasticity of male and female labor supply. • We run an experiment on an online freelance labour market platform where we post matched jobs that differed only in whether workers could choose their own work hours. • Our findings show that both male and female freelancers exhibit high flexibility elasticities of labor supply, with women’s elasticity roughly twice as large as men’s.