TY - JOUR

T1 - Culture as a Hiring Criterion

T2 - Systemic Discrimination in a Procedurally Fair Hiring Process

AU - Meurs, Dominique

AU - Puhani, Patrick A.

N1 - Funding Information: Acknowledgments : This study was supported partly by the German Academic Exchange Service's (DAAD) PROCOPE programme (project number: 57129163) and partly by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR-08- FASHS-016-0) and German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG PU 307/9). It would also not have been possible without the active support of the Directorate General of Administration and the Civil Service (Direction générale de l'administration et de la fonction publique, DGAFP) and the Regional Institutes of Administration (Instituts régionaux d'administration, IRA). We are happy to make our do files (code) available. The data themselves are proprietary. However, researchers interested in using the data should contact: Adrien Friez, Chef du département des études des statistiques et des systèmes d'information, 139 rue de Bercy, 75572 Paris cedex 12. We also thank David Card, Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, Attila Lindner, Jean-Marc Robin, Viktor Steiner, Lowell Taylor, anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Centre for Labor Economics, University of California, Berkeley, the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) at University College London, Freie Universität Berlin, Newcastle University Business School, the Association Française des Science Economique, the Indian Society of Labour Economics, the Scottish Economic Society, and the Society of Labor Economists for helpful comments. All errors are our own.

PY - 2024/4

Y1 - 2024/4

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - audit

KW - disparate impact

KW - recruitment

KW - systemic discrimination

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85181757426&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.labeco.2023.102482

DO - 10.1016/j.labeco.2023.102482

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85181757426

VL - 87

JO - Labour economics

JF - Labour economics

SN - 0927-5371

M1 - 102482

ER -