Broadening Women's Job Search to Improve Their Employment

Collaborating with an online job portal serving jobseekers from India and other target countries, we will investigate how to expand the breadth of job search for women and ultimately improve female jobseekers' job-finding success and resulting wages. Preliminary data show that women tend to be more conservative when applying for jobs on the portal than men. The first experimental arm will deliver non-gender-specific information on the average number of applications submitted by jobseekers and the average breadth of application portfolios (e.g., number of different industries). Since women generally seek less on the platform, this information should be above what many would have done on their own and could encourage them to have broader portfolios. A second treatment arm will give gender-specific and employer-specific information to jobseekers about how open specific employers appear to be to female applicants based on their history of engaging with female applicants on the platform.