The aim of this article is to explore the circumstances leading employers to discriminate by gender and parenthood, contributing to the broader aim at increasing our understanding about the mechanisms underlying gender inequality in the labor market. Previous Swedish (and many international) studies show that employers are about equally likely to hire men and women. These results tend to refer, however, to data based on aggregates of branches, occupations and sectors. Statistical power is commonly low when results are broken down by segments. Studies showing no employer discrimination at the aggregate level may thus hide discrimination in certain segments. There are reasons to expect discrimination by gender and parenthood to vary depending on context and we explore this by relating variation in employer behavior to variation in demographic (gender) composition and qualification level in the occupation applied for. In this study, a large-scale experimental correspondence test design is employed, and non-authentic applications—with gender and parenthood randomly assigned to job applications—are sent to job openings in the Swedish labor market, including information on a total of 6,755 job applications in 15 occupations. The results show no indication of discrimination based on gender or parenthood in this early step of the recruitment process, and this is regardless of whether the occupation is dominated by either gender or is gender balanced.

Biased practices by employers have been suggested as one possible cause for the observed gender disparities in labor market outcomes. While US-based laboratory experiments show a clear motherhood penalty in recruitment, European laboratory experiments on the topic are to our knowledge lacking. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 228 university students to study a potential gender bias in the evaluation of (fictitious) job candidates for an accounting manager position, and how recruitment decisions are made. We explore two dimensions of decision-making, that is, evaluators’ individual ratings and collectively made ratings. The results show a statistically significant gender bias in job applicant ratings in favor of female applicants. Thus, female job applicants are more often than male applicants rated as the top candidates, regardless of their parental status. Also, we find no motherhood penalty in the applicant ratings. Moreover, there is a statistically significant pro-female bias in applicant ratings made by female evaluators individually and by all-female evaluation groups.

It is a matter of debate whether free school choice should lead to higher or lower levels of school segregation. We investigate how school choice opportunities affect school segregation utilizing geocoded Swedish population register data with information on 13 cohorts of ninth graders. We find that local school choice opportunities strongly affect the sorting of students across schools based on the parents’ country of birth and level of education. An increase in the number of local schools leads to higher levels of local segregation net of stable area characteristics, and time-varying controls for population structure and local residential segregation. In particular, the local presence of private voucher schools pushes school segregation upwards. The segregating impact of school choice opportunities is notably stronger in ‘native’ areas with high portions of highly educated parents, and in areas with low residential segregation. Our results point to the importance of embedding individual actors in relevant opportunity structures for understanding segregation processes.

A common assumption in comparative family policy studies is that employers statistically discriminate against women in countries with dual-earner family policy models. The empirical evidence cited in support of this assumption has exclusively been observational data, which should not be relied on to identify employer discrimination. In contrast, we investigate whether employers discriminate against women in Sweden—frequently viewed as epitomizing the dual-earner family policy model—using field experiment data. We find no evidence supporting the notion that Swedish employers statistically discriminate against women. 

Advanced labor markets are typically stratified by origin with a majority ethnic group occupying more desirable (high-skilled) positions and subordinated ethnic minorities occupying less desirable (low-skilled) positions. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether employer recruitment choices reinforce these patterns. This would be the case if employers were more reluctant to hire subordinate minority job applicants for high-skilled positions than for low-skilled occupations. We use experimental correspondence audit data derived from 6407 job applications sent to job openings in the Swedish labor market, where the ‘foreignness’ of the job applicants has been randomly assigned to otherwise equally merited job applications. We find that negative discrimination of job applicants with ‘foreign’ names is very similar in the high-skilled and low-skilled segments of the labor market. There is no significant relative ethnic difference in chances of callbacks by skill level. Because baseline callback rates are higher in high-skilled occupations, discrimination however translates into a significantly larger percentage unit callback difference between ‘natives’ and ‘foreigners’ in these occupations, in particular between male job applicants. That is, the number of (male) ‘foreign’ job seekers subject to ethnic discrimination in terms of actually being denied a job chance is higher in the highly skilled segment, but the effects on the relative scale do not suggest this to be driven by employers being particularly less welcoming of ‘foreigners’ in this segment.

We know that parenthood has different consequences for men’s and women’s careers. Still, the research remains inconclusive on the question of whether this is mainly a consequence of a fatherhood premium, a motherhood penalty, or both. A common assumption is that women fall behind in terms of pay when they become mothers.

Based on longitudinal data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU), and individual fixed-effects models, we examine the support for this assumption by mapping the size of parenthood effects on wages during the years 1968–2010. During this period, Swedish women’s labor supply increased dramatically, dual-earner family policies were institutionalized, and society’s norms on the gendered division of labor changed. We describe the development of parenthood effects on wages during this transformative period.

Our results indicate that both genders benefit from a gross parenthood premium, both at the beginning of the period and in recent years, but the size of this premium is larger for men. Individual fixed-effects models indicate that the wage premium is mainly the result of parents’ increased labor market investments. Controlling for these, women suffer from a small motherhood penalty early in the period under study whereas parenthood is unrelated to women’s wages in later years and to men’s wages throughout the period. Neither for men nor for women do we find a statistically significant period change in the parenthood effects. Instead, patterns are remarkably stable over time given the radical changes in family policies and norms that took place during the period examined.

Group differences in average grades prior to and after a step-wise introduction of blinded examinations at Stockholm University are examined. Relative to students with 'native' names, students with 'foreign' names appear to experience weak positive bias in the grading of their examinations, but the estimated effect is sensitive to model specification. No substantial effects of blinding examinations with respect to male-female gaps are found. The results suggest that examiners - when the names of students are disclosed to them - if anything have a weak tendency to positively discriminate for students perceived to have an immigrant background, but they do not appear to discriminate on the basis of gender.

We ask if school choice, through its effect on sorting across schools, affects high school graduates’ application decisions to higher education. We exploit a school choice reform that dramatically increased achievement sorting across secondary schools in the municipality of Stockholm, employing a before–after design with a control group of students in similar schools located outside this municipality. The reform had a close to zero mean effect on the propensity to apply for tertiary educational programs, but strongly affected the self-selection by achievement into the kinds of higher educational programs applied for. Low achievers increased their propensity to apply for the ‘low-status’ educational programs, on average destining them to less prestigious, less well-paid occupations, and high achievers increased their propensity to apply for ‘high-status’ educational programs, on average destining them to more prestigious, well-paid occupations. The results suggest that increased sorting across schools reinforces differences across schools and groups in ‘cultures of ambition’. Although these effects translate into relatively small increases in the gender gap, the immigration gap, and the parental education gap in educational choice, our results indicate that school choice, and the increased sorting it leads to, through conformity mechanisms in schools polarizes educational choices of students across achievement groups.

It is well known that couples tend to relocate for the sake of the man's career rather than the woman's, also known as the “trailing spouse phenomenon.” The role of employer choices in this process is unknown however. If employers are hesitant to make job offers to women who live a long way from the workplace (e.g., because of work–family balance concerns or a perceived risk that they will not follow through on their applications, or stay hired if employed), this tendency might constitute an underlying mechanism behind the moving premium of partnered men. Ours is the first study to empirically test whether employers prefer geographically distant men over geographically distant women. We sent applications for 1,410 job openings in the Swedish labour market, randomly assigning gender and parental status to otherwise equivalent applications from cohabiting or married women and men and recorded employer callbacks to these. The results indicate that employers in general tend to disfavour job applicants who live a long way from the employer's workplace. This tendency is stronger for women, both for mothers and for women with no children. Our estimated effects are imprecise but clearly suggest that employer recruitment choices contribute to the trailing spouse phenomenon by offering men a larger pool of geographically distant jobs. We call for more research on this hitherto ignored mechanism behind the trailing spouse phenomenon.

In research on fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties in career-related outcomes, employers’ discriminatory behaviours are often argued to constitute a possible explanation for observed gender gaps. However, there is as yet no conclusive evidence of such discrimination. Utilizing a field experiment design, we test (i) whether job applicants are subject to recruitment discrimination on the basis of their gender and parenthood status, and (ii) whether discrimination by gender and parenthood is conditional on the qualifications required by the job applied for. We applied for 2,144 jobs in the Swedish labour market, randomly assigning gender and parenthood status to fictitious job applicants. Based on the rate of callbacks, we do not find that employers practise systematic recruitment discrimination on the basis of the job applicants’ gender or parental status, neither in relation to less qualified nor more highly qualified jobs.