Culture as a Hiring Criterion: Systemic Discrimination in a Procedurally Fair Hiring Process. A new GLO Discussion Paper by Dominique Meurs & GLO Fellow Patrick Puhani.

A new GLO Discussion Paper finds systemic discrimination in a procedurally fair hiring process using culture as hiring criterion.

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Patrick A. Puhani

GLO Discussion Paper No. 792, 2021

Culture as a Hiring Criterion: Systemic Discrimination in a Procedurally Fair Hiring Process Download PDF
by
Meurs, Dominique & Puhani, Patrick A.

GLO Fellow Patrick Puhani

Author Abstract: 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.

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GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers)Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

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