Gender Sorting at the Application Interface

We document gender sorting of candidates into gender-typed jobs at the point of initialapplication to a company. At this step of the hiring process, the firm has implemented a policywhereby organizational screeners’ discretion has been eliminated such that there is noopportunity for contact between hiring agents and applicants. Thus, the job choices studied hereoffer unique insight as they are uncontaminated by screeners’ steering of candidates towardgender-typed jobs. Even in the absence of steering, we find clear patterns of gendered jobchoices that line up with gender stereotypes of job roles. Moreover, these gendered patterns recurboth within individuals and within race groups. Comparing our findings to the pattern of jobsorting in the external local labor market, we find that supply-side factors do not fully accountfor the levels job sex segregation observed in the open labor market. Although probably not theentire story, we show clear evidence that supply-side sorting processes are important factorscontributing to job sex segregation.