Approaching or avoiding? Gender asymmetry in reactions to prior job search outcomes by gig workers in female- versus male-typed job domains

Abstract

Despite recent increases in females entering male-typed job domains, women are more likely to exit these jobs than men, leading to a “leaky-pipeline” phenomenon and contributing to continued occupational gender segregation. Extant work has demonstrated that women are less likely to reapply to employers who previously rejected them for jobs in male-typed job domains. However, these studies leave unexamined whether women will reapply to other employers in those job domains and, if so, whether this pattern differs in female-typed job domains, hampering our confidence in the contribution of these patterns to gender segregation. This paper investigates whether employer rejection dampens women’s job-seeking persistence more than men’s for all employers and across male versus female job domains. Regression analyses of more than 700,000 applications for over 200,000 job postings by roughly 70,000 freelancers in an online contract labor market demonstrate that women are more likely than men to reduce job-seeking activity from all employers following rejections in the male-typed IT and programming job domain. Women are also more likely than men to seek jobs in other domains outside IT and programming following job-seeking rejection. By contrast, female freelancers in female-typed writing and translation jobs do not exhibit similar gendered behavior patterns. Implications for research on gender segregation, careers, and hiring are discussed.