Gender-Class Differences in the Impact of Parenthood on UK Hiring

Abstract

Accounting for the different individual choices women and men make in paid and unpaid work does not fully explain gender-class stratification in labour market outcomes. Employer discrimination is another possible explanation for gender-class employment inequalities around parenthood, but is difficult to assess as a cause. I argue discrimination is also likely to vary across skill levels, as do the theorised choices, constraints, and advantages associated with parenthood. This thesis tests these assertions using a field experimental design, a correspondence study, to be the first UK study to investigate gender-class differences in employer hiring discrimination vis-à-vis parenthood and offer evidence with enhanced causality. Sets of two fictitious applications were developed for a low (call centre staff), medium (restaurant manager), and high skill (financial controller) worker. These applications, displaying equivalent levels of productivity but one of them being a parent and the other childless, were sent in response to 2,262 unique UK job advertisements between August 2019 and December 2021. Analyses of the data found significant discrimination against mothers and favouritism for fathers only among lower-skilled jobs, supporting the mothers’ relative constraints and fathers’ positive signalling hypotheses of class differences in UK hiring discrimination around parenthood. Further novel hypotheses argued that women and mothers face ‘glass doors’ in hiring among higher-paying firms, but these were not supported. Having done the data collection during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, I found some evidence that employers show a stronger preference for childless women and fathers when the pool of job seekers was larger, but only among lower- and medium-skilled occupations. Finally, an extension of fielding allowed this study to be one of the few correspondence studies to address sharp criticisms of the potential bias that in the design, for which I found some support. In all, I conclude that low-skilled mothers face discrimination in UK hiring, which I attribute to their fewer personal and state resources with which to balance competing demands of work and family.

Date of Award	12 Oct 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Lynn Prince Cooke (Supervisor) & Jonathan James (Supervisor)