Who Gets the Job Offer? Manager Gender and Job Skill Requirements (joint with Michal Hodor and Liat Eldor)

Gender disparities in hiring persist even when candidate screening is objective. Using administrative data on applicants to a national retail chain, we estimate the effect of decision-maker gender on job offers in a setting where managers make decisions based solely on standardized assessment reports, with no applicant interaction. We find that female applicants in high-skill occupations face a 7.3 percentage-point offer penalty, driven primarily by male managers (10.9 percentage points); female managers show no penalty. Exploiting quasi-experimental managerial turnover, we find that female-to-male manager transitions reveal a high-skill female-male offer gap of 30.2 percentage points. The male-manager penalty is largest where traditional gender norms are strongest, a pattern consistent with inaccurate belief-based statistical or taste-based discrimination.