Gender Discrimination in Hiring : Evidence from an Audit Experiment in Uzbekistan

This paper studies gender discrimination in hiring through an experiment that randomly assigned fictitious resumes to job advertisements in Uzbekistan. The experiment focused on positions commonly advertised in the local context, such as accountants, office managers, information technology specialists, welders, call center operators, and drivers in the capital city. With the single exception of the applicant's gender (signaled by the person's name), the resumes were identical within each job category. The study finds strong evidence of prevalent and economically significant gender discrimination in response rates. Despite identical qualifications, we find that in female-dominated professions, women were 185 percent more likely to get a callback than men, and in male-dominated professions, men were 79 percent more likely to get a callback than women. The findings suggest strong gender discrimination in hiring practices in Uzbekistan