Men, Women and the Hiring Function

This paper examines the idea of ranking of groups and genders in terms of hiring probabilities. By incorporating a range of complementary data sources, measures of the three possible gross worker flows into employment, and the stocks of job seekers from which they come, are provided for both genders in the Australian labour market. We find a clear ranking of men over women in the hiring process. Indeed, in aggregate women appear to be effectively segregated from the male hiring market, whereas this is not true with males in the female hiring market. We also find that amongst males, employed job seekers are ranked above those unemployed and, in turn, above those not in the labour force. For women, the unemployed and employed are not found to be competing with each other, whilst those not in the labour force are ranked below the unemployed. We believe that this is the first study explicitly investigating these three major gross worker flows for women as well as men, enabling us to further explore the interdependent processes in the labour market by considering more fully the interactions across job seekers of different genders and from different labour market states.