Estimating Gender Differences in Access to Jobs

This paper proposes a new measure of gender di¤erences in access to jobs based on a job assignment model. This measure is the probability ratio of getting a job for females and males at each rank of the wage ladder. We derive a non-parametric estimator of this access measure and estimate it for French full-time executives aged 40 - 45 in the private sector. Our results show that the gender di¤erence in the probability of getting a job increases along the wage ladder from 9% to 50%. Females thus have a signi.cantly lower access to high-paid jobs than to low-paid jobs.