Dear colleagues,

we hereby invite you the next INEQ - Economics of Inequality Research Seminar.

Jonas Jessen (IZA) will present his paper

Dancing with the Stars: How Workers Respond to Politically-Charged Job Ads on

Monday, March 18, 3.00 p.m. at the INEQ Institute (D3.0.259, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business).

Abstract While nouns in the German language are gendered toward males, the introduction of the “gender star” or “gender colon” have allowed for nouns to be interpreted as not assigning gender, or non-binary. Their usage however has become highly politically polarizing. Using over 40 million online job postings from 2016 to 2023, we document the rising prevalence of the gender star and colon in the German labour market, particularly in German counties with greater support for the Green party. We then study how jobseekers respond when the advertised job title includes such non-binary punctuation. Inclusive job ads receive more clicks and lead to more application starts. The positive effect is larger for the colon and holds when exploiting within firm and job title variation and looking at large companies with rapid increases over time. Finally, using a survey experiment, we investigate how such politically-charged signals in job ads affect sorting and labour market polarization.

Please register your participation here.

Best regards,

Franziska Disslbacher, Jan Gromadzki, and Emanuel List
Research Institute Economics of Inequality
WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business