Whose Closure? Gender Inequality and Access to Skill Training

This project is conducted in cooperation with Roberto M. Fernandez (MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA, USA). Job sex segregation is well-documented, and has been shown to be an important contributor to gender wage inequality. Some scholars argue that exclusionary processes by employers and/or workers which limit females’ access to training opportunities are important contributing factors to the sex segregation of employment. However, extant research falls short of documenting the alleged mechanisms of exclusion. We examine the allocation process for training opportunities for new labor market entrants. We study gender patterns in the pipeline of candidates for these opportunities from initial application to final placement, and identify which actions by which actors produce gendered outcomes in access to training. We find that gendered outcomes are evident at each step of the allocation process. A simple model of opportunity hoarding on the part of employers cannot explain our findings.