Gender as an Impediment to Labor Market Success:
Why do Young Women Report Greater Harm?

Heather Antecol (Illinois State University) and Peter Kuhn (McMaster University)

October 1998

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Abstract

Compared to older women, young female job seekers are more than three times as likely to report that their ability to find a good new job is compromised by the simple fact that they are female. Why is this? In this paper we show, first, that young women's more frequent reports of gender-induced harm cannot be statistically attributed to any observed personal or job characteristics, or to any "objective" measure of discrimination computable in our data. Second, using new questions asked in a Canadian survey, we note that women's reports of gender-induced advantage, as well as men's reports of gender-induced harm, are also more prevalent among the young. Using a formal model of the reporting decision, we conclude that the most likely cause of all these phenomena is a particular kind of age difference in reporting behavior: young people of both sexes are more likely than older people to interpret departures in either direction from gender-neutral treatment as causally affected by their gender. This may have important implications for future public support of antidiscrimination policies, and for the design of those policies.

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