Frischseminar: Wegard Wiborg

If individuals perceive preferences as gender-dependent, they might ascribe informational value to the choices made by other men and women. In this paper, I follow this line of thought and develop a theoretical framework for how a decision maker (DM) uses the distribution of men and women in a two-job-labor market and her beliefs regarding men and women’s preferences, to infer how the two jobs vary on an unobservable dimension. Specifically, segregation in the labor market signals that jobs fit men and women differentially, and her perception of gender differences in preferences allows her to infer why the two jobs differ. Based on this inference, she chooses the job which is relatively closer to her preference on the relevant dimension. This implies that, in a large group of DM’s with similar beliefs regarding men and women’s preferences, segregation will reproduce itself despite the lack of knowledge regarding the characteristics of each job. The choice model also implies that men and women sort on preferences that they believe are correlated with gender. The results of a laboratory experiment support these predictions.