A new study led by Tiantian Yang, assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, has found evidence that job rejection in gig work is deterring women from pursuing careers in STEM.
Dr. Yang and her co-authors from Texas A&M University and the University of California, Irvine sought out to determine if employer rejection has a more profound effect on women’s job-seeking persistence compared to men’s persistence. The authors examined over 700,000 applications for over 200,000 job postings by roughly 70,000 freelancers in an online job marketplace between 2000 and 2012.
According to their results, women who were rejected from gig work in information technology and computer programming – historically male-dominated fields – were less likely than rejected men to reapply and less likely to continue their overall job-seeking activity in related fields. However, there were no gender differences found in job-seeking activity among freelancers who were rejected from writing and translation jobs, which are predominately held by women.
The study’s findings reflect the persistent “leaky pipeline” in STEM, a phenomenon in which young women who initially pursue STEM majors ultimately leave the field due to negative experiences, such as gender bias and discrimination. The authors call for future research in this area to both improve transparency and objectivity in hiring processes and empower women to persevere in male-dominated fields.
A Penn faculty member since 2020, Dr. Yang has conducted extensive research on entrepreneurship, career mobility, and social inequality. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.