World Bank's Online Job Portal Data Report: Key Takeaways

The World Bank recently came out with a Reflections of Employers’ Gender Preferences in Job Ads in India: An Analysis of Online Job Portal Data report in India. The report acquired data from India’s leading job-matching website – Babajob.com, established in 2007, which later merged with QuikrJobs.com.

Its biggest takeaway is India with only 27 percent of the population in the labour force has a low participation rate of women. We rank among the lowest in the world.

In the time span of 10 years, 1.25 million jobs were posted on the site. Over 5 million job seekers registered. The websites came with the variety of options to ensure that it can provide better access to the disadvantaged population.

The report created occupation codes using the aggregated ISCO-1 classification, with separating ‘teaching’ and ‘Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). About one-fifth of ads posted were for BPO Jobs.

According to the report, there is a high existence of gender-targeted ads in which gender specification favours men over women.

• There were male biases in the ad which accounted for about 1.6 percent of those ads.
• There is a higher share of gender targeting in ads. BPO ads are mostly gender-neutral. The ones with a higher share of targeting include ads for elementary occupations, machinist, driver and garment workers.

Also Read: Female Labour Force Participation Shrunk By 19.6 Million In India: World Bank Report

High Variation of Gender Bias

• There exists a lot of occupations that favour men for some and women for others. Ultimately, this  leads to occupational gender segregation in the labour market.
• Women are favoured for clerical jobs. On the other hand, men are preferred for jobs in sales and other elementary occupations. Other hiring agencies, including HR and staffing enterprise prefer men over women.
• Professional, teaching and BPO Jobs are less gender-targeted wherein teaching and BPO have a high female bias. On the other, professional are biased towards men.

Salary Discrimination

• Gender stereotyping and biases further leads to salary discrimination. There exist high biases against women in specified-salary in job ads in all occupational categories.

Deepali is an intern with SheThePeople.TV