Males Should Mail? Gender Discrimination in Access to Childcare

Abstract

This study investigates discrimination against women when searching and applying for childcare in a nationwide field experiment. We send emails from fictitious parents to 9,313 childcare centers in Germany inquiring about access to childcare. We randomize whether the email is sent by the child's mother or father. Our results show that women receive shorter and less positive responses than men. The probability of receiving a response does not differ by gender, highlighting the importance of going beyond response rates to detect discrimination. We provide suggestive evidence that regional differences in gender discrimination are related to gender norms.

Discrimination in Universal Social Programs? A Nationwide Field Experiment on Access to Child Care

“…While other correspondence studies often contact study participants multiple times, we sent only one email to each child care center to impose as little cost as possible on them and to minimize detection risk(Bertrand and Duflo, 2017).6 The survey was conducted using Clickworker, a German online platform similar to Amazon MTurk (see Appendix C.2 for further information).7 InHermes et al (2023), we use the sample of emails with a native sender to analyze how the parent's gender affects response behavior.…”