Career Lesbians: Getting Hired for Not Having Kids?

Career Lesbians: Getting Hired for Not Having Kids? Using a field experiment, we investigate whether discrimination based on women’s sexual orientation differs by age and family constraints. We find weakly significant evidence of discrimination against young heterosexual women. This effect is driven by age (and fertility) rather than by motherhood. We do not find any unequal treatment at older ages. This age effect is consistent with our theoretical expectation that, relative to lesbian women, young heterosexual women are penalised for getting children more frequently and taking on, on average, more at-home-caring tasks. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY Former contributions to the academic literature have shown that homosexual women are anno 2013 still discriminated against in the labour market in European countries such as Austria and Greece. We contribute to this literature by sending out fictitious job applications to real vacancies in Belgium, a country that has had an openly homosexual Prime Minister since December 2011, and that was in 2003 the second country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. Our results show that in general heterosexual and homosexual women are treated equally in the Belgian (Flemish) labour market. Moreover, young homosexual women get even more positive callback than their heterosexual counterparts. This age effect is consistent with our theoretical expectation that, relative to lesbian women, young heterosexual women are penalised for getting children more frequently and taking on, on average, more at-home-caring tasks. JEL Classification: C93, J13, J16, J71