Abstract

The literature mainly discusses two approaches to explain gender segregation in the labour market. On the one hand, it is possible that job seekers themselves have preferences for certain economic sectors or occupations. On the other hand, companies may have certain preferences for recruiting a particular gender group. In this project, we discuss a third explanatory approach, which assumes that employers may prefer certain competence requirements whereas groups of job seekers may prefer to acquire certain competences to perform corresponding activities. For this assumption, it is irrelevant whether employers explicitely discriminate after selecting gender. Nevertheless, gender segregation can result from the selection of competence requirements that are explicitly formulated in job advertisements. Based on gender-connoted sets of competency terms that have already been developed in the literature, we want to examine in more detail to what extent a particular way of formulating job advertisements influences gender segregation.