The impact of attractiveness on job opportunities in Italy: a gender field experiment

Abstract

This paper assesses the impact of being attractive and not being native on the gender gap in the opportunity of obtaining a job in Italy. To do so, we propose a field experiment that consists in sending 9680 fictitious curricula vitae to real firms looking for employees. We estimate an Heckit model in order to consider different response from firms and then to calculate the probability to receive a callback. We show that gender gap in opportunity of receiving a callback is a very important issue and this gap is affected by interaction with both attractiveness and not being italian natives, especially for the most qualified jobs.