Screening discrimination and the determinants of wages

This paper tests for a type of statistical discrimination, referred to as “screening discrimination,” that assumes signals of worker productivity that employers receive at the time of hiring are noisier for one group than for another. Screening discrimination implies that starting wages depend less on initial productivity signals for women than for men, and that the influence of worker performance on wages increases faster with tenure for women. I test these predictions and find strong evidence suggesting that employers receive less-accurate initial signals from women than from men, even when comparing men and women in the same job.