Professional Gender Gaps Across US Cities

Authors

  • Karri Haranko Aalto University
  • Emilio Zagheni University of Washington
  • Kiran Garimella École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
  • Ingmar Weber Qatar Computing Research Institute

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v12i1.15064

Abstract

Gender imbalances in work environments have been a long-standing concern. Identifying the existence of such imbalances is key to designing policies to help overcome them. In this work, we study gender trends in employment across various dimensions in the United States. This is done by analyzing anonymous, aggregate statistics that were extracted from LinkedIn's advertising platform. The data contain the number of male and female LinkedIn users with respect to (i) location, (ii) age, (iii) industry and (iv) certain skills. We studied which of these categories correlate the most with high relative male or female presence on LinkedIn. In addition to examining the summary statistics of the LinkedIn data, we model the gender balance as a function of the different employee features using linear regression. Our results suggest that the gender gap, as measured using LinkedIn data, varies across all feature types, but the differences are most profound among industries and skills. A high correlation between gender ratios of people in our LinkedIn data set, and data provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, serves as external validation for our results.

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Published

2018-06-15

How to Cite

Haranko, K., Zagheni, E., Garimella, K., & Weber, I. (2018). Professional Gender Gaps Across US Cities. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v12i1.15064