Since decades, literature on gender discrimination reports an unevenly distribution of men and women across occupations. Recruiters are potential drivers in gender discrimination because they tend to prefer applicants who have similar characteristics like their own. More recent studies report a shift towards less female discrimination, and more male discrimination. However, little is known if this shift in gender discrimination takes mainly place in the labour market or also in the apprenticeship market, which is an important driver for integrating youth in the labour market. Moreover, there is not much research on how recruiters´ sociodemographic characteristics impact a recruitment probability when recruiting apprentices. We investigate the heterogeneity of a recruiters´ gender preferences when recruiting vocational education and training (VET) applicants for gender dominated occupations. We distinguish between potentially driving factors of recruiters´ characteristics such as age, gender, job position, and migration background. We conduct a factorial survey (FS) experiment among 1872 firms in Germany and use a random effect model to estimate the heterogeneous gender preferences of recruiters when recruiting VET applicants for gender-dominated occupations. Our unique dataset of 1872 firms enable us to distinguish between male-, neutral-, and female-dominated occupations. We find that female VET applicants are less preferred for male-dominated occupations and preferred for neutral- and female-dominated occupations in comparison to male VET applicants. Moreover, older recruiters or firm owners prefer female VET applicants less for male-dominated occupations, while they prefer them more for female-dominated occupations in comparison to male VET applicants. In contrast, recruiters with a human resource background (i.e., human resource and training heads) prefer female VET applicants more for male-dominated occupations and less for female-dominated occupations in comparison to male VET applicants. We find no impact of the recruiters´ gender or migration background with regard to recruitment preferences.

Keywords: gender preferences, apprenticeship market, recruitment practices, employer perspective, factorial survey experiment