Not only do men and women choose different professions at dissimilar rates, within many professions, men and women often specialize in different jobs. In fact, there are many jobs that, in the minds of many, are clearly associated to one gender. Namely, 43% of employees work in occupations where more than 75% are from a single gender. There is mounting evidence, however, that differences in ability cannot account for the observed degree of specialization along gender lines.

In this paper, we study specialization and hiring decisions in a labor market experiment where employers cannot observe the workers’ abilities but can infer them through the workers’ specialization decision and their gender. The advantage of using the laboratory is that it allows us to observe the innate abilities of individuals and to induce arbitrary gender stereotypes by controlling the information individuals have about the skill distribution. This allows us to determine whether gender stereotypes become self fulfilling due to specialization and hiring decisions and whether giving workers and employers more information about the distribution of innate abilities is sufficient to move away from the discriminatory equilibrium.