Responsible team players wanted: an analysis of soft skill requirements in job advertisements

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how soft skills are depicted in job ads and their impact on gender and wage disparities, revealing that soft skills influence occupational segregation and wage outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-automatic text mining approach to identify soft skills in job ads and examines their role in gender segregation and wage inequality.

Findings

Soft skills are prevalent in low-paid and female-dominated jobs.

Certain soft skills are linked to gender-based wage penalties.

Soft skills can partially predict gender composition in occupations.

Abstract

During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across race and gender. This work explores the role of soft skills in job advertisements by drawing on methods from computational science as well as on theoretical and empirical insights from economics, sociology and psychology. We present a semi-automatic approach based on crowdsourcing and text mining for extracting a list of soft skills. We find that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and jobs in female-dominated professions. Our work shows that soft skills can serve as partial predictors of the gender composition in job categories and that not all soft skills receive equal wage returns at the labour market. Especially "female" skills are frequently associated with wage penalties. Our results expand the growing literature on the association of soft skills on wage inequality and highlight their importance for occupational gender segregation at labour markets.