I have shown in previous articles how some private firms offer Saudi women lower median wages than other groups, even after controlling for factors such as the job title and the required educational attainment. Based on qualitative interviews I have conducted, I found that one plausible explanation for this is that young Saudi graduates, particularly females, lack information on how valuable their skills and knowledge are for employers. This causes many female job candidates to be hesitant to ask for higher salaries when they receive their first job offer because they typically lack information on how much others with similar jobs and years of experience are earning.
To address this issue, I have utilized data from the thousands of online job ads to enable fresh graduates to better gauge their market value (i.e. salary), thus giving them greater confidence to negotiate for higher salaries when firms offer them meager wages. Specifically, I am building a search tool that allows jobseekers to enter salary information based on the job offers they have received, and compare them against thousands of job ads recruiting other workers who share the same: 1- job title, 2-gender, and 3-years of experience (i.e. even more features/inputs like education will be added later!).
Depending on the amount of information entered by the user, the Salary Comparison App would provide a tailored individual response informing users whether they are earning above or below median wages for individuals similar to them. Click on the video below for a real demonstration of this work-in-progress search tool:
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