Cluster-Seminar Public Finances and Living Conditions

While nouns in the German language are gendered toward males, the introduction of the "gender star" or "gender colon"' have allowed for nouns to be interpreted as not assigning gender, or non-binary. Their usage however has become highly politically polarizing. Using over 40 million online job postings from 2016 to 2023, we document the rising prevalence of the gender star and colon in the German labor market, particularly in German counties with greater support for the Green party. We then study how jobseekers respond when the advertised job title includes such non-binary punctuation. Inclusive job ads receive more clicks and lead to more application starts. The positive effect is larger for the colon and holds when exploiting within firm and job title variation and looking at large companies with rapid increase over time. Finally, using a survey experiment, we investigate how such politically-charged signals in job ads affect sorting and labor market polarization.