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At The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, Professor Ming Leung and his co-authors, Tiantian Yang (University of Pennsylvania) and Jiayi Bao (Texas A&M University), have uncovered new insights into gender inequality in today’s digital labor markets.

Their study — Approaching or Avoiding? Gender Asymmetry in Reactions to Prior Job Search Outcomes by Gig Workers in Female- versus Male-typed Job Domains — published in Social Forces by Oxford Academic, explores a key question: Why do women increasingly enter male-dominated job domains, yet leave them more often than men?

The Power of Rejection

Professor Leung says the idea for the study came from observing a troubling paradox.

“We see women increasingly entering male-type job domains — the ones that are higher paid, the ones that are more likely to lead to promotions, the ones that are higher status,” Leung explains. “However, we also see women being more likely to leave these domains. So clearly, you need to understand both sides of the equation to really understand whether women will be able to stay and thrive in these more male-type job domains.”

This led Leung and his co-authors to ask a pivotal question: Could the way men and women respond to rejection explain this pattern?

Digging Into the Data

To explore that question, Leung and his team turned to Upwork, the world’s largest online freelancing platform.

“The data from Upwork allowed us to look at the behaviors of women and men freelancers over about eight years,” Leung says. “We had access to the jobs they applied to, what happened from their application — whether they were hired or not — and then we could see what they did after, whether they were rejected or not.”

This massive dataset enabled the researchers to track patterns of application, rejection, and reapplication, providing a rare look at how gig workers adjust their strategies after success or failure.

Recognizing Gendered Patterns

What the team discovered revealed deep behavioral differences. “After being rejected from a certain employer, women may be less likely to apply to that same employer — that’s expected,” Leung says. “But what’s more interesting is that women are less likely to apply to any employer in that same type of job after being rejected, whereas men are not.”

In short, when a woman is rejected for a programming job, she’s less likely to apply for another programming job — even with a different employer.

“It wasn’t just, ‘this employer has a problem with me,’” Leung explains. “It became, ‘this whole domain — maybe I don’t belong here.’”

Interestingly, this pattern did not appear in female-typed job domains such as writing or translation. In those spaces, women’s reactions mirrored men’s — they continued applying without hesitation.

Women Aren’t Leaving — They’re Shifting

One of the most surprising findings was that women weren’t quitting freelancing altogether.

“Women aren’t leaving freelancing,” Leung says. “What happens is that if women apply to male-type jobs and get rejected, they’re less likely to apply again to those same jobs, but they’re actually more likely to switch and apply to other types of jobs — often more female-typed jobs.”

Rather than exiting the workforce, women were reorienting their focus, gravitating toward job categories that felt safer or more affirming after rejection.

Why Feedback Matters

These insights carry major implications for employers and job platforms. According to Leung, the way rejection is communicated can shape gendered career trajectories.

“We need to realize how rejection affects male and female reapplication,” he says. “You can imagine there could be different types of rejection and altering the rejection letters people get. Maybe there’s more information you could provide that would affect how a woman reacts to that rejection.”

Research supports this: the tone and content of rejection messages — whether factual, vague, or personal — can deeply influence how candidates interpret feedback.

“It’s about making sure that women realize that their qualifications are just as good,” Leung explains, “that can lead to very different reactions than giving no explanation at all, which might make them believe they were discriminated against.”

Ultimately, the tone and transparency of feedback can determine whether a woman stays in — or walks away from — an entire field.

A Shift From Entry to Retention

Leung believes this research reframes how we think about gender equality. The issue isn’t just about helping women enter male-dominated fields — it’s about helping them stay.

“While women may be more likely to be entering male-type job domains more recently, they’re also more likely to leave,” Leung says. “So, reorienting the focus on why women may be leaving and trying to fix that end of the pipeline is a big part of what we’re trying to do with this paper.”

He argues that small changes in feedback, transparency, and communication could go a long way toward building more inclusive and sustainable workplaces.

“Employers and managers have the ability to alter this,” he says. “We’re not saying change who you accept. The point is, given that you’ve made a decision, perhaps more detail and more justification would be useful.”

Rethinking Rejection in the Gig Economy

Professor Ming Leung’s research sheds light on a subtle but powerful dynamic: how people respond to rejection can shape entire career paths — and those responses are deeply gendered.

By rethinking how feedback is delivered, employers and platforms can help ensure that rejection doesn’t push talented women out of entire industries — but rather empowers them to try again.