Why do implicit biases still exist in hiring decisions?

Samantha Dodson, assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Calgary, answers this.

Faculty Bio:

Samantha Dodson’s research program focuses on when and why women experiencing roadblocks and adversity are evaluated as deserving of opportunities and support at work.

Transcript:

Since women began joining the modern workforce after World War II, support professions such as secretaries and paralegals have been predominantly occupied by women. The more powerful professions they support, such as executives and lawyers, are predominantly held by men. These low-power support professions often involve developing efficient processes and paying close attention to detail. In contrast, individuals in high-power organizational roles tend to engage in tasks like identifying and creating values, strategies, and visions. Thus, women are more likely than men to be in roles that require concrete mindsets and less likely to be in roles that require abstract mindsets. Drawing on research linking gender role segregation to gender stereotypes, we theorized that people might believe there are innate attributes that enable women to perform well in process-based roles requiring specificity and attention to detail, whereas men have attributes that help them excel in roles that require seeing the big picture.

Six experiments showed that we do, in fact, hold implicit and explicit descriptive stereotypes – or beliefs about what men and women are – such that people tend to believe women are more concrete than men, women are more concrete than abstract, and men are more abstract than concrete. Women tend to hold these beliefs more deeply than men, and these stereotypes arose across dozens of occupations and industries. These beliefs have real-world consequences. In one study, we found that in nearly 550,000 LinkedIn recommendations, connections are more likely to use words such as “detailed and exact” to describe women and “visionary and farsighted” to describe men. Critically, we also found that these beliefs increased the likelihood of women being assigned detailed tasks at work, such as filing paperwork and proofreading, on top of their existing workload, perpetuating gender roles and organizational inequity.

Read More:

[APA PsyNet] - She sees the trees, he sees the forest: Descriptive gender stereotypes of concreteness and abstractness

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Samantha Dodson, University of Calgary - She Sees the Trees, He Sees the Forest: Gender Stereotypes of Concreteness and Abstractness

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Samantha Dodson, University of Calgary - She Sees the Trees, He Sees the Forest: Gender Stereotypes of Concreteness and Abstractness