{"id":32511,"date":"2021-03-07T11:33:50","date_gmt":"2021-03-07T19:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=32511"},"modified":"2021-03-07T11:33:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-07T19:33:50","slug":"conservatives-and-liberals-differ-in-how-aggressively-they-recruit-women-for-leadership-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=32511","title":{"rendered":"Conservatives and Liberals Differ in How Aggressively They Recruit Women for Leadership Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source\uff1a\u00a0https:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/political-ideology-recruiting-women-leadership?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer032021&pnespid=hOIwrv9eXgGNksAtCqRGGJYaGjXxNpvRIac1Vm8j<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
<\/p>\n
\n

But companies take note: a new study offers a simple intervention to curb gender bias early in the hiring process.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
BASED ON THE RESEARCH OF<\/div>\n

Burak Oc<\/p>\n

Ekaterina Netchaeva<\/p>\n

Maryam Kouchaki<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"woman<\/p>\n

Yevgenia Nayberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n

Why, despite decades of progress, are women still\u00a0vastly underrepresented<\/a>\u00a0in senior leadership positions at U.S. organizations? It\u2019s a question that has vexed companies, policymakers, and women themselves\u2014and one that has many answers, ranging from lack of mentorship and training to outright discrimination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Maryam Kouchaki<\/a>, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, thought there might be another important dimension to the gender leadership gap: women receive less encouragement to apply for senior positions than men do.<\/p>\n

Pre-recruitment\u2014the early phase of a job search, when other employees, recruiters, and human-resources staff identify qualified contacts and encourage them to apply\u2014is an increasingly important and common aspect of the hiring process.\u00a0One survey found<\/a>\u00a0that 82 percent of U.S. organizations use social-media platforms such as LinkedIn to contact potential candidates.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to discrimination and sexism in the workplace, a lot of the research has focused on issues like raises and promotions, which are very important,\u201d Kouchaki says. \u201cBut when you think of the broader issue of underrepresentation, while there are probably many mechanisms at play, we felt like pre-recruitment was crucial in terms of whether women would get excited about a position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kouchaki wanted to understand whether recruiters framed positions differently depending on the gender of the prospective candidates. In particular, she was interested in how political ideology might influence pre-recruitment communications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cConservative participants, on average, are not more likely than liberal ones to push more negative information. They\u2019re just not selling the position to female candidates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Maryam Kouchaki<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

She and her coauthors focused on political ideology in part because of how that can impact people\u2019s preference for maintaining the status quo. Political conservativism,\u00a0research shows<\/a>, strongly predicts a person\u2019s preference for the status quo\u2014which, in many organizations, doesn\u2019t include women in leadership roles.<\/p>\n

For that reason, Kouchaki and her coauthors\u2014Burak Oc<\/a>\u00a0of Melbourne Business School and\u00a0Ekaterina Netchaeva<\/a>\u00a0of Bocconi University\u2014suspected that conservatives might be less encouraging to prospective female candidates.<\/p>\n

And indeed, that\u2019s what they found: while conservative recruiters don\u2019t actively discourage women from applying, they offer less encouragement to women than to men during the early stage of filling senior positions.<\/p>\n

To Kouchaki, the research shows that bias doesn\u2019t always manifest as obvious hostility or mistreatment. \u201cSubtle discouragement can result in the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Happily, the researchers also discovered that it wasn\u2019t hard to overcome the encouragement gap between liberals and conservatives: simply reminding people that women leaders can have a positive effect on an organization was enough to eliminate the disparity in how conservatives treated female and males candidates.<\/p>\n

Women Get Less Encouragement to Apply for Leadership Positions<\/h2>\n

Kouchaki and her coauthors started their investigation by recruiting a group of 222 working adults in the United States.<\/p>\n

Participants were asked to imagine themselves as hiring managers browsing LinkedIn to recruit candidates for a senior leadership position. They had come across a promising prospect with strong qualifications and relevant experience: either David Thompson (for half of the participants) or Sarah Thompson (for the other half).<\/p>\n

Next, participants were given a list of eight facts about the position to use in an initial email to either David or Sarah\u2014half positive attributes (e.g., good pay, friendly colleagues) and half negative (e.g., no flexible working hours, skimpy benefits). Participants indicated which of these they would include in an introductory message. They also indicated from one to five how likely they would be to immediately send the email and the probability they would continue searching for other candidates.<\/p>\n

Finally, participants answered demographic questions, including questions about their political beliefs and endorsement of traditional gender roles.<\/p>\n

The researchers discovered that political ideology didn\u2019t have any effect on how likely participants were to contact David or Sarah or their desire to continue searching for other candidates. But it did change the content of those introductory messages: conservative participants, they found, used fewer positive facts about the position when writing to Sarah as opposed to David. Political leaning didn\u2019t affect participants\u2019 use of negative facts, however.<\/p>\n

\u201cConservative participants, on average, are not more likely than liberal ones to push more negative information. They\u2019re just not selling the position to female candidates,\u201d Kouchaki explains. \u201cThat was interesting for us\u2014it\u2019s not a case of hostility; it\u2019s that you are less inclined to be positive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conservatives Are Anxious to Preserve the Status Quo<\/h2>\n

The first study showed the researchers that political ideology does influence how decision-makers treat men and women during the pre-recruitment phase of a job search. But it didn\u2019t explain why
\nconservative recruiters treat female candidates differently.<\/p>\n

Kouchaki and her coauthors suspected that anxiety about change may have played a role. Conservative political beliefs are characterized by a desire to maintain the current social order\u2014an order that in many cases doesn\u2019t include women in leadership positions. And when faced with such a threat, the dominant emotional response is anxiety.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnxiety here is a reaction to the threat women pose to their status or what they think is the right way to do things,\u201d Kouchaki says.<\/p>\n

To test this theory, the researchers repeated the first experiment with a larger group of participants and a few tweaks: this time, they asked participants to rank on a one-to-seven scale how anxious they felt at the prospect of interacting with David or Sarah. In addition, participants actually wrote an introductory email, rather than simply indicating which positive and negative facts about the position they would include in one.<\/p>\n

The researchers used specialized software to analyze these emails for positive-emotion words; for authenticity (the use of words and expressions associated with uncensored thought); and for personal pronouns (\u201cI\u201d rather than \u201cit\u201d\u2014a sign of more personal and friendly communication).<\/p>\n

As in the first study, political ideology predicted the content of participants\u2019 emails: when writing to Sarah as opposed to David, more conservative participants used fewer positive-emotion words, less authentic phrasing, and more impersonal pronouns. In other words, the emails weren\u2019t just less positive; they were also less open and friendly.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, conservative participants also expressed greater anxiety about interacting with Sarah as compared with David\u2014a feeling that statistically predicted their tendency to write less personal emails.<\/p>\n

Simple Interventions Can Reduce Gender Bias<\/h2>\n

Having established this subtle bias on the part of conservative hiring managers, the researchers wondered if anything could be done to counter it. They ran one final study to find out.<\/p>\n

Once again, they repeated the basic design of the first study with new participants. This time, however, instead of only assigning participants to the David or Sarah group, they added a third option. This group was told they had found a promising candidate named Sarah\u2014and were given information about the positive organizational effects of having women in leadership roles.<\/p>\n

This information, Kouchaki says, was designed to legitimize and normalize the idea of hiring women\u2014something they suspected might particularly help conservatives, who feel anxious about social change.<\/p>\n

As in the first study, participants indicated which facts about the position they would include in an introductory message. But this time, the researchers weighted each of those facts on the theory that some positives and negatives are more important than others. (After all, good pay is typically more important to job seekers than friendly colleagues, although both are desirable.) They used the quantity and weight of the positive descriptors participants selected to calculate a positivity score for each participant\u2019s proposed message.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Once again, conservative participants wrote more positive messages to David than to Sarah\u2014but this pattern disappeared among participants in the third group, who learned both about Sarah\u2019s professional qualifications and about the importance of hiring women into senior positions.<\/p>\n

Tackling Bias through Training and Technology<\/h2>\n

This final study showed that even small measures can help reduce gender bias.<\/p>\n

A simple reminder that hiring women can have organizational benefits was all it took to overcome the encouragement gap\u2014a message companies can reinforce during trainings for hiring managers. The power of this small intervention is a sign that \u201clegitimizing the presence of women and minority groups in companies is really important,\u201d Kouchaki says.<\/p>\n

Companies can also use technology to ensure they aren\u2019t discouraging women from applying, Kouchaki notes. One technology startup saw its number of female employees\u00a0increase by 30 percent<\/a>\u00a0after implementing a text-analysis tool that checks for biased language in job descriptions.<\/p>\n

Together, these kinds of interventions can help employees become more mindful about all the interactions they have at work, Kouchaki says: \u201cChanging people\u2019s mindsets and attitudes in these more formal ways could have a spillover effect even when it comes to personal interactions.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

\n
\n
FEATURED FACULTY<\/div>\n
\n
\n
Maryam Kouchaki<\/a><\/div>\n

Associate Professor of Management & Organizations<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
\n
ABOUT THE WRITER<\/div>\n
Susie Allen is a freelance writer in Chicago.<\/div>\n
\n
ABOUT THE RESEARCH<\/div>\n
Oc, Burak, Ekaterina Netchaeva, and Maryam Kouchaki. 2021. \u201cIt\u2019s a Man\u2019s World! The Role of Political Ideology in the Early Stages of Leader Recruitment.\u201d Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 162: 24-41.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source\uff1a\u00a0https:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/political-ideology-recruiting-women-leadership?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer032021&pnespid=hOIwrv9eXgGNksAtCqRGGJYaGjXxNpvRIac1Vm8j But companies take note: a...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32512,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32511\/revisions\/32512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}