Romantic Priming Effects on the Social Desirability and Hireability of Self-Promoting Women

Samantha B Douglas,Juanita Cole

doi:10.5539/ijps.v8n4p121

Abstract

<p>The present study examined the effects of romantic and intelligence priming on the social-desirability and hireability of self-promoting and communal female job applicants. Participants were first primed with either romantic or intelligence related images and then asked to evaluate the social-desirability and hireability of three female job applicants. These job applicants were self-promoting and competent, communal and competent, or communal and not competent. After rating the job applicants, participants were reprimed and asked to complete a scale measuring career aspiration. Results revealed that participants rated the self-promoting applicant as more hirable than the communal applicants. In contrast, the communal and competent applicant was rated more socially desirable than the self-promoting applicant. No effect of priming on participants’ career aspiration or applicants’ social-desirability or hireability was found. However, there was a marginally significant relationship between participant gender and first choice to hire.</p>

Highlights

In the past decade women in the United States of America have made significant gains in the labor force, such as higher rates of employment and earnings
In 2012, women earned only 81 cents for every dollar a man earned (U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). This pay gap has contributed to the feminization of poverty, meaning that women are more likely to be poor than men (U.S Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 2011)
In order to use an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test for main and interaction effects between gender and priming condition two new normally distributed variables were created: (1) the difference in hireability score between the self-promoting and competent (SC) candidate and the communal and competent (CC) candidate; and (2) the difference in the social-desirability score between the SC candidate and the CC candidate

Summary

Introduction

In the past decade women in the United States of America have made significant gains in the labor force, such as higher rates of employment and earnings. In 2012, women earned only 81 cents for every dollar a man earned (U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). This pay gap has contributed to the feminization of poverty, meaning that women are more likely to be poor than men (U.S Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 2011). The gendered workforce has kept women in lower status positions compared to men in similar occupations (U.S Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 2011). Women are still significantly underrepresented in higher levels of the workforce, such that women account for only 19.2% of board seats and 4.3% of CEO positions in S&P 500 companies (Catalyst, 2015)

Methods

Results

Conclusion