Hiring Bias Research Articles

Exploring women's leadership labyrinth: Effects of hiring and developmental opportunities on gender stratification

Many factors have been proposed as potential causes for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. The present research leverages computational modeling and simulation to examine the impacts of external hiring and developmental opportunities, which may have consequences at different junctures in women's leadership labyrinth. Two agent-based simulations examined 1) the emergence of gender stratification in gender-balanced organizations and 2) the impact of reducing bias in external hiring and developmental opportunities in gender-stratified organizations. Results revealed that gender differences in external hiring heightened women's sense of tokenism and their turnover rates and that bias in developmental opportunities increased women's turnover rates due to a lack of promotions - a “sticky floor” effect. Further, improving women's leadership representation in gender-stratified organizations may be a rocky road – positive impacts were preceded by elevated turnover for women. Implications for organizational interventions are discussed. All code and datasets are available at https://github.com/grandjam/SamuelsonEtAl_GenderStratModel.

A Latina Developer Confronts Implicit Bias in CTL Hiring

AbstractThis chapter describes the author's experience of applying for a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Directorship during which personal, institutional, and educational development identities intersected. Recommendations for inclusive CTL searches are provided.

Business or Fairness Case for Social Issues? Influencing Stakeholders in Organizations

Achieving diversity within the workplace remains a challenge for organizations, yet many are trying to convey their commitment to diversity through diversity statements, in which they justify why they value diversity. The most popular of these messages, the “business case for diversity”, claims that organizations should value diversity because it is instrumental to organizational goals, in contrast to the less prevalent “fairness/moral case for diversity”, which emphasizes moral and social justice principles. This symposium will question the untested assumption in current organizational approaches to diversity that the business case for diversity is the most effective rhetoric to promote diversity in the workplace. The first paper provides evidence that the targeted audience’s demographics are of paramount importance to predict whether a business or moral case for diversity will be most convincing. The second, third and fourth papers show that business case diversity statements undermine underrepresented group members’ sense of belonging in, and attraction to organizations using them, generate performance-contingent support for diversity, deteriorate diversity attitudes, increase bias in hiring and promotion decision-making, and decrease people’s ability to detect organizations’ lack of diversity. Finally, the fifth paper shows that organizations’ instrumental use of diversity elicits indifference to diversity, suggesting that this approach may undercut the very value on which organization intend to capitalize. Finally, the discussant, Professor Dobbin, will integrate the insights from these works into a discussion of the pitfalls of organizations’ instrumental approaches to diversity, and propose theory-driven next steps for a more effective promotion of diversity in the workplace. The Effectiveness of Business Case and Moral Arguments for Diversity Presenter: David Mayer; U. of Michigan Presenter: Samir Nurmohamed; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Adverse Effects of The Business Case for Diversity on Diversity Attitudes and Inclusion Presenter: Oriane Georgeac; London Business School Presenter: Aneeta Rattan; London Business School Does Social Justice Sell?: Examining Instrumental Vs. Moral Rationales for Diversity Presenter: Jamillah Williams; Georgetown U. The Consequences of Diversity Rhetoric Presenter: Modupe Akinola; Columbia U. Presenter: Tina R. Opie; Babson College Presenter: Geoffrey C. Ho; Google People Innovation Lab Presenter: Safiya E. Castel; - Presenter: Miguel Unzueta; U. of California, Los Angeles Presenter: Arthur P. Brief; U. of Utah Instrumental Use Erodes Sacred Values Presenter: Rachel Lise Ruttan; Rotman School of Management Presenter: Loran F. Nordgren; Northwestern U.

Unpicking the Gender Hiring Bias in Online Labor Markets

Online labor marketplaces (OLMs) allow businesses and private individuals to contract with freelancers around the globe. Recent studies suggest OLMs suffer a gender bias in hiring that favors women...

Trade, Competition and Welfare in Global Online Labour Markets: A 'Gig Economy' Case Study

This study focuses on collaborative economy platforms that specialize in purely digital tasks that require no physical delivery or proximity between workers and their clients, which we call Online Labour Markets (OLMs). They have a global reach. There is a debate on job fragmentation and deteriorating working conditions in OLMs. This study emphasizes the economic opportunities and explores (a) the drivers of global trade in digital tasks, (b) the determinants of online wages and (c) the welfare impact of OLMs on workers and employers. This is a case study based on data obtained from a single UK-based OLM. Our findings cannot necessarily be generalised to other OLMs with different characteristics. Using panel data we find that the vast majority of employers are located in high-income countries while many workers are located in low-income countries. Workers in low-income countries are motivated to participate mostly by labour productivity gains and the corresponding higher wages. Workers in high income countries combine opportunities for additional work and income with the benefits of flexible time use and other non-wage benefits. Employers are motivated by wage savings and task unbundling. Despite the global nature of digital OLMs, there is an impression of home bias in hiring. OLMs are heterogeneous markets where about half of all transactions are settled above the lowest price bid. Workers' skills and experience as well as their countries of residence have an impact on the agreed wage and the probability of being hired. Worker quality signaling induces superstar effects and a very uneven distribution of work. Taking into account only the difference between online and offline wages in the countries of residence of workers and employers we estimate that this particular OLM has positive monetized welfare effects, both for workers (+17%) and even more so for employers (+70%). Unobservable non-monetized benefits such as increased flexibility and savings in transport or migration costs for workers and task unbundling for employers give a further boost to welfare. The extent of unbundling is demonstrated by the very short duration of the average task in this OLM: slightly less than 8 hours. Workers in this case study platform are self-employed and responsible for compliance with regulations in their country of residence.

The problem of infra-marginality in outcome tests for discrimination

Outcome tests are a popular method for detecting bias in lending, hiring, and policing decisions. These tests operate by comparing the success rate of decisions across groups. For example, if loans made to minority applicants are observed to be repaid more often than loans made to whites, it suggests that only exceptionally qualified minorities are granted loans, indicating discrimination. Outcome tests, however, are known to suffer from the problem of infra-marginality: even absent discrimination, the repayment rates for minority and white loan recipients might differ if the two groups have different risk distributions. Thus, at least in theory, outcome tests can fail to accurately detect discrimination. We develop a new statistical test of discrimination—the threshold test—that mitigates the problem of infra-marginality by jointly estimating decision thresholds and risk distributions. Applying our test to a dataset of 4.5 million police stops in North Carolina, we find that the problem of infra-marginality is more than a theoretical possibility, and can cause the outcome test to yield misleading results in practice.

OLD AND UNEMPLOYABLE? HOW AGE-BASED STEREOTYPES AFFECT WILLINGNESS TO HIRE JOB CANDIDATES

Across the world people are required or want to work until an increasingly old age. But how might prospective employers view job applicants who have skills and qualities that they associate with older adults? This paper draws on social role theory, age stereotypes and research on hiring biases, and reports 3 experimental- online - studies using age-diverse North American participants. These studies reveal that a) positive older age stereotype characteristics are viewed less favorably as criteria for job hire, b) even when the job role is low status a younger stereotype profile tends to be preferred, and c) an older stereotype profile is only considered hirable when the role is explicitly cast as subordinate to that of a candidate with a younger age profile. Implications for age-positive selection procedures and ways to reduce the impact of implicit age biases are discussed.

Human capital and the size distribution of firms

Countries with a lower fraction of workers with secondary education have smaller firms. We set up a model of occupational choice where individuals have primary, secondary or tertiary education. A more educated work force raises firm size and productivity. More educated workers earn higher wages, and hence among educated individuals only the more able become entrepreneurs. We find that within the framework of our model, different educational attainments can explain one third of the difference in average firm size between the US and Mexico. While improved educational attainments hence imply an increase in firm size over time, a fall in the price of capital together with capital-skill complementarity acts in the opposite direction, something that can explain a relatively constant average firm size in the US since the late 1970s. Our policy experiments highlight how public employment and the skill bias in public hiring additionally affect firm size and productivity.

O Sotaque Estadunidense Representa uma Vantagem em Decisões de Emprego no Brasil?

Resumo O objetivo deste estudo foi examinar a relação entre o sotaque de um candidato a uma vaga de trabalho hipotética, bem como suas características pessoais (competência percebida e cordialidade), e os julgamentos relacionados ao desempenho deste no trabalho pretendido (adequação ao cargo, probabilidade de promoção e de contratação). Para tal, foi realizado um experimento com uma amostra de 304 alunos e ex-alunos de um curso de MBA em Gestão de Pessoas, de uma instituição de ensino superior sediada na cidade de São Paulo. Os resultados mostraram que, comparados a um candidato a uma vaga de trabalho brasileiro, o profissional com um sotaque estadunidense no idioma português foi mais bem avaliado em termos de adequação ao cargo, probabilidade de contratação e competência percebida. O candidato brasileiro, por sua vez, recebeu avaliações mais favoráveis em termos de probabilidade de promoção e cordialidade percebida. Uma vez que foram identificados vieses nos julgamentos relacionados ao trabalho realizados pelos participantes da pesquisa, sugere-se que as empresas busquem contratar selecionadores menos propensos a julgamentos estereotipados de candidatos a vagas de trabalho.

A variation on forced migration: Wilhelm Peters (Prussia via Britain to Turkey) and Muzafer Sherif (Turkey to the United States)

ABSTRACTIn 1933 the Turkish Republic formally offered university positions to 30 German-speaking academics who were dismissed with the coming to power of the National Socialist Government. That initial number went up to 56 with the inclusion of the technical assistants. By 1948 the estimated total had increased to 199. Given renewable five-year contracts with salaries substantially higher than their Turkish counterparts, the foreign émigrés were to implement the westernization program of higher education. The ten year-old secular Turkish Republic’s extensive social reforms had encompassed the adoption of the Latin alphabet, and equal rights for women, removing gender bias in hiring. Such a high concentration of émigré academics in one institution, “the highest anywhere in the world,” provides a unique opportunity to study a subject which has been neglected. In this article two cases in psychology will be examined: Wilhelm Peters (1880–1963), who came, via Britain, to Istanbul in 1936 from the University of Jena in Germany, and Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988) who went to the United States from Ankara University in 1945. The purpose of the comparative analysis is to identify the features that are specific to the German experience, and those that are shared and underlie translocation in science within the multifaceted complexity of the process of forced migration.

Old and Unemployable? How Age-Based Stereotypes Affect Willingness to Hire Job Candidates.

Across the world, people are required, or want, to work until an increasingly old age. But how might prospective employers view job applicants who have skills and qualities that they associate with older adults? This article draws on social role theory, age stereotypes and research on hiring biases, and reports three studies using age‐diverse North American participants. These studies reveal that: (1) positive older age stereotype characteristics are viewed less favorably as criteria for job hire, (2) even when the job role is low‐status, a younger stereotype profile tends to be preferred, and (3) an older stereotype profile is only considered hirable when the role is explicitly cast as subordinate to that of a candidate with a younger age profile. Implications for age‐positive selection procedures and ways to reduce the impact of implicit age biases are discussed.

Hiring Preferences in Online Labor Markets: Evidence of a Female Hiring Bias

Online labor marketplaces facilitate the efficient matching of employers and workers across geographical boundaries. The exponential growth of this nascent online phenomenon holds important social and economic implications, as the hiring decisions made on these online platforms implicate the incomes of millions of workers worldwide. Despite this importance, limited effort has been devoted to understanding whether potential hiring biases exist in online labor platforms and how they may affect hiring outcomes. Using a novel proprietary data set from a leading online labor platform, we investigate the impact of gender-based stereotypes on hiring outcomes. After accounting for endogeneity via a holistic set of job and worker controls, a matched sample approach, and a quasi-experimental technique, we find evidence of a positive hiring bias in favor of female workers. An experiment was used to uncover the underlying gender-specific traits that could influence hiring outcomes. We find that the observed hiring bias diminishes as employers gain more hiring experience on the platform. In addition, the female hiring bias appears to stem solely from the consideration of applicants from developing countries, and not those from developed countries. Subanalyses show that women are preferred in feminine-typed occupations while men do not enjoy higher hiring likelihoods in masculine-typed occupations. We also find that female employers are more susceptible to the female hiring bias compared to male employers. Our findings provide key insights for several groups of stakeholders including policy makers, platform owners, hiring managers, and workers. Managerial and practical implications are discussed. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2756 . This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

Does the Gender Mix Among Employers Influence Who Gets Hired? A Labor Market Experiment

We consider in this paper whether the gender mix at the level of decision-makers in firms can influence gender representation at the employee level. We run a laboratory experiment whereby we present a pair of independent employers with applications from two potential employees. We consider whether the gender of the other employer will influence an employer's hiring decision. We find that the gender mix among employers plays a role in the individual hiring decisions of female members. Female employers when paired with a male employer are more likely to choose a female applicant over an equally competent male applicant. Results of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and answers to a post-experimental questionnaire show that explicit beliefs about relative gender performance are significantly associated with the observed hiring bias, while implicit attitudes do not appear to play a role.

Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks

The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network-who hires whose graduates as faculty-we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.

Hiring Preferences in Online Labor Markets: Evidence of a Female Hiring Bias

Online labor marketplaces facilitate the efficient matching of employers and workers across geographical boundaries. The exponential growth of this nascent online phenomenon holds important social and economic implications, as the hiring decisions made on these online platforms implicate the incomes of millions of workers worldwide. Despite this importance, limited effort has been devoted to understanding whether potential hiring biases exist in online labor platforms and how they affect hiring outcomes. Using a novel proprietary dataset from a leading online labor platform, we investigate the impact of gender-based stereotypes on hiring outcomes. After accounting for endogeneity via a holistic set of job and worker controls, a matched sample approach, and a quasi-experimental technique, we find evidence of a positive hiring bias in favor of female workers. We find that the observed hiring bias diminishes as employers gain more hiring experience on the platform. In addition, the female hiring bias appears to stem solely from the consideration of applicants from developing countries, and not those from developed countries. Sub-analyses show that women are preferred in feminine-typed occupations while men do not enjoy higher hiring likelihoods in masculine-typed occupations. We also find that female employers are more susceptible to the female hiring bias compared to male employers. We further run an experiment to uncover the underlying gender-specific traits that could influence hiring outcomes. Our findings provide key insights for several groups of stakeholders including policymakers, platform owners, hiring managers, and workers. Managerial and practical implications are discussed.

The Mechanism of Occupational Segregation: A Social Dominance Perspective

The occupational segregation has been maintained for centuries in labor markets of various countries. Based on Social Dominance Theory, this research explained the occupational segregation phenomenon from social dominance orientation(SDO). And the author also aims to figure out the effect of sexism in this process. Due to the fact that each person and institution has different levels of social dominance orientation(SDO), men and women are inclined to choose the institutions whose values are identified with themselves. This process is called the self-selected mechanism of occupational segregation. Besides, when institutions face the choice of an employee, in order to maintain the priority of men, they do the same as individuals. According to Pratto et al, occupations can be divided into hierarchy enhancing ones and hierarchy attenuating ones. To explain more specifically, the hierarchy enhancing institutions are inclined to prefer men and the hierarchy attenuating institutions are more interested in women. It's called the institution–selected mechanism of occupational segregation. We designed two studies to test the hypotheses above. In Study 1, the questionnaire survey was used to exam the relationship among gender, SDO and career choice. Data was collected from 187 students of Beijing Normal University. The result of Study 1 showed that men tended to choose hierarchy enhancing jobs and women tended to choose hierarchy attenuating jobs. Furthermore, SDO had a full mediating effect between gender and hierarchy jobs. The results indicated that occupational segregation had a self-selected mechanism, which means that men and women chose different jobs because of their different levels of SDO.In Study 2, an experiment was designed to test the relationship among SDO, sexism and hiring bias, in order to confirm the institution–selected mechanism of occupational segregation. 274 students from Beijing Normal University were recruited to do the tasks in study 2. They were asked to choose two resumes that best appeal to their respective institution in the capacity of an employer. One institution is a Securities Company, and the other is a charity organization. The results showed that hiring bias existed in different hierarchy institutions. The hierarchy enhancing institutions tended to choose male applicants and the hierarchy attenuating institutions tended to choose female applicants. Besides, both SDO and sexism could predict hiring bias, and sexism had a partial mediating effect between SDO and hiring bias. In conclusion, this research showed that during the forming process of occupational segregation, both self-selected mechanism and institution-selected mechanism are playing an indispensable part. This dynamic process provides us a new perspective to regard SDO and sexism, of which the former is not merely objective cognitions of group differences nor the latter is perceived social attitudes. In fact, they legitimize the inequality of social system. Through the connection of gender and different institutions and jobs, sexism and occupational segregation maintain in the society.

Human Capital and the Size Distribution of Firms

Countries that have relatively fewer workers with a secondary education have smaller firms. The shortage of skilled workers limits the growth of more productive firms. Two factors influence the availability of skilled workers: i) the education level of the workforce and ii) large public sectors that predominantly hire individuals with a better education. We set up a model economy with a government and private firm formation where production requires unskilled and skilled jobs. Workers with a secondary education are pivotal as they can perform both types of jobs. We find that level of education and public sector employment account for 40-45% of the differences between the United States and Mexico in terms of average firm size, GDP per capita, and GDP per hour worked. We also show that the impact of public employment on skill premiums and productivity measures depends on the skill bias in public hiring.

All-male physics faculties don’t prove hiring bias

All-male physics faculties don’t prove hiring bias

The Psychological Stigma of Unemployment: When joblessness leads to being jobless.

In three studies, we find that a psychological stigma against the unemployed exists, occurs instantaneously, is difficult to alleviate, and leads to hiring biases. This stigma-based account of the unemployed stands in contrast to economic theories purporting that perceivers rationally judge the employed based on skill deterioration caused by long unemployment durations. Study 1 and 2 demonstrate that psychological stigma occurs and leads to hiring biases, holding constant qualifications and minimizing unemployment duration. Moreover, rationales indicating the controllability of unemployment-onset (i.e., voluntarily left vs. laid-off), a causal dimension that has been found to mitigate negative responses toward stigma in past research, did not alleviate stigma. This may have occurred because of perceivers’ fundamental tendency to overemphasize internal/dispositional explanations for target outcomes. Study 3 supports this reasoning as we found that providing a rationale indicating causal externality (i.e., employer bankruptcy), to correct for this attribution bias, alleviated unemployment stigma and bias.

When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint vs. Separate Evaluation

Gender bias in the evaluation of job candidates has been demonstrated in business, government, and academia, yet little is known about how to overcome it. Blind evaluation procedures have been proven to significantly increase the likelihood that women musicians are chosen for orchestras, and they are employed by a few companies. We examine a new intervention to overcome gender bias in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge” in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to base their decisions on individual performance in joint than in separate evaluation and on group stereotypes in separate than in joint evaluation, making joint evaluation the profit-maximizing evaluation procedure. Our work is inspired by findings in behavioral decision research suggesting that people make more reasoned choices when examining options jointly rather than separately and is compatible with a behavioral model of information processing. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2186 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.