Conservatives and Liberals Differ in How Aggressively They Recruit Women for Leadership Roles – Kellogg Insight

Maryam Kouchaki, 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.

Pre-recruitmentthe early phase of a job search, when other employees, recruiters, and human-resources staff identify qualified contacts and encourage them to applyis an increasingly important and common aspect of the hiring process. One survey found that 82 percent of U.S. organizations use social-media platforms such as LinkedIn to contact potential candidates.

When 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, Kouchaki says. But 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.

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.

She and her coauthors focused on political ideology in part because of how that can impact peoples preference for maintaining the status quo. Political conservativism, research shows, strongly predicts a persons preference for the status quowhich, in many organizations, doesnt include women in leadership roles.

For that reason, Kouchaki and her coauthorsBurak Oc of Melbourne Business School and Ekaterina Netchaeva of Bocconi Universitysuspected that conservatives might be less encouraging to prospective female candidates.

And indeed, thats what they found: while conservative recruiters dont actively discourage women from applying, they offer less encouragement to women than to men during the early stage of filling senior positions.

To Kouchaki, the research shows that bias doesnt always manifest as obvious hostility or mistreatment. Subtle discouragement can result in the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions, she says.

Happily, the researchers also discovered that it wasnt 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.

Kouchaki and her coauthors started their investigation by recruiting a group of 222 working adults in the United States.

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).

Next, participants were given a list of eight facts about the position to use in an initial email to either David or Sarahhalf 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.

Finally, participants answered demographic questions, including questions about their political beliefs and endorsement of traditional gender roles.

The researchers discovered that political ideology didnt 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 didnt affect participants use of negative facts, however.

Conservative participants, on average, are not more likely than liberal ones to push more negative information. Theyre just not selling the position to female candidates, Kouchaki explains. That was interesting for usits not a case of hostility; its that you are less inclined to be positive.

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 didnt explain whyconservative recruiters treat female candidates differently.

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 orderan order that in many cases doesnt include women in leadership positions. And when faced with such a threat, the dominant emotional response is anxiety.

Anxiety here is a reaction to the threat women pose to their status or what they think is the right way to do things, Kouchaki says.

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.

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 (I rather than ita sign of more personal and friendly communication).

As in the first study, political ideology predicted the content of participants 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 werent just less positive; they were also less open and friendly.

Whats more, conservative participants also expressed greater anxiety about interacting with Sarah as compared with Davida feeling that statistically predicted their tendency to write less personal emails.

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.

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 Sarahand were given information about the positive organizational effects of having women in leadership roles.

This information, Kouchaki says, was designed to legitimize and normalize the idea of hiring womensomething they suspected might particularly help conservatives, who feel anxious about social change.

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 participants proposed message.

Once again, conservative participants wrote more positive messages to David than to Sarahbut this pattern disappeared among participants in the third group, who learned both about Sarahs professional qualifications and about the importance of hiring women into senior positions.

This final study showed that even small measures can help reduce gender bias.

A simple reminder that hiring women can have organizational benefits was all it took to overcome the encouragement gapa message companies can reinforce during trainings for hiring managers. The power of this small intervention is a sign that legitimizing the presence of women and minority groups in companies is really important, Kouchaki says.

Companies can also use technology to ensure they arent discouraging women from applying, Kouchaki notes. One technology startup saw its number of female employees increase by 30 percent after implementing a text-analysis tool that checks for biased language in job descriptions.

Together, these kinds of interventions can help employees become more mindful about all the interactions they have at work, Kouchaki says: Changing peoples mindsets and attitudes in these more formal ways could have a spillover effect even when it comes to personal interactions.

Original post:

Conservatives and Liberals Differ in How Aggressively They Recruit Women for Leadership Roles - Kellogg Insight