Hiring managers may suffer from unconscious gender bias

Job hunting can be tiresome and exhausting. Adding insult to injury, you may even be rejected for being too good for the task at hand. If you’re “overqualified”, does that mean you won’t ever get hired? New research says it may depend on your gender.

Researchers Elizabeth Lauren Campbell (University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management) and Oliver Hahl (Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University) have published a paper in Organization Science about the relationship between qualifications and hiring based on gender.

The paper reveals that hiring managers are suspicious about overqualified male candidates’ motivations; a news release calls them perceived “flight risks” who are declined because hiring managers believe that they will go off to greener pastures as soon as they get the chance.

Yet overqualified women are another story – hiring managers don’t hesitate to hire them even though their qualifications may exceed expectations for the requirements of the position.

Hiring managers are not as concerned about overqualified women as they are about overqualified men; they may “assume overqualified women are leaving their previous roles due to gender discrimination,” the news release notes.

“Our research suggests that overqualified women and sufficiently qualified men will tend to be hired for the same jobs and ranks,” says Elizabeth L Campbell, assistant professor of management at the Rady School and lead-author of the study.

“This means female employees will be systematically more qualified than men who work in the same roles. Generally speaking, this means women aren’t getting the same return-on-investment for their qualifications compared to men and that women are likely to end up with jobs below their qualification level, relative to men,” she points out.

Campbell goes on to say that firms might not be hiring women for positions that take full advantage of their expertise and experience, which may be detrimental to the firm’s performance in the long run.

The two researchers conducted experiments to compare equivalent candidates. They prepared two sets of qualifications; one set was “overqualified”, while the other was “sufficiently qualified.” They then assigned names to these CVs with traditional female or male connotations before asking hiring managers to evaluate the candidates for an open position.

“Gender neutral names and non-binary candidates were not incorporated into this study design to reduce the complexity of this initial experimental examination, although this is an important direction for future research,” Campbell says.

Campbell and Hahl’s study focuses on hiring managers’ evaluation of candidates for available positions in their companies.

“Research shows that job candidates are evaluated on two main dimensions: their skills and qualifications and their commitment to applying those skills to benefit the firm,” Campbell says.

“Firms want to hire job candidates who are highly capable and likely to be successful in the position. But firms also want candidates who will be committed to helping the firm succeed over the long term.”

The researchers note that hiring managers only have the CVs to go on from, missing essential information which they fill up by having to make assumptions about the candidates: “Hiring managers make inferences about candidates’ capability and commitment based on limited information,” Campbell says.

She says an overqualified job candidate “might check the box on capability, but it’s not as obvious to hiring managers if they check the box on commitment.” She explains that this prompts hiring managers “to think about the motivations and we find evidence that the assumptions they make about candidates’ motivations differ based on gender.”

Campbell and Hahl’s paper, titled “He’s Overqualified, She’s Highly Committed: Qualification Signals and Gendered Assumptions About Job Candidate Commitment” examines hiring managers’ unconscious biases and stereotyping behaviour they take part in without realising it.

“Our paper is focused on understanding the process of evaluating job candidates and how it is influenced by gender bias,” Campbell said.

The researchers were taken aback by the rationalisations by hiring managers about their decisions to hire overqualified women, but not overqualified men.

“Hiring managers thought overqualified men would feel that they’re ‘too good for this job’ and leave as soon as something better came along,” Campbell says. 

She adds that hiring managers did not worry as much about overqualified women leaving the company as soon as another, better job was available to them.

She gives two reasons for this unconscious bias: “First, they fell back on gender stereotypes about women valuing relationships more, which quelled concerns about flight risk. Second, they rationalised overqualified women’s motivation and guessed they would be willing to take a relatively lower ranking position in a new firm because they’re trying to leave a company that has unfair barriers to their advancement.”

The findings of this study suggest more effort may be needed to eliminate gender discrimination from the workplace, at least at the hiring front. “Our evidence shows hiring managers had women’s possible experiences with discrimination in mind,” says Campbell.

“And yet we still observed overqualified women and sufficiently qualified men are likely to be hired for the same jobs. This means inequality is perpetuated despite it being at the forefront of some people’s minds.”