Women Job-Seekers Must Overcome Prejudice of Gatekeepers and Future Coworkers

This finding comes from a recent Yale study:

Women seeking jobs often have to overcome the conscious or unconscious gender bias of those doing the hiring, many studies have shown. But women job-seekers also must overcome another hurdle: Gatekeepers in charge of hiring are heavily influenced in their decisions by the biases of the employees the woman would work with, a new Yale-led study has found.

Andrea Vial, John Dovidio, and co-author Victoria Brescoll conducted several experiments asking a series of questions of subjects who played the role of “gatekeepers” charged with reviewing job applications of women and men. They found these gatekeepers, both men and women, tended to accommodate the biases of third parties because they feared that a woman would not get along well with those individuals — that hiring a woman would therefore disrupt workplace efficiency.

However, many of those gatekeepers later expressed guilt about their roles. “But it does mean that realizing diversity goals is a lot trickier than we thought,” Vial said.

You can read more here.

(ljs)