GRSJ224/Women and the Job Search

Introduction

The corporate sphere of discrimination, especially with respect to females, is a polarizing topic as women continue to make gains in the workplace – however, studies suggest that women face adversity before they are able to enter the workforce. That is, the feminization of the job search has left women disadvantaged in acquiring work, and further, in attaining vertical mobility in the workplace. This article speaks to the differing qualifications men and women face as prospective employees for the same position – as well as that of minority women, and vertical mobility of all types of women in the workplace.

The Job Search

In a simple model of on-the-job searching, the predicted probability of a man engaging in a continued job search while employed is 7.5 percentage points above that of a woman with like characteristics. Additional findings showed that males had considerably more success than females in job applications, for a given level of qualifications and experience, providing prima facie evidence of gender discrimination at the initial job-screening stage. This research further revealed that people of color, both male and female, are less successful than whites during this process.

A popular statistic stemming from research by Hewlett Packard, as quoted in The Confidence Code, regarding women and the job search is as follows:

“Women only apply for jobs when they are 100 percent qualified. Men, on the other hand, tend to apply when they are only 60 perfect qualified.”

While it is impossible to essentialize the behavior of men and women, this statistic suggests that there is a disparity in the willingness of heterogeneous men and women to apply for the same job – this suggestion has serious ramifications in terms of women’s employment.

Sources

A Hewlett Packard internal study has resulted in a lot of discussion regarding the confidence gap between men and women – that is, implying that the cause of this inaction is low confidence. While there is a suggested tendency for women to internalize failure to a greater degree than men, Mohr, alongside many others, was skeptical that the origins of this disparity lie in confidence. She sought to uncover the reasons for over a thousand men and women in the United States underlying why or why not they applied for a job.

Mohr suggests that differential levels of confidence are not to blame for the described phenomenon. As reported in the Harvard Business Review, “what held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process.” This is crucial, as this result suggests that women do not require any additional skills, nor do they need to acquire different traits – such as those held by men. Rather, women need to be better informed in regards to how the hiring process really works. That is, that women need not meet the threshold of 100% qualified to apply for any given job.

Resulting from the surveying of over a thousand people, the reported barriers that encompass 78% of why women don’t apply for jobs have little to do with confidence, but rather revolve around the belief that job qualifications are real requirements. Mohr suggests three reasons why women may take job qualifications more seriously than men:

• Bias – women have always had to meet a higher level of qualification than do their male counterparts. This stigma dissuades women from applying.
• Women have long been socialized to strictly follow rules. This behavior has significant consequences in a competitive setting, especially in regards to “who should apply” for jobs.
• As women became integral to professional life in the 20th century – accreditations were mandatory for obtaining jobs, thus women typically overestimate “the importance of our formal training and qualifications, and underutilize advocacy and networking.”

Implications

Intersectionality

Gender and race-based factors are found to intersect revealing that African American men and women are isolated from job opportunities – as a result of the spatial-mismatch theory, however, despite this adversity, they are able to overcome barriers in order to gain access to distant job opportunities – although earnings may be significantly reduced by this exertion. This is an important finding with respect to women of color having opportunities equal to those of their peers – if this group applies to jobs strictly within their realm of qualification, they are limiting in their ability to attain suitable careers in conjunction with the higher costs already faced by this group. Similar results have indicated similar adversity with respect to low-income prospective employees and other minority groups.

Developments

Despite these hardships, reassuring findings are able to ascertain that gender disparities vanish although as soon as women achieved a management position that they had set out to acquire – at this point, females utilize proactive passive job search strategies to the same extent as men. This implies that women who employ these strategies are more likely to attain senior management positions. This follows previous findings, suggesting that the disparity existing between men and women with respect to these instruments is “a question of knowing the right tools and career-enhancing strategies than to overcome barriers”. These conclusions have been replicated, finding that men and women use job seeking strategies with the same intensity.

In a contemporary setting – these findings are even further supported. Specifically, the advent of the internet has significantly diminished the disparity between men and women in engaging in the employed job search, as well as engaging the most effective tools for doing so.

The above findings, taken all together, stress the importance for providing women with the same guidelines that men face when applying for prospective jobs – as discrimination continues to be addressed and diminished in the workplace, the baseline requirements are likely to represent a final hurdle with respect to equality of opportunity. While no professional nor personal traits are able to explain differences in employment opportunities – the willingness of men and women to apply for a job in which they a meet certain threshold of qualifications has significant repercussions.

References

Chapple, K. (2001). Time to Work: Job Search Strategies and Commute Time for Women on Welfare in San Francisco. Journal of Urban Affairs, 23(2), 155-173. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2166.00081.

Cooke, T. (1997). Geographic Access to Job Opportunities and Labour-Force Participation Among Women and African Americans in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area. Urban Geography, 18(3), 213-227. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.18.3.213.

Firth, M. (1982). Sex Discrimination in Job Opportunities for Women. Sex Roles, 8(8). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287858.

Kain, John F. (1968). "Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization". Quarterly Journal of Economics, 82 (2): 175–197. doi:10.2307/1885893.

Kay, K., & Shipman, C. (2014). The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance. HarperCollins.

Lang, J., & Zapf, D. (2015). Quotas for Women Can Improve Recruitment Procedures. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 14(3), 131-141. https://doi.org/10.1027/1866-5888/a000124.

Mohr, T. (2014). Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified

Yankow, J. (2017). Employed Job Search among Young Workers: Do Women Still Search Differently than Men in the Internet Age? International Advances in Economic Research, 23(2), 245-259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11294-017-9633-0.

Yankow, J., & Horney, M. J. (2013). Gender Differences in Employed Job Search: Why Do Women Search Less than Men? Modern Economy, 4(7), 489-500. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/me.2013.47053.