Using >3M profile views on online recruitment services, a new study found that recruiters are 6.7% less likely to contact women in male-dominated sectors, and 12.6% less likely to contact men in female-dominated sectors.

ElmerMalmesbury · 2021-01-24T18:13:26+00:00

The article, published in Nature, is well-written and easy to understand, so I'd recommend checking it out. Briefly, they recorded how long recruiters spent on each profile, and whether they clicked or not on the "contact" button to get in touch with the candidate. They used a LASSO-based) model to see how the different pieces of information visible to the recruiter would increase or decrease the probability of pressing the "contact" button.

Pooling all occupations together, there is no overall gender discrimination, contrary to the common belief. Everything else equal, men are 12.6% less likely to be contacted in the top five female-dominated occupations.

There is also a fun analysis of discrimination depending on the time of the day. It looks like recruiters discriminate more just before lunch, or before the end of their workday. That speaks in favor of implicit, unconscious bias rather than a deliberate decision.

(And of course, there is a lot of data on ethnic discrimination, but you knew that already.)

Oncefa2 · 2021-01-25T17:20:47+00:00

This is consistent with previous studies that demonstrate systemic gender biases that are significantly higher among women than men.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15491274/

Put simply: women are far more likely to be biased in favor of other women whereas most men have very little bias at all, sometimes even favoring women more than other men.

Dunkolunko · 2021-01-25T13:51:50+00:00

Were these cases of artificial resumes that on average show similar qualifications for each gender or were they actual applicants? If the latter, it would be interesting to see the relative likelihood of clicking contact for identical or statistically similar resumes of each sex. See if any bias remains in male dominant jobs once qualifications are accounted for.

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