Impression formation and gender bias: An empirical research in the personnel selection context
Giulia Callà, Luciana Carraro & Fabio Fasoli
In the last decades there has been significant progress in order to achieve gender equality in different contexts, such as in employment and in the workplace. However, nowadays women are still under-represented in the workforce participation and paid less than men. Research has widely investigated the likely processes responsible for this gender-gap. A recent study conducted by Moscatelli et al. (2020) has demonstrated that women are evaluated with multiple criteria, whereas men are mainly evaluated only on competence. As a consequence, women find more difficult to be selected for a position since they have to fulfill more requirements than men.
Based on these findings, we aimed at investigating whether making participants aware of these findings (Moscatelli et al., 2020), could be a practical and useful solution in order to reduce gender discrimination in the personnel selection process. To this aim, we conducted two studies in two different countries: Study 1 (N = 144, F = 132, Mage = 23.9) in the United Kingdom and Study 2 (N = 147, F = 95, Mage = 30.10) in Italy. In both studies, participants were randomly assigned to two different experimental conditions (awareness vs. control): in one condition participants were initially informed about gender bias in the personnel selection process, whereas participants in the control condition were not informed about it. Then, they were presented with a likely candidate for a position (male vs female) and then they were asked to indicate how important was competence, morality, and sociability in order to make a decision in the selection. Moreover, they were asked to choose at least 3 questions (among 9 interview questions about competence, morality and sociability) to ask the candidate. Overall results displayed a general attempt to avoid gender bias in the awareness condition, but also some differences between Study 1 and 2. Limitations and practical implications will be discussed.
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