Study shows gender bias for women seeking employment

Are women at a disadvantage when they go on a job interview because of stereotypical beliefs? A new study suggests the answer is frequently "yes."

According to Ioana Latu, a professor of psychology at Rutgers-Camden, the study found gender bias is widespread when it comes to females looking for employment.

"Male managers tend to associate women more with managerial incompetence, and the more a male interviewer associates women with incompetence, the less well she does during the job interview," Latu said.

The professor said "explicit stereotypes" are what people say, but "implicit stereotypes" exist on an unconscious level, and these are the types of ingrained beliefs that many men may have about women in certain situations.

To gather data for the study, researchers staged 30 mock job interviews, consisting of a male interviewer and female job applicant. Before each interview, an experimenter informed the participants that they would be taking part in a seemingly unrelated study, which was actually measuring their implicit and explicit stereotypes.

Researchers used computer-based, reaction-timed tests to measure how quickly participants associated women with attributes signifying incompetence and men with traits signifying competence.

According to Latu, women picked up on non-verbal cues from the people interviewing them, and this tended to undermine their performance.

"It was things like dominant body posture, that's taking more space, and visual dominance," she said. "Visual dominance is looking at somebody more when you're talking, but less when you're listening to them."

She said male interviewers holding negative implicit stereotypes tended to interrupt the female job candidates frequently.

"We know there is gender inequality in the workplace, and now we're trying to find where it's coming from." Latu said. "When these negative stereotypes are identified, there are techniques that can be taught to reduce them."