Women Need Not Apply

The government assures us that we are sure to have huge swathes of newly-enfranchised workers entering the economy. A significant number of these new job-hunters will be women either newly made redundant or having to re-enter the workforce due to benefit cuts, and of course the coalition is expecting them all to find gainful employment, a task any woman would struggle with in a recession. But why specifically women, I hear you cry (sounding uncannily like my high school English teacher)?  Surely men and women will struggle equally with high unemployment and a lower number of vacancies? The problem is the recruitment process and the tendency of female candidates to de-select themselves from consideration.

As a third sector worker, I have spent the last two years trying to recruit high-flying management positions. Of course, before I could recruit anyone, I first had to be trained in the very latest in interviewing techniques. Recruitment specialists took me through the entire process, from sitting down with the applications to sending out the offer letter. One tangent in the discussion – as usual, initiated by me, because I can’t quite let go of my responsibility to be Outraged By Everything^TM – was about job adverts, especially ones designed to attract more female candidates (something we had specifically tried to do for the shiniest, most well-paying jobs, with limited success). There were two issues that quickly reared their ugly heads:

1. Job adverts that want to attract more female candidates will usually include something to the effect of, “Organisation X is committed to diversity and equality, and particularly welcomes applications from women and members of ethnic minorities for this position.” These words tend to be included only on some ads for that organisation, and not on all ads for all vacancies.
2. Those ads also tend to stress the maternity leave, childcare vouchers and other family-friendly policies of the organisation, whereas your typical ad will focus more on performance-related pay and the opportunity of overseas travel.

“Women candidates are highly encouraged to apply.”

UNDP, vacancy notice for Liberia Project Assistant position

So, where does that leave the female candidate?

When a candidate first decides to job-hunt, the desired salary level is one of the main factors influencing their choice of whether or not they should bother applying. If you feel that you’re at about £35K, for instance, you’ll feel over-qualified for jobs at £20K and under-qualified for jobs at £60K in the same field. The trouble is, according to investigations such as this one, women have a self-assessment of their worth that is considerably lower than men’s. Recent studies looking at the wage gap have also shown that women tend to submit bids for lower wages when bargaining, and also tend to self-promote a lot less than men. What these two studies indicate is that where salary negotiations are in place, this means women end up with lower salaries than their male counterparts. They also indicate that, anticipating a lower salary as a result of negotiations, women are more likely to turn to fixed-salary jobs, rather than highly competetive, negotiable ones.

Even in the fixed-salary (or salary bracket jobs) there are complications. If a women self-promotes a lot less than her male counterpart, and if her self-assessment of her worth is lower than his, then she would have a reasonable expectation of being paid less than he is. When looking for a job to match both her skills and her salary expectations, she will look for a job that requires her skillset, but has a lower salary than the one a qualified male candidate would expect. For fixed salary brackets, then, the issue is at the application stage rather than the negotiation stage: qualified women are simply not applying for well-paying jobs in their respective industries.

Take a hypothetical female applicant on a salary of £30k, which we have already established is likely to be at least a little below her equally qualified male counterpart, who receives £35k, for the sake of argument. This female candidate would therefore reasonably expect to look for positions offering £30k-£35k, whereas her male counterpart would be looking for £35k-£40k. Both of these candidates are equally qualified, and they are looking at the same job advert – but if the studies above are correct, a woman looking at two identical ads for two identical jobs,one of which matches the male applicant’s expectation of salary (the higher) and one of which matches hers (the lower), she will be more likely to apply for the job ad with the lower salary.

I’m going to pause here for a second and let you think about how perverse that is. Internalising a lower value for their work, women will actively look for the lower-paying jobs that require their skills, on the assumption that the higher-paying jobs are somehow out of their reach. “It’s too big a jump in salary” is a frequent one I’ve heard among my friends when discussing why they can’t apply for a managerial position, as if extra money is in some way a barrier to applying. When reviewing candidates, I’ve found it helpful to ignore previous salary details (especially for internal candidates, where salary is tied in to a ‘grade’ that is somehow supposed to be linked to the complexity and skill requirements of the role) as they can give you a biased impression of whether the candidate is pitching ‘at the right level’.

This tendency by women to self-deselect based on salary expectations is somewhat lowered by ads that include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’. Positive discrimination is illegal in the UK; no-one is going to be more likely to hire you just because you are a woman. However, what this tendency highlights is the understanding that negative discrimination is still alive and well: that a woman is less likely to be hired for a position that does not include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’ relative to one that does.

The practical implications of this are:

• Within a single organisation, the understanding therefore becomes that if the organisation would particularly like female applicants, it will add the words. If it would not particularly like female applicants, it will say nothing. In essence, the use of those words singles out some jobs as suitable for women, and other jobs as suitable for a default candidate – and the default, of course, is always male. Career progression for potentially sterling female candidates is therefore implicitly discouraged.
• This notion is reinforced by the sorts of packages offered to women to attract them to some points, conflating ‘woman candidate’ with ‘future mother’. Therefore a female job-hunter primarily interested in a high-flying job with overseas travel and performance-related pay finds herself in what seems to be very hostile territory. If female-friendly=mother-friendly, and this job isn’t very mother-friendly, then it must follow that it isn’t very female-friendly. (And neither are you, you harlot; why are you looking for a job with a bonus instead of one with a good maternity package?)
• In the third sector at large, organisations tend to find a large number of women applying for entry-level jobs, and practically none for the high-placed positions. This is partly because many women have taken the economic ‘hit’ of having a family, which means they take longer to accrue seniority, but partly because the ads for the top jobs never highlight maternity leave etc (the shorthand identified in b) as referring to female candidates), but instead focus on bonuses – which, from many years in the workforce, a working woman comes to understand as the default code for ‘male, white, middle-class’. Therefore many good candidates never bother applying, anticipating discrimination even where none might exist in the selection process.

Putting pen to paper, captured by gtmcknight on Flickr.

So what should organisations do?

1. Stop using those words for some adverts. You want to diversity your workforce? Good for you. Either change the nature of the ad to include common concerns (and this can be done in more neutral ways by highlighting paternal and maternal leave, travel opportunities, a commitment to equality, a particular interest in people with language skills or overseas experience, etc) and skip the words entirely, or add the words to every ad. If you want to increase the number of female candidates, surely you want them to apply for all jobs, rather than just one or two? Add them to every ad, and see the applications for your jobs increase relative to those received by your competitors.
2. In my experience, women tend to be put off requirements that sound vague, such as ‘experience in…’ rather than the more specific ‘5 years of experience in…’, as many will assume they do not have the required experience. Such age-specific requirements, however, are discriminatory for different reasons. So what can be done? Well, identifying what precisely you are looking for (such as through competency-based criteria) helps considerably, as does tightening up the other specifications. It will assist people in mapping across their skill sets on to the job profile.
3. As for women being less likely to apply for jobs that pay more? Well, that one’s easy – all you need to do is pay them more! A woman on £35k pa is a lot less likely to go for a job that pays £30k than a woman who has the same job but earns £25k pa. I appreciate that this is a chicken and egg scenario, but an organisation that identifies internal talent and promotes from within is more likely to foster confidence and ambition in all its workes, instead of just the male ones.

And, you know, not penalising a woman if she does decide to have a child (and in this way help the economy and pay your pension twenty years down the line) wouldn’t kill you either.