Gender bias in job adverts

My new work recently trained me in interviewing techniques. How to interview other people, you understand, not how to be interviewed myself (although it did give me some interesting insights into what must be going on in the minds of the interviewers).

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, specifically ones designed to attract more female candidates. There were two issues arising:

1. Job adverts that want to attract more female candidates will usually include the words, "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.

So, where does that leave perpetually-outraged little old me? Well, it took some time for the thought processes to percolate, but here's what I've come up with:

When a woman looks at two identical ads for two identical jobs, she is more likely to apply for the job ad with the lower salary. FACT. This tendency 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:
a) 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.

b) 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 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?)

c) In the industry 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 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, but instead focus on bonus - 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.

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 a more gender- and ethnicity--neutral way 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. Women tend to be put off requirements that sound vague, such as 'experience in...' rather than '5 years of experience in...', as many will assume they do not have the required experience (this also ties in to why women will apply for more low-paying jobs). Unfortunately, putting in concrete figures runs afoul of the Age Discrimination Act. So what to do? Well, identifying what sort of experience (junior, managerial, senior management) helps, 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.

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.

Random-generated poetry

Gacked from likeadeuce: Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

I had to cheat a little, since a surprising number of instrumentals came up. But here are the first twenty lines of the first twenty songs with vocals. I've messed around a little with the punctuation, of course, but other than that...


Stay

You can.
Shake an apple off an apple tree;
ain't no sunshine.

When she's gone, I wear a disguise.
Now there's a back-seat lover,
I've loaded up a good thing -
Watch me ride...

Suavamente, besame
Sometimes in our lives we all have pain.
(Who lives in a house like this?)

There's something
lucky - you were born that far away, so
cosy in the rocket.

(We were nameless)

I feel so unsure;
no clouds in my storms.

Maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should have.
You have me, I was born.

In a forked-tongued story,
It's a mean and stormy night.

(You walk in.)

*

It's art, I tells you! Art!!