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Empirical Study: Discrimination in Personnel Selection?

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Corporate Social Responsibility and Discrimination

Part of the book series: CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ((CSEG))

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Abstract

It was suggested the following factors perpetuate discrimination of women in a male-dominated setting: Gender stereotypes have personnel decision-makers implicitly associate desired and required traits of a job with men to a greater degree than with women. This pattern will reflect on ascriptions of competence and suitability to the advantage of men over women. The desire to surround oneself with and to trust more readily individuals similar to oneself—especially with challenging assignments—is expected to reflect negatively on women’s assessment of suitability in a male-dominated and stereotypically masculine-connoted context. Reference to the law in an organizational context without enforcement threat will not counter biases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Castilla and Benard (2010), p 543ff.

  2. 2.

    Nebenzahl et al. (1993), p 101ff; Eagly et al. (1995), p 136ff.

  3. 3.

    Castilla and Benard (2010), p 543ff.

  4. 4.

    Wennerås and Wold (1997); Fernandez and Mors (2008); Shantz et al. (2011).

  5. 5.

    Strunk et al. (2005) in: Mayrhofer et al. (2005), p 211ff.

  6. 6.

    Charness (2010), p 21f.

  7. 7.

    Walker and Willer in: Webster and Sell (2007), p 25f.

  8. 8.

    Hegtvedt in: Webster and Sell (2007), p 142.

  9. 9.

    Polzer et al. (1998), p 42ff.

  10. 10.

    Webster and Sell in: Webster and Sell (2007), p 245f.

  11. 11.

    TU Career Center, http://www.tucareer.com/SiteContents/page/de/startseite

  12. 12.

    The timeframe studied was from January 2006 to February 2010.

  13. 13.

    Früh (2007), p 62ff.

  14. 14.

    Auer-Srnka and Koeszegi (2007), p 36.

  15. 15.

    Früh (2007), p 86f.

  16. 16.

    Früh (2007), p 128.

  17. 17.

    Cohen’s Kappa was chosen as the preferable measure, Auer-Srnka and Koeszegi (2007), p 44ff. Inter-coder reliability turned out to be highly satisfying with a Kappa value of 97 %.

  18. 18.

    Auer-Srnka and Koeszegi (2007), p 36ff.

  19. 19.

    It was agreed by the coders that a mere referral to expectations selected candidates be involved in “teaching and research” was not sufficient as these tasks go without saying for a job in academia. Only when this threshold was exceeded through a more substantiated description of future tasks and responsibilities, the unit was coded under this category of job or task description.

  20. 20.

    A tricky decision regarding the coding manual for the technical skill category was how to deal with IT skills. Undoubtedly, IT skills, for example knowledge or skills related to specialized software or methods involving information technology, are technical skills. Following the general coding rule, the more specific category was relevant. Since IT skills is more specific than technical skills, any requests for IT knowledge or skills were to be coded under IT. For the case of job advertisings related to the school of Information Technology, such a coding strategy would skew findings towards frequencies of IT skills and to the disadvantage of technical skills (of the specific discipline). IT graduates’ technical skills will most likely always be IT skills. For the sake of comparability across schools, technical skills from the school of Information Technology’s ads were defined as technical skills just like all other subject and discipline-related skills of other disciplines were coded as technical skills. This strategy, whilst keeping requests for technical skills comparable across schools, of course led to the odd phenomenon that Information Technology job ads were to have all frequencies of discipline-related skills under “technical”, and none under “IT” skills—a peculiarity deemed acceptable for the sake of consistency and comparability.

  21. 21.

    The remaining advertisings meant to employ under-graduate members for administrative tasks within the institution or for early research activity in the framework of research projects.

  22. 22.

    Compare Steffens and Mehl (2003) for details and references.

  23. 23.

    Heilman et al. (1989), Schein (2001).

  24. 24.

    Steffens and Mehl (2003), p 173ff; Webster and Sell (2007), p 229.

  25. 25.

    Landy and Farr (1980), p 72ff; Swim et al. (1989), p 423.

  26. 26.

    Eagly et al. (1995), p 125ff.

  27. 27.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 249.

  28. 28.

    Dubinsky and Rudelius (1980) in: Bagozzi et al.

  29. 29.

    Stedham et al. (2007), p 5.

  30. 30.

    Petersen and Krings (2009), p 506ff.

  31. 31.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 75.

  32. 32.

    Powell (1987), Huffcutt and Roth (1998), Rosenstein and Hitt (1986).

  33. 33.

    Swim et al. (1989), p 423.

  34. 34.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 6ff.

  35. 35.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 294.

  36. 36.

    Scholarios and Lockyer (1999), p 142.

  37. 37.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 294.

  38. 38.

    Larwood et al. (1988), p 14

  39. 39.

    Güth and Kliemt (2010), p 46.

  40. 40.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 493.

  41. 41.

    Dabic and Hatzinger in: Hatzinger et al. (2009), p 131.

  42. 42.

    Koordinationsstelle für Frauenförderung und Gender Studies, TU Wien, http://www.tuwien.ac.at/dle/koostelle/daten_und_fakten/hoererinnenzahlen/

  43. 43.

    To make the identical form of submissions believable, subjects were given information applications had to be submitted via the institute’s own online tool, which provided a framework for the inclusion of information, and which produced identical layout for all applications.

  44. 44.

    Steffens and Mehl (2003), p 173ff.

  45. 45.

    Webster and Sell (2007), p 75f.

  46. 46.

    Military service in Austria is mandatory for male citizens, and voluntary for female citizens.

  47. 47.

    Charness (2010), p 21f.

  48. 48.

    Webster and Sell in: Webster and Sell (2007), p 13.

  49. 49.

    Powell (1987); Fernandez and Mors (2008); Castilla and Benard (2010).

  50. 50.

    Larwood et al. (1988), p 14.

  51. 51.

    McCabe et al. (2006), p 105.

  52. 52.

    Schools differed in the proportion of female scientists and students: Mechanical Engineering participated with 18.18 % of female senior scientists (at a very low response rate of senior scientists, though), and with 16.47 % of female students; Civil Engineering had 100 % male senior scientists responding (again, at a very low senior scientist response rate) and 32.65 % participation of female students; 27.59 % of senior scientists in Technical Chemistry were women as well as 32.26 % of students from this school.

  53. 53.

    Weber and Weiler in: Hatzinger et al. (2009), p 49ff; Dabic and Hatzinger in: Hatzinger et al. (2009), p 119ff.

  54. 54.

    An advantage of ranked orders over directly paired comparisons is subjects may inflate scores by according equally or similarly high ratings to sets of pairs, thereby avoiding clear choices beyond the immediately contrasted pair (Krosnicka and Alwin 1988, p 534).

  55. 55.

    Krosnick and Alwin (1988), p 534.

  56. 56.

    Heilman (1997), p 882.

  57. 57.

    Swim et al. (1989), p 410.

  58. 58.

    Basow (1986), p 60ff.

  59. 59.

    Porter and Roberts (1976), p 1559ff.

  60. 60.

    Szwajkowsi and Larwood (1991), p 512.

  61. 61.

    Metz (2003), p 240f.

  62. 62.

    Petersen and Krings (2009), p 508f.

  63. 63.

    Powell (1987), Huffcutt and Roth (1998).

  64. 64.

    Früh (2007), p 27f.

  65. 65.

    Früh (2007), p 63.

  66. 66.

    Hellerstein et al. (2002), p 714.

  67. 67.

    The example statement “candidate X does not excel in languages like candidate Y” would be unitized into two different sense units. Unit 1 would read “candidate X does not excel in languages (like candidate Y)”. A corresponding (split) unit 2 from this originally integrated statement would read “(candidate X does not) excel in languages like candidate Y (does)”. In contrast to this, a statement like “candidate X excels in languages” would be one thought unit. For the permissibility of this technique of adding or reducing semantic fillers without altering the content, see also: Früh (2007), p 92f.

  68. 68.

    Against this methodological choice for their concrete example, but in principle recognizing the permissibility of this choice for designs that intend to measure increased intensity of an argument: Früh (2007), p 92f.

  69. 69.

    The preliminary category system was developed with about 10 % of the unitized. Compare: Früh (2007), p 156f.

  70. 70.

    Main categories unrelated to immediate arguments on applicant suitability were (7) need for clarification of doubts regarding candidates in a job interview, (8) critique of the study or its design, and (9) other.

  71. 71.

    Früh (2007), p 207, p 242f.

  72. 72.

    Früh (2007), p 73.

  73. 73.

    Heilman et al. (1995), Schein (2001), Eagly et al. (1995).

  74. 74.

    A manual ensuring discriminatory power and invariability of the coding rules was prepared in a way that reliability would not be increased at the cost of validity, meaning explicit examples were not used at this stage in order not to render coding a rather mechanical task that would ensure incomplete capture “with great precision”, but defeat interpretative accomplishment by coders. Compare Früh (2007), p 87ff.

  75. 75.

    Früh (2007), p 129.

  76. 76.

    Früh (2007), p 188ff, 263.

  77. 77.

    In absolute frequencies, 145 of 204 and 194 of 253 arguments from the six applicant characteristics categories are quality/“plus” mentions for the gender-blind and gender-visible responses, respectively.

  78. 78.

    Note as mentioned in Appendix C, there is reason to depart from a strict 0.05 threshold for significance considerations in the case of (conservative) Fisher test.

  79. 79.

    Nieva and Gutek (1980), p 273f.

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  1. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Christina Keinert-Kisin

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Keinert-Kisin, C. (2016). Empirical Study: Discrimination in Personnel Selection?. In: Corporate Social Responsibility and Discrimination. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29158-1_6

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