job assignment based on gender or race rather than capabilities

• Data, AI, & Machine Learning
• Managing Technology
• Social Responsibility
• Workplace, Teams, & Culture
• AI & Machine Learning
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Big ideas Research Projects
• Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy
• Responsible AI
• Future of the Workforce
• Future of Leadership
• All Research Projects
• AI in Action
• Most Popular
• The Truth Behind the Nursing Crisis
• Coaching for the Future-Forward Leader
• Measuring Culture

Our summer 2024 issue highlights ways to better support customers, partners, and employees, while our special report shows how organizations can advance their AI practice.

• Past Issues
• Upcoming Events
• Video Archive
• Me, Myself, and AI
• Three Big Points

Assignments Are Critical Tools to Achieve Workplace Gender Equity

Work assignments can be a powerful means of propelling employees’ growth but — unless managed deliberately — they can also undermine efforts to build a diverse workforce..

• Workplace, Teams, & Culture
• Organizational Behavior

Facing unprecedented levels of employee burnout and historic quit rates , how can companies lead with a model that attracts and retains talent? This period of transition, and the lessons learned from the pandemic, offer organizations a unique opportunity to improve and refine their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies. 1 It is imperative that leaders consider the landscape of work assignments at their companies as a foundation for greater workforce equity.

“Assignments” can comprise work tasks, activities, or projects. Scholars have long identified a gender gap in access to the kinds of assignments — large in scope, highly visible, and strategically important — that are seen as essential to career advancement. An estimated 70% of leadership development occurs through experiential learning , especially the kind offered by these challenging stretch assignments.

Get Updates on Transformative Leadership

Evidence-based resources that can help you lead your team more effectively, delivered to your inbox monthly.

Please enter a valid email address

Thank you for signing up

Privacy Policy

Yet women are largely overlooked for challenging work assignments. One factor is that women typically have fewer ties to influential decision makers who connect people to assignment opportunities . Biased performance evaluations also may play a role, with women seeing no gains in their performance scores for the very behaviors (such as “taking charge”) for which men are rewarded. 2 One study showed how promotability depends on having had challenging past projects — setting up a vicious cycle in which women never get ahead. 3 Women of color, tasked with the additional burden of “fitting in” at predominantly White organizations, may find channels to career-advancing work blocked entirely. 4

Historically, companies have not tracked assignment processes. In one 2010 report, when HR leaders were asked the percentage of “business-critical/important” assignments held by women, the top two responses were “1% to 10%” and “not measured.” Both career-advancing work and meaningful work are cornerstones of positive professional experiences. But leaders may know little about who has access to significant assignments, or they may be unaware of how a lack of access drives burnout, turnover, and dwindling diversity on the leadership bench. 5

These many unknowns about assignments drive an information gap that grows riskier as countless organizations head into new hybrid work arrangements. To quantify this risk, our team at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab ran a study of assignments, using data that many companies collect and managers review at least yearly: employee engagement survey (EES) data.

About the Authors

Erin Macke is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stanford University and a graduate research assistant at Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Gabriela Gall Rosa is a research data analyst at the VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Shannon Gilmartin is a senior research scholar at the VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. Caroline Simard is managing director of the VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.

1. “ Hybrid Working Is Here to Stay Post-Pandemic: Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom ,” Bloomberg TV, Dec. 30, 2020, video, 6:34, www.bloomberg.com; and J.M. Barrero, N. Bloom, and S.J. Davis, “ Why Working From Home Will Stick ,” working paper 28731, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2021.

2. S.J. Correll, K.R. Weisshaar, A.T. Wynn, et al., “Inside the Black Box of Organizational Life: The Gendered Language of Performance Assessment,” American Sociological Review 85, no. 6 (December 2020): 1022-1050.

3. I.E. De Pater, A.E.M. van Vianen, M.N. Bechtoldt, et al., “Employees’ Challenging Job Experiences and Supervisors’ Evaluations of Promotability,” Personnel Psychology 62, no. 2 (May 2009): 297-325.

4. T.M. Melaku, “You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism,” (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019).

5. P.T.Y. Preenan, I.E. De Pater, A.E. van Vianen, et al., “Managing Voluntary Turnover Through Challenging Assignments,” Group & Organization Management 36, no.3 (April 2011): 3088-344; C. Maslach and M. Leiter, “Early Predictors of Job Burnout and Engagement,” Journal of Applied Psychology 93, no. 3 (June 2008): 489-512; and J.M. Hoobler, G. Lemmon, and S.J. Wayne, “Women’s Managerial Aspirations: An Organizational Development Perspective,” Journal of Management 40, no. 3 (March 2014): 703-730.

6. This EES data was collected in 2015 from over 4,000 respondents at this company.

7. For this analysis, we calculated predicted probabilities (57% for women and 67% for men, p<0.0001) from a logistic regression in which the dependent measure, agreement with “having opportunities,” is dichotomized into levels of agreement: “great/very great” and “very little/some/moderate.” A series of ordinary least squares regressions on a nondichotomized dependent measure yielded similar results.

8. L. Babcock, M.P. Recalde, L. Vesterlund, et al., “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks With Low Promotability,” American Economic Review 107, no. 3 (March 2017): 714-747.

9. It is worth noting that we could not conduct our case study analyses by employees’ race and ethnicity because this information was not collected on the company’s EES, so our analyses cannot speak to both gender and race assignment inequities. While legal and privacy considerations in different geographies may constrain what can be measured, companies should strive to examine such data by race and ethnicity, geography, and other social dimensions based on their diversity strategies.

Acknowledgments

More like this, add a comment cancel reply.

You must sign in to post a comment. First time here? Sign up for a free account : Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Advertisement

Mind the Job: The Role of Occupational Characteristics in Explaining Gender Discrimination

• Original Research
• Published: 01 March 2021
• Volume 156 , pages 91–110, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Clara Cortina   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2822-9339 1 ,
• Jorge Rodríguez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5445-6319 1 &
• M. José González   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4570-248X 1  

1784 Accesses

10 Citations

Explore all metrics

Using correspondence testing, we investigate how job characteristics affect gender discrimination in hiring. In particular, we analyse whether discrimination against women is moderated by the occupation’s sex composition, required level of decision-making and expected educational level. To do so, we carried out a correspondence study in 2016, in which we sent two pairs of matched male–female applications to 1371 job postings for a heterogeneous selection of occupations in two large cities in Spain. Differences in response rates and response order by gender were then used as a tool to assess discrimination. The results show that job characteristics matter for gender discrimination and that their effects are complementary. Women were particularly discriminated against in connection with jobs that involved decision-making, in male-dominated and mixed occupations, and in jobs requiring both high and low education levels. This discrimination is likely to stem from the activation of both stereotypes and prejudices.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Gender Discrimination in the Hiring of Skilled Professionals in Two Male-Dominated Occupational Fields: A Factorial Survey Experiment with Real-World Vacancies and Recruiters in Four European Countries

Assessing the role of gender in hiring: a field experiment on labour market discrimination

What if your boss is a woman? Evidence on gender discrimination at the workplace

Jobs at the extreme of the sex-ratio composition (having more than 80% men or women) were eliminated from the analysis, because it could be difficult to observe variations by sex in hiring.

Sex ratios and average educational levels for each occupation were estimated using Spain’s Labour Force Survey (2nd quarter 2015).

For anonymity reasons, we do not provide a reference for these figures. It is available upon request.

For 13 of the job postings, the employer closed the selection process before we could send all 4 applications.

In our design, we also contemplated the possibility that the differential treatment shown by the same employer towards women with one trait of interest (e.g., low skills) could vary according to the other trait of interest (e.g., if they had children) by sending six applications to a small subset of job postings (79 job postings, or about 8.5% of all postings applied for). In the analyses we control for the number of applications sent to each job posting.

Alonso-Villar & Coral Del Río (2010) show that women are more segregated at an older age, while men are more evenly distributed across occupations in the Spanish labour market. Gender segregation by age and occupations do not affect our analyses, as we experimentally manipulate the number of fictitious job applicants across occupations and sex groups, and the age of the candidates.

See note 3 above.

When we use the words “first” and “fourth” we do not mean to say that employers selected our candidates in that order relative to all candidates who applied to the position, as we do not know which other candidates may have been contacted by the employers, apart from the other fictitious applicants in the set. The order is established exclusively in terms of the time at which our fictitious candidates were contacted.

Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies : A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4 (2), 139–158.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ahmed, A. M., Andersson, L., & Hammarstedt, M. (2010). Can discrimination in the housing market be reduced by increasing the information about the applicants? Land Economics, 86 (1), 79–90.

Albert, R., Escot, L., & Fernández-Cornejo, J. A. (2011). A field experiment to study sex and age discrimination in the madrid labour market. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 22 (2), 351–375.

Aldaz Odriozola, L. & Eguía Peña, B.. (2016). Segregación Laboral Por Género En España y En El País Vasco. Un Análisis de Cohortes. Estudios de Economía Aplicada, 34(1), 133–54.

Alonso-Villar, O., & Del Río, C. (2010). Segregation of female and male workers in Spain: Occupations and industries. Hacienda Pública Española, 194 (3), 91–121.

Google Scholar  

Arrow, K. J. (1973). The theory of discrimination. In O. Ashenfelter & A. Rees (Eds.), Discrimination in labor markets . Princeton University Press.

Azmat, G., & Petrongolo, B. (2014). Gender and the labor market: What have we learned from field and lab experiments? Labor Economics, 30, 32–40.

Baumle, A. K., & Fossett, M. (2005). Statistical discrimination in employment: Its practice, conceptualization, and implications for public policy. American Behavioral Scientist, 48 (9), 1250–1274.

Becker, G. (1975). The Economics of Discrimination . Univ. Chicago Press.

Becker, G. (1985). Human capital, effort, and the sexual division of labor. Journal of Labor Economics, 3 (1), 33–58.

Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are emily and greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94 (4), 991–1013.

Bertrand, M., & Duflo, E. (2017). Field experiments on discrimination. Handbook of Economic Field Experiments, 1, 309–393.

Baert, S. (2014). Career Lesbians. Getting hired for not having kids? Industrial Relations Journal , 45 (6), 543–561.

Bisping, T. O., & Fain, J. R. (2007). Job queues, discrimination and affirmative action. Economic Enquiry , 38 (1), 123–135.

Britton, D. M. (2000). The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender and Society, 14, 418–432.

Burgess, D., & Borgida, E. (1999). Who women are, who women should be: Descriptive and prescriptive stereotyping in gender discrimination”. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 5, 665–692.

Bygren, M., Erlandsson, A., & Gähler, M. (2017). Do employers prefer fathers? Evidence from a field experiment testing the gender by parenthood interaction effect on callbacks to job applications. European Sociological Review, 33 (3), 337–348.

Correll, S. J., Benard, S., & Paik, I. (2007). Getting a job: Is there a motherhood penalty? American Journal of Sociology, 112 (5), 1297–1339.

Drydakis, N. (2014). Sexual orientation discrimination in the Cypriot labour market. Distastes or uncertainty? International Journal of Manpower, 35 (5), 720–744.

Eagly, A. H., & Karau, J. A. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109 (3), 573–598.

Ewens, M., Tomlin, B., & Wang, L. (2014). Statistical discrimination or prejudice? A large sample field experiment. The Review of Economics and Statistics , 96 (1), 119–134.

Fernández-Muñoz, A., & Blasco-Camacho, M. (2012). Estrategias de búsqueda de empleo . Centro de Estudios Financieros.

Gaddis, S. M. (2015). Discrimination in the credential society: An audit study of race and college selectivity in the labor market. Social Forces, 93 (4), 1451–1459.

García-Mainar, I., Montuenga, V. M., & García-Martín, G. (2018). Occupational prestige and gender-occupational segregation. Work, Employment and Society, 32 (2), 348–367.

Gorman, E. H. (2003). Gender stereotypes, same-gender preferences, and organizational variation in the hiring of women: Evidence from law firms. American Sociological Review, 70, 702–728.

González, M. J., Rodríguez, J., & Cortina, C. (2019). The role of gender stereotypes in hiring: A field experiment. European Sociological Review , 35 (2), 187–204.

Heilman, M. E. (2001). Description and prescription: How gen- der stereotypes prevent women’s ascent up the organizational ladder. Journal of Social Issues, 57 (4), 657–674.

Ibañez-Pascual, M. (2008). La Segregación Ocupacional Por Sexo a Examen. Características Personales, de Los Puestos de Trabajo y de Las Empresas Asociadas a Las Ocupaciones Masculinas y Femeninas. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Reis), 123, 87–122.

León, M., & Pavolini, E. (2014). Social investment’ or back to ‘Familism’: The impact of the economic crisis on family and care policies in Italy and Spain. South European Society and Politics, 19 (3), 353–369.

McCall, J. (1972). The simple mathematics of information, job search, and prejudice. In A. Pascal (Ed.), Racial discrimination in economic life (pp. 205–224). Lexington.

March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Organizations . Blackwell.

Neumark, D., Bank, R. J., & Van Nort, K. D. (1996). Sex discrimination in restaurant hiring: An audit study. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111 (3), 915–941.

Pager, D. (2007). The use of field experiments for studies of employment discrimination: Contributions, critiques and directions for the future. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 609 (1), 104–133.

Pedulla, D. S. (2014). The positive consequences of negative stereotypes. Social Psychology Quarterly, 77 (1), 75–94.

Petit, P. (2007). The effects of age and family constraints on gender hiring discrimination: A field experiment in the French financial sector. Labour Economics, 14 (3), 371–391.

Phelps, E. S. (1972). The statistical theory of racism and sexism. American Economic Review, 62 (4), 659–661.

Riach, P. A., & Rich, J. (2006). An experimental investigation of sexual discrimination in hiring in the english labor market. Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy, 6 (2), 1–20.

Rodríguez Menés, J., & Rovira, M. (2019). Assessing discrimination in correspondence studies. Sociological Methods and Research . https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124119826152

Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (1999). Feminized management and back- lash toward agentic women: The hidden costs to women of a kin- der, gentler image of middle managers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1004–1010.

Sahni, H., & Paul, S. L. (2010). Women in top management and job self selection. Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal . https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2870673

Skyt Nelsen, H., Simonsen, M., & Verner, M. (2004). Does the gap in family-friendly policies drive the family gap ? Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 106 (4), 721–744.

Torns, T., & Recio, C. (2012). Las desigualdades de género en el mercado de trabajo: entre la continuidad y la transformación. Revista de Economía Crítica, 14, 178–202.

Weichselbaumer, D. (2004). Is it sex or personality? The impact of sex-stereotypes on discrimination in applicant selection”. Eastern Economic Journal, 30 (2), 159–186.

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Julia Rubio, Juan Ramon Jiménez and Guillem Subirachs for their contribution to the field work. The authors also thank the Barcelona MAR Health Park Consortium for reviewing the ethical aspects of this research, and the two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.

Funding was provide by “la Caixa” Foundation (Grant no. Recercaixa2014).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

Clara Cortina, Jorge Rodríguez & M. José González

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

The authors have contributed equally to this article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Clara Cortina .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (7Z 355 KB)

Rights and permissions.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cortina, C., Rodríguez, J. & González, M.J. Mind the Job: The Role of Occupational Characteristics in Explaining Gender Discrimination. Soc Indic Res 156 , 91–110 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02646-2

Download citation

Accepted : 10 February 2021

Published : 01 March 2021

Issue Date : July 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02646-2

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Gender stereotypes
• Gender discrimination
• Correspondence testing
• Field experiments
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

A RESOURCE CREATED BY:

The Racialized and Gendered Workplace: Applying an Intersectional Lens to a Field Experiment on Hiring Discrimination in Five European Labor Markets

Employment chances of minority applicants depend on how well they are perceived to align with the feminine or masculine traits of the job. while white women are strongly preferred for female-type jobs, women of color are not given a similar advantage.  .

Cite this Article

Valentina Di Stasio and Edvard N. Larsen. “The Racialized and Gendered Workplace: Applying an Intersectional Lens to a Field Experiment on Hiring Discrimination in Five European Labor Markets.” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 3, 2020, pp. 229–50, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272520902994.  

Valentina Di Stasio & Edvard N. Larsen. (2020). The Racialized and Gendered Workplace: Applying an Intersectional Lens to a Field Experiment on Hiring Discrimination in Five European Labor Markets. Social Psychology Quarterly, 83(3), 229–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272520902994

Valentina Di Stasio

Edvard n. larsen.

• Introduction
• Methodology

Gender, racial and ethnic stereotypes continue to be obstacles for racial minority groups when applying to a job position. Hiring discrimination fosters economic inequality for both women and racial and ethnic minorities since these groups have to overcome the additional obstacle of bias in the labor market in order to secure an income. 

Intersectionality theory states that social identities are embedded in culturally specific systems of privilege and power. Rather than seeing misogyny, homophobia, racism and other systems of oppression as independent from one another, intersectionality claims these systems are interlocked and the interactions and overlaps should be closely examined. When analyzing hiring discrimination, an intersectional lens turns into a critical tool to understand how different and overlapping identities might affect a person’s prospects to be hired, and what type of jobs they are most likely to be called for. 

In this large-scale simultaneous field experiment in five European countries, the authors analyzed how employers evaluate applicants with intersecting group membership when making hiring decisions, focusing on job positions that are frequently gendered, namely: store assistants, receptionists, payroll clerks, cooks, software developers and marketing/sales representatives. The authors hypothesized that the gendered nature of racial discrimination would differ across minority groups and labor market segment, depending on the existing stereotypes of specific gender-race subgroups.   

Employment chances of applicants of different gender and racial backgrounds depend on how well they are perceived to align with the feminine or masculine traits of the job they apply to. 


• Racial minorities experienced significant discrimination in the labor market. Black and MENAP minorities (people originating from regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan) were 11.8 – 11.9% less likely to be called back, as compared to their white counterparts. Asians and white minorities were 3.7 and 6.6% less likely to be called back, respectively. 

• The discrimination that each racial group faced was consistent across genders. 

• For instance, white women applying to a female-stereotyped job were more likely to receive callbacks. 
• In gendered-balanced or male-dominated occupations, Black and Middle Eastern candidates of both genders faced discrimination.
• Black and MENAP men faced the strongest discrimination when applying to male-type jobs - likely due to the male-stereotyped occupational context making their stereotyped masculinity be perceived as threatening.

The study consisted of a set of large-scale simultaneous field experiments in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain. The research team sent more than 19,000 job applications in six core occupations: store assistants, receptionists, payroll clerks, cooks, software developers and marketing/sales representatives. All applicants were qualified for the jobs they applied to and had four years of uninterrupted work experience, and their ages ranged from 22 to 26. 

Proxied by the applicant´s countries of origin, ethnicity was communicated through names and reinforced through a statement in the cover letter and the language skills mentioned in the resume. The design was factorial, as several characteristics were simultaneously varied across applications, including the gender and race of the applicant.  After the compilation of data, the authors used both linear and logistic regression models predicting callbacks based on ethnicity and gender.

• Top of Page
• Authors & Citations
• Related Studies

Related GAP Studies

Redesigning résumés reduces discrimination against female jobseekers with child-related employment gaps and overall improves hireability of applicants with and without employment gaps. , reducing discrimination against job seekers with and without employment gaps.

Employment opportunities for refugees significantly boosted their psychological well being. For women refugees, it also increased their perceptions of household power and intolerance for intimate partner violence.

The psychosocial value of employment: evidence from a refugee camp.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.