We have mentioned before that the first thing you need to do when looking for your next role is to identify the fact that a successful job seeker is a successful self promoter.
There is an interesting point about this – women tend not to be as good self-promoters as men – there’s lots of research that backs this up. Whether by nurture or nature, women tend to be more generous at bestowing glory elsewhere, rather than taking it for themselves. We also know that women are far less likely to guess the answer in tests – they either know the answer and say so, or don’t and often leave the answer blank. Men will have a stab at something even if they are not sure of their ground.
All of which suggests that most standard selection methods might discriminate against females. Take the interview for example. a prime moment where, as an interviewee, you need to be very positive about your own achievements and take as much of the credit for all of those great things that have happened in your career as you can. Some on these will have been just good fortune and being in the right place at the right time, but in an interview, you can make it seem all part of your master plan. Dare we suggest that people exaggerate in interview – of course they do – and men might well be better at that than women.
Perhaps certain tests, (as long as you’re not penalised for having a wrong guess) favour men who are prepared to guess, where a women may not.
A very insightful paper, published in the Harvard Business Review, is “Do Women Lack Ambition?” written by Anna Fels a couple of years or so ago. In it Anna argues that it is likely that even young girls playing with baby dolls are being accidently programmed to believe to put others before them, and that a maternal instinct means developing a generosity which might count against them in certain aspects later in life.
Perhaps recruiters need to think more about this – whether there really is a bias in some of the processes they hold so dear – and take a fresh look at how to address the balance. Perhaps there is a glass ceiling after all…