Gender Bias in the Evaluation of Application Letters: The Interplay of Gender Stereotypicality, Argument Structure, and Linguistic Features

Buscicchio G. Gender Bias in the Evaluation of Application Letters: The Interplay of Gender Stereotypicality, Argument Structure, and Linguistic Features. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2022.Starting from the current European situation, the labor market still seems to be characterized by the unbalanced percentage of women and men in different job sectors. Social psychological literature has addressed this gap in terms of several factors, especially gender stereotypes. To examine which factors act together in causing this mismatch, I focused on the effects of the manipulation of the language in which stereotypical or counterstereotypical applicants’ traits and weaknesses are presented on the evaluation of female and male target applicants. To this end, I conducted three pilot studies and three studies. The three pilot studies were used to test the effectiveness of the experimental conditions of language and the descriptions in terms of stereotypicality versus counterstereotypicality. Study 1 was aimed at investigating the effect of abstract and concrete terms along the two dimensions of communion and agency on the perceived honesty and evaluation of female and male applicants. The aim of Study 2 was to investigate the effect of disclosing weaknesses along the two dimensions of lack of agency and communion on perceived honesty and evaluation of female and male applicants. Study 3 was built based on the findings from Studies 1 and 2 and was aimed at investigating the effect of abstract and concrete terms, along with agentic traits and weaknesses, on the perceived honesty and evaluation of female and male applicants. These effects were tested while considering also the effect of participants’ cognitive processes and internal characteristics (i.e., gender bias, attitudes toward women, self-reported communion, and agency, perception of the ideal applicant in terms of communion and agency, perception of applicant’s prototypicality), which were integrated into a new path model that was analyzed in each of the three studies. Literature has not considered as many different internal characteristics all together in one single model before. Results showed that manipulating language in which information on traits and weaknesses was presented helped only female applicants to increase their evaluation: Women described with counterstereotypical (agentic) traits in concrete terms, as well as women described with stereotypical traits (communal) in abstract terms had more chances than their male competitors of being hired for the same gender-neutral job. In the former case, women showed that they were agentic, but moderately, satisfying in this way the double standards request to be both agentic and communal. In the latter case, they confirmed the participants’ gender expectations, not violating in this way their gender prescriptions. The final path model revealed different paths, in which the perceived honesty of applicants plays the mediating role in the relation of some of participants’ internal characteristics with the evaluation of applicants. According to my findings, it seems to be confirmed that women are evaluated along with double standards. Therefore women should be agentic but not to the extent in which they gain an advantage over men. Moreover, this research contributes to shedding light on the effects of recruiters’ perceived cognitive load and processing fluency (as self-reported measures) when interacting with applicants’ prototypical traits on the evaluation of female applicants. Managing female applicants’ presentations might represent a possible device for bypassing gender stereotypes, at least in the first steps of a woman’s career