Why There Are Fewer Women at Corporate Board Levels

Oct. 23, 2012 - PRLog -- Recent research study carried out by London Business School associate professor Isabel Fernandez-Mateo , with interest in human resource training and management; and Henley Business School Zella King shows that gender inequality in recruitment based on personal recommendation is a key factor that affects women’s chances of achieving board level career progression.

The research tagged, Anticipatory Sorting and Gender Segregation in Temporary Employment’ focused on a medium size recruitment agency operating in the IT industry, which have been in operation for close to nine years with over 23,000 candidates competing  for more than 6,000 job opportunities for around 2,300 clients.

Professor Fernandez and her colleague were privy to the initial recruitment process for an opening with access to candidate’s ‘pre-hire’ information.  According to Fernandez-Mateo, “This kind of information is extremely rare, yet it is essential to make accurate inferences regarding how men and women are allocated to different jobs”.

She states, “We did find evidence of gender segregation. When staffing firms are involved in a hiring process, women are more likely to be shortlisted for lower-paid projects and less likely to be shortlisted for higher-paid projects. By stark contrast, the client companies are more likely to interview women for almost all projects with the exception of some at the top of the pay distribution.”

Favoritism isn't perceivable during the ‘search’ stage of the recruitment process, but can be seen during the ‘sorting’ staged, which the academics refer to as the ‘anticipatory gender sorting’.  Consultants decide on candidate’s eligibility for a role by sorting out skill sets that are closely matched with those highlighted in the job opportunity.  The researchers sort to find possible favoritism and unfair acts of judgement unconsciously enacted by the recruitment agency in the selection of candidates for interviews.

Interestingly, clients also displayed certain level of gender segregation as it appeared that they appeared to pay less attention to applicant’s gender for temporary positions. It would seem that more women were favored for temporal roles than their male counterparts. The utmost concern of the recruitment agency was to pleasing clients and ensuring continuing business, hence repeatedly providing similar candidates that meet client’s expectation; which were likely for be men for top paying positions and women for lower paid roles.  This assumption that client’s client a particular gender for a type of job opening is in itself, a practice of gender inequality.

To tackle the issue of gender inequality in recruitment, one of the tools to consider is human resource training for consultants. Candidate’s eligibility for a role should be assessed based on their skills sets and competency to fill the role and not on their gender.

For more information, visit http://www.london.edu/programmes/executiveeducation/human...