Women at Work

Issues in the hiring and promotion process

A problem of perceived ambition.

Entry level hiring

In 2020, I interviewed a couple of people for entry level data analyst positions. Of the two top candidates, one was male and the other was female. When asked about their near-term career goals, the man said that he wanted to learn the company ins and outs enough to be promoted to a data scientist position in a year. The female said that she has so much to learn so she wanted to focus on learning and absorbing as much as she can.

If everything else about the two candidates’ background is the same, who would you hire? Does the man’s answer come across as more ambitious? Is this desirable? What if the female also answered this way? Would it come across as pushy or bragging? If you hired both candidates, would you actually expect their work product to be any different based on their answers?

Leadership program

In our company’s leadership program, all candidates have to pitch to a panel of senior leaders on why they are suitable for the program and what the program would allow them to do for the company in the future. A common part of male pitches include something along the lines of them wanting to do <fill in the blank great thing for the company> as a future C-level executive. Most female pitches often include the same <fill in the blank great thing for the company> but without attaching the “as a future C-level executive” portion.

A frequent feedback to the female candidates is that they don’t seem ambitious enough.

My suggestion: Name the position that you want to your manager and sponsors. Maybe not as immediately or directly as many men would, but make sure to work it into your conversations early on.

Spurious correlations.

One of our executives recently proudly commented that he promoted two females because they were the best for the job (they were in support staff roles). Another executive apologetically commented that he hired a white male executive because there were no qualified women or minorities.

Besides the facepalming comment made by the second executive, it made me wonder about what criteria they were using to judge candidates. “Best” and “Qualified” are obviously defined differently for different roles. But if the roles have traditionally been held by mainly one gender, then “Best” and “Qualified” likely also capture gender and gender traits.

Consider leadership. Wikipedia says: “

Traits traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness. ”

Since leadership has been tagged as a male trait, it doesn’t seem a stretch to think that many hiring managers consciously or not use “being male” as a basis for qualification for leadership positions. (Promoting mostly females in female dominated roles is also a problem.)

My suggestion: When hiring, be very specific and explicit about the characteristics that you are hiring for in order to try to get away from some of the potential gender biases. For example, instead of hiring for a good “leader” (a male trait), hire for someone with “integrity”, “influence”, “empathy”, “courage”, and “respect” (traits that are more gender-neutral or at least have a mix of traits that better represents diversity).