What I have realised making one interview a day for 30 days
you might be surprised.
I have always enjoyed interviewing people, maybe because it connects you with a broad of stories and experiences giving you a different perspective over the world.
Last month I have interviewed at least 20 people, one interview a day, not exclusively for the same position. It was really enjoyable for sure, but after the 10th interview it’s hard not to find patterns among the candidates. I was kind of chocked with my discovery. Maybe I knew this deep inside since the beginning and just wanted to pretend it doesn’t happen, but it was undeniable that women were more likely to think less of themselves.
It started with languages spoken. While women used to describe their English proficiency as "intermediate" (even when they were advanced!!!), men used to score themselves higher in the CV than their real proficiency. Then you go deeper into questions about experience. Women in general tended to answer they were juniors in some position when it was clear they were almost seniors. You can already imagine that something like that didn't happen with men.
I was devastated. Why such thing happens so frequently? Don't these women know how good professionals they are? And then I came to a realisation: I do the same. My female friends do the same. It is a psychological pattern and it is called Impostor Syndrome.
From Cambridge Dictionary, Impostor Syndrome (IS) is
the feeling that your achievements are not real or that you do not deserve praise or success.
We can also understand it refers to a belief you are not as competent as other perceive you to be, that you just got where you are through luck. Among the symptoms, the most common are: self-doubt, inability to realistically assess your competence and skills and berating your performance.
As Brian Daniel Norton, a psychotherapist and executive coach, once said, “women, women of colour, especially black women, as well as the LGBTQ community are most at risk.”
And why IS hits women harder than men? Let's discuss briefly the main reasons.
The representativeness issue
How many women in high leadership your company has? According to the 2020 research "Women in the Workplace" from Lean In (a US organisation), women are still less likely to be promoted than men.
"For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted — and this gap was even larger for some women: Only 58 Black women and 71 Latinas were promoted. " When it comes to management level positions, "they [women] held just 38 percent of manager positions, while men held 62 percent."
You may be asking yourself why this is relevant when discussing IS. Well, if women don't have role models to be inspired, they are more likely to believe they don't belong to that environment. Quoting the American clinical psychologist Emily Hu, “we’re more likely to experience imposter syndrome if we don’t see many examples of people who look like us or share our background who are clearly succeeding in our field.”
Last but not least, technology is one of the areas that has less female workers. According to Eurostat, only 17% of the roles in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are held by women. In leadership positions, the situation is even worst: only 5% of the leadership position in technology industry are occupied by women.
Not surprisingly, we could recruit only 30% of female candidates to the interviews in a team that is already formed by 82% male workers (no women in the tech leadership).
The stereotype issue
I have discussed a little bit about stereotypes and their influence over our judgement in this article. When it comes to women, probably you've heard things like:
"Women are not good for leadership positions because they are too emotional."
"Women are not good at maths and science."
"Women tend to worry more."
These sentences might sound trivial or even irrelevant, however a study conducted by WHO/John Hopkins University concludes that they affect girls from a very early age reducing their aspirations and limiting their career options.
When we were doing recruiting researches to convoke the candidates to the interview, we faced comments like "it's easier to find women for this particular role, but impossible to find female developers, specially a good one."
I have no doubts this comment was not intentional, but did the person think about its implications? I hardly believe so. We face comments like this in a daily basis and it's part of our roles as advocates to bring people's attention to how prejudicial it is to perpetuate this line of thinking.
The beauty industry is also part of the problem. According to Hu, “if you’ve grown up with messages that you’re only valued for your looks and your body, not your skills or intelligence, you may end up getting a certain job or position and wondering whether you truly deserve it or if the hiring manager just thought you were a pretty face.”
The 'raising women' issue
Most women are still raised to be good wives and values as respect, grace and prettiness are encouraged by parents to their daughters. Women are taught they cannot fail in any circumstance, they need to be perfect. If you are a woman you probably have been told to act like a lady at some point of your life.
And there is no surprise to the mention that the need for perfection increases the insecurity. The first study that analysed job application data from women and men was the one published by Hewlett Packard. Even it's dated from 2014, the statistics are still true: women tend to apply to a job position only if they fulfil all requirements, while men apply to a job if they fulfil only 60% of the requirements.
Seeking perfection also decreased the performance of some female professionals during my interviews. In almost all cases, women were not able to mention a project that they succeed. They always pointed some flaws and never took the credit for themselves.
What is being done
As we discussed, the statistics are still against women when it comes to the workplace, however we can see efforts been made worldwide.
Recently, UN recognised that all countries and individuals have responsibility for the future of our society and launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and one of them is directed to gender equality. Because of this initiative, several companies have gender equality goals related to their financial results.
We also have several global organisations that promote gender inclusion such as Women in Tech.
If you are also involved in job interviews like me, I'd like to ask you something: be understandable, be curious, be kind. Make women comfortable during the interview, show them they are in a safe place. Bring women to interview women. Also try to avoid individual interviews. When you have more people interviewing the same person in a unique session, decisions are more likely to be bias-free.
The fight against IS in women is both individual and collective. As the data has shown, we are moving forward very slowly and we will just speed up this change if we fight together.
