Women more likely than men to be hired for jobs below their qualification level
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Overqualified women and sufficiently qualified men tend to be hired for the same jobs and ranks, according to a study published in Organization Science.
Findings from the study suggest that hiring managers reject overqualified men for job roles because they are suspicious about overqualified male candidates’ motivations, deeming these men as “flight risks,” fearing that they will move on to better opportunities.
Conversely, overqualified women are more likely to be hired despite their excessive qualifications.
“The unfair disadvantages that women face in organizations and the labor market are well established. Women are likely to end up with jobs that are below their qualification level relative to men, which is evidence of gender inequality being perpetuated in hiring decisions,” Elizabeth L. Campbell, PhD, MSc, assistant professor of management at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management, told Healio. “This work was sparked by my interest in wanting to better understand this phenomenon for women and what can be done about it.”
Campbell spoke with Healio about her research on gender inequality in the workplace, why it is important to bring this information to light and the implications of the findings.
Healio: What prompted this research?
Campbell: My research has always been focused on gender inequality in the workplace from my own personal experiences, and the older that I got, I have realized that sexism is still very much a problem in the workplace. This bothered me, and so I wanted to dedicate my academic career to better understanding how sexism can look different now than it did 20 or 30 years ago but still persist. There is a tendency to think that because we do not see the same blatant sexism that was acceptable 30 years ago that means that we have reached equality, but this is not the case. This is what spurred my research program more broadly, and specifically I wanted to understand the barriers that women continue to face when advancing up the organizational hierarchy.
Hiring decisions are one of those gatekeeping processes that impact how quickly women move up the organizational ladder, and barriers in hiring processes can be an area where discrimination happens. Overqualification is an interesting phenomenon as more and more people are overqualified for their jobs. Millennials, and particularly younger generations, are highly educated and more so than prior generations and are applying for jobs that historically wouldn’t have required the same level of expertise.
Articles have been written in the popular press about this phenomenon of overqualified workers in the labor market, but there was not much understanding as to how people respond to overqualified workers. A paper came out a couple of years ago by my collaborator, Oliver Hahl, PhD, in which he looked at overqualification more broadly and showed that overqualified workers face negative assumptions because people think they are a “flight risk” and are too good for the job and will ‘jump ship’ as soon as something better comes along. Therefore, hiring managers hesitate to bring them in for an interview. I discussed with Hahl how interesting the paper was but that the method they took did not allow for them to explicitly examine gender. The expertise that I had developed to that point led me to believe that this phenomenon that overqualified workers would be rejected would not extend to women. There is a lot of work that show women face these unfair double standards in demonstrating their competence. It seemed unlikely to me that women would be seen as overqualified in the same way that men are.
Healio: How do these findings apply to medicine?
Campbell: Medicine is an interesting field because clinicians are extremely highly qualified individuals, and if overqualification was relevant to any industry, it would certainly be medicine. The field of medicine also remains male-dominant in top-tier positions. Women face a lot of unfair barriers in advancing in their careers despite general societal progress toward gender equality. This phenomenon is directly relevant to the challenges that female physicians are going to be facing daily when they look to change organizations where they work or generally when they are on the job market.
Healio: How did you conduct the research?
Campbell: We used an experimental method in which we recruited hiring managers and had them evaluate profiles of equivalent male and female job candidates that we created. We created two types of candidates — those that met the qualifications of the job, who we dubbed ‘sufficiently qualified,’ and those candidates who had double what was required, whom we dubbed ‘overqualified’ candidates. This allowed us to make equivalent comparisons between sufficiently qualified men and women and overqualified men and women. This is important because there is criticism on gender equality research suggesting that equivalent comparisons are not being made, which isn’t usually true but is a way to try to discount the legitimacy of the work. This method avoids that.
We then had hiring managers evaluate these candidates. We asked them how good of a fit they think the candidates are for the job, how likely they would be to offer them a job and their perceived commitment of the candidate in terms of how committed they would be to the firm and also in their career more generally.
Healio: What are the key findings?
Campbell: Overall, we found that hiring managers hesitated to hire overqualified men and they much preferred to hire sufficiently qualified men because they thought that overqualified men were a flight risk. Prior work shows that this phenomenon of overqualified workers being rejected only extends to men, which is a very important distinction that this paper makes. However, we found the opposite to be true for women. Overqualified women were more likely to be hired despite their excessive qualifications, more so than sufficiently qualified women and overqualified men.
We asked hiring managers open-ended questions that explain their decisions to give us qualitative insights. For men, they could not rationalize why a man would apply for a lower ranking position and take a step back in his career. As a result, they were very suspicious. They thought this overqualified man would “leapfrog” from their job to a better position and they would not be able to rely on this man’s long-term commitment to the firm.
Conversely, the hiring managers found ways to rationalize overqualified women’s motivations. They recognized that women were overqualified. However, it was easier for them to come up with reasons why an overqualified woman would apply for the position. They relied on many gender stereotypes when making this rationalization. One example was that hiring managers assumed women would be less likely to ‘job hop’ because they’d want to keep their relationships with their current job. They had no way of knowing that assumption is true and made this assumption based on a resume, relying on stereotypes that people have about women being more relationship oriented.
Also, hiring managers assumed there might be a reason why women are willing to take a lower ranking job at a company. They postulated that the candidate’s current firm discriminated against them, leading to trouble advancing, and thus the women are willing to take a lower ranking position to get them out of that situation. The irony of this is that hiring managers were thinking about women’s possible experience with discrimination but at the same time knowingly hired them for a position that they were overqualified for.
Healio: Why do you speculate that these assumptions happen?
Campbell: We dug more into why hiring managers were making this rationalization, and it emerged that this idea of commitment was a bit more complicated for women than for men. For men, the hiring manager needed to know if the men were committed to the firm and men’s commitment to advancing in their career was taken for granted. However, women face many biases when it comes to career commitment — dubbed the motherhood penalty — in which women face discrimination in the workforce because people assume that they are going to be less committed to the job due to competing demands between their family and work because women are stereotyped as the primary caregiver, whereas men are stereotyped to be the “bread winners.” This stereotype seemed outdated to us considering that many families in America are dual-income families. Still, there is evidence that women do a disproportionate amount of the caregiving and child care at home. However, that hiring managers would assume that women would not be committed to their careers purely because they are women was interesting because the resumes included nothing about their children or family life. When looking at these findings from 10,000 feet, they show that women have to be overqualified to convince people that they are committed to their career.
Healio: What can be done to change this?
Campbell: My collaborator and I have discussed potential interventions that we could design to help women deal with these biases. We ultimately came down to the fact that awareness of these issues isn’t cutting it. Many organizations partake in antibias training and have campaigns about increasing awareness of the challenges that women face in their careers because of gender bias. Even our data showed this. Yet, it didn’t seem to matter. Hiring managers still reproduced inequality by being comfortable hiring overqualified women but not being comfortable hiring overqualified men. Even with good intentions, this still equals inequality.
With all of this in mind, organizations need to do more to develop policies and procedural changes that help keep this from happening. What research shows is that antibias training increases awareness, but the effects are short-lived in terms of reducing inequality unless they are linked to actionable changes. Instating procedural changes within the organization is one way to do this. For hiring, more rigorous policies could be put in place regarding how candidates are evaluated in terms of qualification level.
Hiring managers need to work with leaders in their department to develop procedures that ensure they evaluate men and women equally because we found that hiring managers are making a lot of assumptions about both men and women’s motivations, and whenever we make assumptions based on limited information, that is when biases influence behavior. There may be an overqualified man who wants to take a position because perhaps he wants a career change and is open to taking a lower ranking position, or perhaps he wants to spend more time with his family and therefore wants to scale back his career. It’s become more accepted in society for men to do this, and we do not want overqualified men to be rejected for jobs where they could be a good fit.
Healio: Is there anything else that you would like to mention?
Campbell: Overqualified men and women should be evaluated in the same way to ensure equality in the future. It is wonderful that more people are aware of the barriers that women face in the workplace, but awareness is not sufficient anymore. We need to take more action developing actual procedural shifts that help ensure gender equality. We need to structure the system correctly to ensure equality. We need to stop putting the onus on women in terms of fixing gender inequality but rather change the systems that are in place that are perpetuating this inequality.
References:
- Campbell EL and Hahl O. Organization Science. 2022;doi:10.1287/orsc.2021.1550.
- Galperin RV, et al. Administrative Science Quarterly. 2019;doi:10.1177/0001839219840022.
For more information:
Elizabeth L. Campbell, PhD, MSC, can be reached at ecampbell@ucsd.edu.
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