The researchers argue that each of those factors might be influenced by gender role socialization, which shapes our basic beliefs about the behaviours that are most appropriate for men versus women, and about the kinds of skills that accompany those behaviorus. For example, if women are expected to play different roles in the workplace and at home than men, then they may also look for different rewards from their work, such as pay, intellectual challenge, flexibility, work/life balance and so forth.
Four nights in a hotel
Specifically, the researchers looked at expected work/life satisfaction with regard to 19 different job types, and found that women were significantly less likely than men to apply for jobs where work/life satisfaction ranked low. “This explained why women weren’t applying for consulting jobs,” says Bidwell. “The hours are not that much worse than investment banking jobs, but the expectation is that you will be staying in a hotel four nights a week. And that doesn’t change. With investment banking, you might work very hard, but you usually sleep in your own bed, and the hours tend to trail off as you get more seniority.”
The second decision factor shaping applications is how people identify with different jobs. Bidwell and Barbulescu found that women identified the least with stereotypically masculine jobs, and they tended to apply to industries that usually employ a higher proportion of women. The third decision factor is whether individuals believe their applications for certain jobs will be successful: It may not make sense for applicants to pour a lot of time and effort into applications for jobs they do not expect to get.
Bidwell and Barbulescu found that at the beginning of the MBA program, men and women showed the same level of confidence that they would get an offer for a specific job in most of the fields they might apply to – except investment banking. There are good reasons that women might have lower expectations of job offer success in stereotypically masculine jobs, says Bidwell, and no industry has more of a macho image than investment banking. “Women just didn’t think they would get jobs there, so they didn’t apply,” he notes.
Equally interesting, says Bidwell, is that when women did apply to investment banking jobs, they were just as likely to get them as the men who applied.
“Our research shows how hard it is to bring about change,” Bidwell adds.” If you tell employers to stop discriminating, it doesn’t mean you will end up with greater access for women to better, higher-paying jobs. Instead, it’s about changing perceptions of culture. You can imagine that if you have a job that is seen as highly macho and aggressive, and you recruit those kinds of people – mainly men – then these perceptions and stereotypes become self-fulfilling. It’s a much more insidious way in which jobs become gendered.”
The researchers emphasize in their paper that “even when there are no gender differences in the likelihood of receiving a job offer, this does not imply that employers do not influence gender segregation.” Indeed, employer decisions may affect applicant behaviour “in ways that we could not detect.” For example, they cite the climate and recent litigation history of some of the sectors they studied, primarily finance, which may have increased the pressure on employers to hire more women, but doesn’t necessarily mean they will promote them into the same senior level positions as men.
The behaviour of employers – and the control they often exert over the workplace – can clearly affect whether women apply for jobs with their companies. For example, the researchers write, “practices that reduce conflicts between work and family demands could reduce” segregation, and “interventions in the way that jobs are structured and role behaviours enacted to emphasise either masculine or feminine stereotypical attributes could also” lessen segregation. But that is not an easy sell. For instance, as the researchers note, “workplaces with fewer women face less pressure to adapt their working styles to accommodate family demands” – an example of how segregation becomes self-perpetuating.
