,
8 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
The most depressing research paper of 2018? "The Mark of a Woman’s Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring" (Quadlin 2018, ASR). This is a correspondence study showing that women are penalized in job searches for having good university grades. 
2,106 fictitious job applications for entry-level positions were submitted with randomized manipulation of GPA, gender, and college major. Call-back data shows that GPA mattered little for men's. For women, mid-level performers were called back more than others.
The disadvantage of high-performing women was especially large for people with degrees in Math, as compared to English or Business. This is interesting given that STEM jobs have previously been argued to be relatively gender equal (such as in Goldin 2014).
An additional audit study was directed only at hiring professionals. These were asked to rate applicants' personality traits and give open-ended assessments. As in the first experiment, high-performing women were at a disadvantage compared to mid-performers.
For women in general, being "likeable" was the primary trait driving the hiring-professionals' decisions on who to interview for the job. Open narratives pointed to a strong skepticism of high-performing women's likeability, in particular (see cut-out)...
For low-performing men, the open narratives showed various excuses for low school performance. For these candidates, various other strengths were pointed out (see cut-out)
I personally think that the gender-gap in grades comes partly from women trying to overcome expected discrimination in the labor market, so it is super sad to see that good grades for women may even back-fire. I am curious to see this paper replicated outside the U.S.
Thank you @nquadlin for this important work!
