Why 'Higher-Class' Women Won’t Get That Biglaw Job: Hiring Biases That You Won't Believe!

What are some possible solutions to this problem?

need a job LFYou know that you want that job. Badly. And you know that you are oh-so-qualified.

But you don’t get it. You – who are top of the class!

Ever hear of hiring bias?

We like to think – hell, we are long-trained to think – that objective evidence of merit is or should be the sole criteria in hiring. You know – the ability to do the job and who can do it best.

But not so fast. Humans being humans, subjective criteria creep into the process – some legal and some not-so-much, some conscious and some not.

Tribes And Stereotypes

Let’s start with the obvious: we all want to work with – and hire – people just like us. Humans are tribal and don’t like, or are at least suspicious of, other tribes. Some refer to this as the similarity-attraction hypothesis.

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And we just love stereotypes – we use them to classify and understand those who we don’t know. Workplace stereotypes are not illegal – unless they are (see Title VII), and when it comes to hiring we tend to hire who we (think we) know, and base a lot of this on stereotypes.

In the 21st century, stereotypes could not be easier to use – just look up an applicant on Facebook or LinkedIn, and bingo! You can tell gender, age, race, and ethnicity, as well as social class. What else do you need to know? (P.S. This is one reason employment lawyers try to talk clients out of using social media for hiring).

As Olga Mack and Katia Bloom recently noted in these pages, “The use of gender-specific language predicts the gender of the person you hire at the end. A highly masculine listing makes it twice as likely that the position will be filled by a man. Similarly, a highly feminine listing makes it twice as likely that the position will be filled by a woman.”

Studies have shown that people with ‘white’ or ‘domestic’ names get more interest from employers than those with ‘black’ or ‘foreign’ names.”

And the Wall Street Journal reported on a study using dummy résumés and social-media profiles which found that up to one-third of American companies searched social media “profiles” which, when indicating that applicants were Muslim, resulted in fewer interviews than Christian applicants.

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Moreover, one writer said that “Americans tend to assume Indians who come to the U.S. are skilled at math,” and commented that “people were more likely to hire a male candidate over a female candidate to perform a mathematical task, even when they learned that the candidates would perform equally well.”

So Should We Hide An Applicant Behind A Sheet?

Not a bad idea.

One expert said that “blind hiring”– hiding personal information, such as faces and names – may be useful, and he cited an oft-told story. “More than fifty years ago, several orchestras began to experiment with auditioning candidates behind a sheet to shield a performer’s gender or race from the selection process. It made a dramatic difference in getting more women and minorities onto the stage.”

Short of a sheet, we can “remove identifying information, such as names, gender, etc., from résumés. Candidates can’t be unfairly discriminated against on the grounds of gender and race if they are only identified by a number.”

Even Zip Codes?

Another writer noted that “It’s also common to draw conclusions about a person based on what zip code they live in, where they attended school, where they worked in the past, or their gender or ethnicity based on the derivation of the candidate’s name.” How do you avoid that?

And what’s worse, a Harvard study even found “some pitfalls in the use of postal zip codes” which are used for research, which they referred to “spatiotemporal mismatches.” What this may mean is that you are your zip code, even if the zip code demographics are not accurate.

Oy.

Can Computers Hire?

Maybe we can “let[] computers do the selection. … they don’t have a subconscious and simply don’t carry all that unconscious baggage around with them like mere mortals do. This arguably makes them bulletproof against claims of stereotyping and bias.”

Wrong.

The New York Times discussed that “there is growing evidence that algorithms and other types of software can discriminate. The people who write them incorporate their biases, and algorithms often learn from human behavior, so they reflect the biases we hold.”

And there’s another problem called “redundant encoding” – The Stack gave an example: even if gender is not included in a loan application, “gender can be inferred from other data factors which are included: for example, if the applicant is a single parent, and 82% of single parents are female, there is a high probability that the applicant is female (emphasis added).”

So we can infer gender — or even age or race – from the accumulation of other big data?

Not good.

So Tell Us Finally – Why Can’t “Higher-Class” Women Get That Biglaw Job?

I commend to you a fascinating article by two professors who discuss “subtle class cues” and prior research which shows “that hiring in top professional services firms is highly skewed toward applicants from wealthy families.” They note that résumé items such as extracurricular activities can signal class status (see playing polo v. interning with a dentist).

They came to a disturbing conclusion: “coming from an advantaged social background helps only men” and hurts women. But why?

Biglaw apparently deems “higher-class women as ‘flight risks,’ who might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might even leave paid employment entirely. [They] cited ‘family’ as a primary reason these women would leave.”

So résumés that somehow signal “higher-class woman” may be bad for your chances at that plum job.

Oh well. Guess we are not at bias-free hiring yet.

Earlier: Combatting Unconscious Hiring Bias
Biglaw Hiring Bias? Men With High-Class Hobbies More Likely To Get Summer Associate Interviews Than Women


richard-b-cohenRichard B. Cohen has litigated and arbitrated complex business and employment disputes for almost 40 years, and is a partner in the NYC office of the national “cloud” law firm FisherBroyles. He is the creator and author of his firm’s Employment Discrimination blog, and received an award from the American Bar Association for his blog posts. You can reach him at Richard.Cohen@fisherbroyles.com and follow him on Twitter at @richard09535496.