4 unexpected ways you might be holding women back (even if you identify as one

Are you confident you’re doing more than just paying lip service to inclusion?

Every year, LinkedIn is awash with corporate accounts celebrating International Women’s Day, restating their commitment to equity and inclusion and shouting about all the inspiring women they are grateful to have working for them. 

There’s no denying that this is a good thing. Especially in industries where female representation is typically low –– after all, you can’t be what you can’t see. 

But for as many posts as there are using the #IWD hashtags, there are often also a handful of posts asking…

👉 Why we are still struggling to make progress? 

👉 Why do we still have a gender pay gap that will take until 2051 to close? 

👉 And why do many companies feel motivated enough to post about International Women’s Day, but not motivated enough to fundamentally change their systems to improve female representation to #InspireInclusion for real? 

But maybe it’s not as simple as that. 

TA teams have been striving to improve the equity of their processes in a bid to create more balanced shortlists for years. But despite a lot of effort, even the most committed TA teams have struggled to make progress. 

Why? 

Perhaps we haven’t necessarily realised some of the ways we’re holding women back. 

If you’re still striving to #InspireInclusion this International Women’s Day, you might want to stress test whether you’re holding yourself back from achieving high-quality, gender-balanced shortlists by employing some of these methods…  

1. Relying on CV-based sifting 

There are over 135 biases that can come into play in a CV-based sifting process. And gender bias is obviously one of them. 

A report on ‘gender bias in hiring’ from our friends at Applied shared the results of a study in which researchers applied for a variety of jobs using exactly the same application –– changing only the gender. The results?

 In the words of the Applied team, “this tells us that men tend to be favoured for typically male roles. And women tend to be favoured for typically female roles. If a job is dominated by the opposite sex, and you’re sifting based on CVs, you’re likely to be penalised and that elusive gender-balanced shortlist is likely to keep evading you.” 

Additional research done by Applied also showed that replacing CV-based sifting with psychometric assessment-based sifting improved female representation by a whopping 68% compared to the global average. Over half (52%) of all successful candidates were women, up from the global average of 31%. 

If diversity targets are evading and you still haven’t scrapped the CV, this might be the year to ask yourself why not.

2. Focusing your job adverts on experience, not transferable skills or future potential

We’ve all heard the story before… “Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.”

If you’re still listing hard and fast requirements, qualifications, and experience as critical for a role –– especially a role where the talent pool is limited or you’re already facing a skills shortage –– you could be unintentionally shrinking your talent pool. 

 Instead, you might want to take a leaf out of Siemens EA’s book. Faced with a skills shortage and a role that had been open for 200+ days, the Siemens TA team decided to start recruiting for the role differently. Instead of advertising for a role with a long list of requirements around experience, they decided to focus on a candidate’s future potential and transferable skills. 

Their application volume grew 542%, they achieved a 50:50 gender shortlist (despite only 16% of engineers in the UK being female) and the quality of candidates was so good, they could have hired every single one. 

If this insight is making you think it’s time to start re-evaluating your job adverts, check out step three of this practical playbook on how to move away from experience-centric hiring.  

3. Using proctoring to mitigate against AI-enabled candidates 

Many TA teams are struggling right now with a dramatic increase in application volume thanks to tools like AutoApplyAI and a drop in candidate quality at later stages of the selection process, thanks to the fact that candidates can now use ChatGPT to outperform the average in many traditional question-based psychometric assessments (from SJTs to Aptitude tests to Personality assessments).  

One of the ways that some TAs are choosing to mitigate this is by employing proctoring — typically to stream live or record a test-takers entire assessment session by auto-enabling a device’s webcam before an admin or AI system monitors for ‘suspicious activity’. 

But the challenge is, while only 43% of candidates are comfortable with proctoring, women are even less comfortable –– in fact, only 35% of women are happy with this kind of monitoring. 

If you’re using proctoring in your selection process and you’re seeing a gap between the number of up-front applications from women before a big drop in numbers at later stages of the application process, this could be why. And it might be time to look for an alternative. 

4. Using Black Box AI-driven sifting tools 

Finally, there’s no doubt that ethical use of AI does exist and it can be used exceptionally well to help TA teams develop more scalable selection processes.

But you probably don’t need us to tell you that –– just like the humans who built it –– AI is inherently biased. 

Last year, a report emerged which revealed that “the world according to Stable Diffusion [a text-to-image AI model] is run by white male CEOs. An analysis of more than 5,000 images created with Stable Diffusion found that it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world.” For example, all but two of the hundreds of images generated with the prompt “engineer” were men. 

While this is just one example of a product and one that wasn’t designed specifically for talent acquisition teams, it does highlight an important consideration. Any AI-fuelled talent acquisition tools –– especially those built on open-sourced models or those where the algorithm cannot be clearly and simply explained by a professional psychologist or data scientist –– must be questioned and stress-tested for bias. If you can’t be confident there isn’t any, you can’t be confident your process is equitable. 

Moving forward 

International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate all of the amazing women that we’re fortunate enough to work with –– across talent acquisition and beyond –– but it’s also a chance to step back and ask whether we’re really doing enough to create a fairer, more inclusive, and more equitable world of work. Over to you. 

3 IWD nuggets of wisdom 💡

📈 While women’s participation in labour markets is increasing, this PWC Women in Work report ‘Unmasking inequalities’ identifies that women continue to face pay disparities compared to men –– read to dive deeper into the data 

🌎 The World Economic Forum delves into the data behind why we have International Women's Day and why we still need it, spotlighting issues surrounding gender parity

📑 A survey of HR magazine readers revealed the state of HR in 2024 –– zooming in on bias-free recruitment processes, AI usage in HR, and why  career growth is a key recruitment tool

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