Job recruiters may be swayed by signs of our sexuality revealed in our faces

By Alex Fradera Vacant job roles should be filled on the candidate’s skills, experience and knowledge, not their identity. But that means dodging our deeply held stereotypes, such as men being a natural fit for decision-making roles like management and women for care-giving professions. Evidence suggests this also applies to sexual orientation, meaning, for instance, that CVs that indicate the candidate is homosexual (for instance, by mentioning college experience in a group promoting gay rights) are likely to be seen by recruiters as a better match for care-giving roles. New research from the Journal of Applied Psychology adds to this, suggesting that merely looking gay is enough for a candidate to be treated in a biased way by recruiters. Nicholas Rule and his colleagues from universities at Toronto and Stanford conducted several studies, each involving between 68 and 201 participants. In every study, participants read about a target job, in most cases either a nurse or engineer, and then estimated the likely success of 90 different candidates, based only on a photo provided of each one. These cropped photos were originally taken from dating sites, ensuring that sexual orientation data was known by the researchers for each candidate. Participants repeatedly predicted gay candidates would have more success applying to nursing positions than heterosexual candidates, and they predicted the reverse pattern for the engineer position. This effect was also found when participan...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Faces Job interviews Occupational Source Type: blogs