Gender equitable recruitment and promotion
A guide for organisations
Gender bias is pervasive at work and in organisations, creating inequalities at every stage of the employment cycle, from recruitment
to selection to promotion. This leading practice guide provides evidence-based suggestions for creating more equitable hiring and
promotion systems.
Recruitment and selec tion
Organisations can take various steps to reduce gender bias in recruitment and selection.
Gender neutral job advertisements
Organisations should strive to ensure that job advertisements contain gender-neutral wording. Various
online tools enable organisations to check their job advertisements for language that evoke masculine and
feminine gender stereotypes.
Interview invitations
Organisations should carefully monitor who is applying for jobs and who is receiving interview invitations
to ensure that subtle gender biases (and other intersectional biases, such as age, race, parental status, and
socioeconomic status) are not producing inequalities at the initial recruitment stages.
Use specific recruitment and selection criteria
Specific criteria directly tied to the job should be used to assess job applications. Criteria must be directly
related to the job requirements, and the relative importance of each criterion must be weighted in advance
to avoid the phenomenon of evaluators subtly shifting criteria to favour applicants who fit a stereotypical
profile.
Use structured interviews
Organisations should develop structured interview questions around specific job-related criteria. Rather than developing ‘holistic’
assessments of candidates based on managers’ gut feelings or intuition, organisations should rate each candidate against pre-
established criteria. When making negative judgments about a female candidate’s personality or perceived weaknesses, interviewers
should be trained to use ‘counter-stereotypical’ scenarios to question (either individually or collectively) whether they would have the
same reaction to a male candidate who answered the same question in the same way.
Anonymise performance-related criteria
Organisations need to be aware of the unintended consequences that can arise from anonymous
recruitment procedures and conduct rigorous testing and evaluation to ensure that the process
does not exacerbate existing inequalities. Organisations may wish to consider using anonymisation for
procedures that test work performance (such as work sample tests or job-specific questionnaires), rather
than anonymising resumes.
www.wgea.gov.au Workplace Gender Equality Agency 1
Feedback and promotion
Organisations should also take steps to ensure that gender biases are not holding women back in feedback and promotion.
Train managers to provide specific feedback
Women are more likely to receive feedback that is vague and unspecific, such as being told they are ‘too abrasive’ or ‘too demanding’.
Managers must be trained to provide feedback that is specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timely and thoughtful.
Career development
Organisations should seek to ensure that women and men have equal opportunities for career
development. Managers should be made aware that well-intentioned attempts to protect women from
overwork might limit women’s advancement within organisations and lead to discrimination. Managers
should also be given specific guidance on how to avoid letting gender-based assumptions interfere with
the allocation of career development opportunities.
Valuing alternative leadership styles
Organisations seeking to encourage women’s progression into senior leadership need to be aware of and
sensitive to the dilemma facing women who display traditionally masculine leadership styles and develop
new evaluation frameworks to ensure that alternative leadership styles are equally valued and respected.
Addressing procedural fairness at all stages of recruitment, selection and evaluation may also improve
women’s sense of belonging and persistence in competing for senior leadership roles.
Merit
Organisations should also take steps to make their processes more accountable and transparent, and to
challenge uninterrogated notions of ‘merit’ which can be used to justify discrimination.
Create a dialogue around ‘merit’
Many organisations committed to gender equality have initiated bias awareness training for managers alongside the setting of
organisational gender targets. However, research suggests that educating managers about the existence of biases is not sufficient
to garner support for affirmative action policies. Organisations must also begin a systematic process of challenging and redefining
uninterrogated concepts of ‘merit.’
Research
Further research is required to design and test interventions that effectively reduce or eliminate gender bias in recruitment, selection
and promotion. Such research requires that organisations partner with universities and research laboratories to allow such design and
testing to occur.
www.wgea.gov.au Workplace Gender Equality Agency 2
