Management 13th Edition by John Schermerhorn,Daniel Bachrach

Exercise 8

THINK BEFORE YOU ACT
"... if you have several pair of shoes available, you're much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes."
Curbing Bias in Hiring Decisions

S tudy Harvard scholars Iris Bohnet, Alexandra van Geen, and Max H. Bazerman asked 100 participants to act as candidates for a new job. They performed a variety of "math and verbal tasks" chosen by the researchers because of the common gender stereotype that "females are believed to be worse at math tasks and better at verbal tasks than males." Another 554 study participants then acted as evaluators to select candidates from this set of 100 for a second round of testing. They were given test results and gender for each candidate. Some evaluators were asked to evaluate the candidates one at a time while others directly compared male and female candidates.
Findings Gender stereotypes influenced the one-by-one evaluations, with female candidates more often chosen for further verbal testing and male candidates for further math testing. When male and female candidates were evaluated together, however, gender stereotypes largely disappeared.
Conclusion One way to curb bias in hiring decisions is to make sure evaluators compare candidates directly rather than one-by-one. Bohnet and colleagues point out: "If you look at one pair of shoes, it's hard to evaluate the quality of those shoes. You will be much more likely to go with stereotypes or heuristics or rules of thumb about shoes. But if you have several pair of shoes available, you're much more likely to be able to compare different attributes of the shoes."
YOUR TAKE
Does this research put its finger on a simple way to remove gender bias from human resource decisions Is it time to stop assessing candidates one at a time and instead compare them to one another directly