For mid-career STEM professionals looking to advance their skills and careers, certificate programs at elite universities can offer a fast track. And for universities, such programs are an important and growing revenue stream—and a recruitment tool for women and underrepresented groups.
Yet, new research suggests that gender bias seeps in before women even apply to these programs, undercutting the goal of broadening applicant pools and bolstering equity in business—particularly in technology. It’s happening as universities lean on vendors to recruit prospective participants, handing them as much as 80 percent of tuition for delivering top applicants.
“If you're not really thinking about how these little subtle differences might occur here, before people even apply, then maybe you're missing out on potential non-traditional applicants.”
In candidate outreach, recruiters are calling male prospects more often and having longer conversations with them than similarly qualified women, according to Harvard Business School assistant professor Jacqueline Ng Lane. These outside recruiters appear to rely on gender stereotypes even more when the number of prospects they’re assigned to contact each week rises, cutting time spent on each potential applicant.
“This is the very, very beginning of the process,” Lane says. “And so, if you're not really thinking about how these little subtle differences might occur here, before people even apply, then maybe you're missing out on potential non-traditional applicants.”
Certificate programs often pay off for participants, and ensuring success for all involved—the universities, graduates, and future employers—is big business. Some 40 percent of graduates studied received a raise or promotion by graduation. Another 36 percent were given new job responsibilities. Six months after graduation, those figures rose to 70 percent and 42 percent, respectively, the research shows.
166,000 prospects called and emailed
Lane collaborated on the work with Karim R. Lakhani, the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and Roberto M. Fernandez, Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
To study how recruiters looked for candidates, the scholars examined initial calls and emails to 166,000 prospects from 2017 to 2019 by an outside recruiting firm. They screened for names that could be understood as male or female and analyzed intake data collected on the program’s webpage about the prospects’ credentials, including level of education and current job.
Recruiters were paid a salary and given a weekly volume target, rather than commission. Each of 44 recruiters were randomly assigned prospects on a tier system that gave highest priority to the most experienced leads with the best academic records.
The average applicant was 42 years old with 18 years of work experience. About two-thirds of them had advanced degrees, with more than half working at a director level or higher.
The risks of shortcuts in a time crunch
More men hold jobs in STEM—short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics— professions at this level than women. With the tiered calling system, recruiters were more likely to pay attention to the credentials of female prospects before targeting them, prioritizing female prospects with higher-ranking positions, grade point averages, and experience first, but showing no such preferencing strategy for the male prospects. That rose notably when the number of calls assigned per week increased.
The outside firm’s phone calls to recruits are unscripted and can last from about a minute to more than an hour, the researchers note.
“If your experience suggests that male prospects are more likely to be a positive signal compared to your female prospects, then you may try and exhaust the male prospects in your queue before you get to your female ones.”
“When you don't have time, and you're just trying to get through all the people that are flooding into your queue, then you're going to rely on shortcuts,” Lane says, noting the recruitment firm was surprised by the findings and is already making changes.
“If your experience suggests that male prospects are more likely to be a positive signal compared to your female prospects, then you may try and exhaust the male prospects in your queue before you get to your female ones,” Lane adds. "Because you're trying to call and you're also trying to convert. And so, statistically speaking, you go to the male sounding names.”
Advice for everyone involved
So, how should stakeholders improve the process? Lane offers the following advice:
For universities: Pay close attention to details when choosing a recruitment firm—and make sure your goals are clear.
“This is all about incentives and the design of your partnership,” Lane says. “And if diversity is something you want to promote, then you want to make sure that every party or partner working on this is aligned.”
For recruiters: Examine how you direct outreach efforts, and attach metrics other than volume to the job.
For employers: Don’t worry about losing your best employees to training—take the risk. “This is one way to really educate your employees and keep them fresh,” Lane says.
For students: Finish your application rather than wait for a recruiter to guide you.
For women: In interviews, male students mentioned they had asked employers to pay for the training. Women hadn’t.
“This was such a lightbulb moment for me,” Lane says. “Women just weren't asking for sponsorship. So, if you never asked your employer, then of course, you have to sponsor it yourself. My advice is: Just ask.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: iStockphoto/skynesher