Linguistic gender bias in personnel selection: The role of competence, morality and sociability

Despite widespread public commitments to equal opportunity and an abundance of research illustrating the commercial benefits of diverse leadership, currently there is a worldwide solid gender disproportion of senior business roles. Why it is still so difficult for women to reach such high status-jobs? Is it plausible that this gender inequality starts at the very beginning of the job selection process through linguistic attributions made to evaluate candidates’ performance? Language is a motivated action and a refined tool individuals use to transform ideas into linguistic behaviors (e.g., Menegatti & Rubini, 2014; Moscatelli & Rubini, 2013; Rubini et al., 2014; Semin, 2000). Therefore, the linguistic evaluations reported by selectors represent a noteworthy measure to examine the motivations that guide outcome selection. In an ecological study conducted within a public organization we examined the terms used by female and male selectors to describe each candidate for a senior business position. We showed that men were expected to be more competent to be eligible for high status positions, whereas women were expected to be both more competent and more moral. Moreover, female selectors attributed higher sociability to female candidates and male selectors attributed higher competence to male candidates and both female and male selectors attributed higher morality to their ingroup candidates. The implications of these results are discussed.