There may be some wisdom to the adage that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Research from Emory University suggests that women are underrepresented in certain fields, such as politics and STEM, because women prefer to work in fields with more perceived gender representation.
Emory psychologists found that women who believed a job had more female representation were more likely to apply — even when the job ads required abilities typically associated with men. The research, conducted by Stella F. Lourenco, Kylee Novick, Ryno Kruger and Arber Tasimi,emphasized that women are less likely to pursue careers in certain industries because women are underrepresented in them, meaning gender representation matters for recruitment purposes.
“Some people may think of gender representation as mostly symbolic — that it’s simply nice for women to see themselves represented in a field,” Stella Lourenco, study author and Emory psychology professor, said in a statement Sept. 14. “What we found is that gender representation is more consequential. It is perhaps a primary reason women decide whether to enter a particular occupation in the first place.”
The Emory findings also suggested, per the research abstract, that “women may be underrepresented in fields associated with intrinsic aptitude — or ‘brilliance’ — because women are stereotyped as not possessing brilliance.”
A murky view of women’s capabilities and confidence — even held by women themselves — continues to be an ongoing conversation in the world of work. Earlier this year, Rockwool Foundation Berlin Institute for the Economy and Future of Work issued a report suggesting that men were more comfortable using outside job offers to leverage a higher salary than their women peers.
In that study of Swedish workers, women moved jobs as often as the men did, which led researchers to conclude the only difference in how pay was managed was renegotiation on the women’s part. A similar takeaway was gleaned from a Cornell University report published earlier this year, where women study subjects felt more discouraged than men when facing job posts with wide salary ranges.
What can be done about the systemic and psychological barriers between women’s abilities and where they can see themselves professionally? Researchers go back to the idea of “brilliance” or “intrinsic aptitude,” and what is called the “field-specific ability beliefs theory.” This theory posits that women may truly be underrepresented in a field because people think that men are inherently more likely to have that intrinsic aptitude — and there is no place for women in these fields, such as philosophy or engineering.
The answer, then, may be in HR and other business leaders not just improving representation in a certain field, but in creating welcoming workplaces. “One hypothesis is that gender representation may be a proxy for workplace climate,” Lourenco said, nodding to workplace expectations about support, inclusivity and competitiveness.
“Gender representation is often spoken of simply as a result of women choosing not to work in a particular field,” Lourenco added, emphasizing once more that gender representation is also an underlying cause of why women feel discouraged from entering certain fields. “It’s really a self-reinforcing cycle. Today’s gender representation likely plays a role in shaping tomorrow’s gender representation.”