Most of us have heard a great deal in the news about women and minorities who are passed over for positions in fields that are mostly dominated by men. What we hear far less about, however, are when men are turned away from positions that are traditionally dominated by women.
In a story appearing on the CNN website, Julia Carpenter, a correspondent for CNN Business, reports about a recent study conducted by the University of North Carolina in Charlotte in which Assistant Professor of Sociology and Organizational Science, Jill Yavorsky, determined that men also face issues of discrimination in terms of hiring biases as well.
The study found that the fields of financial management, sales, manufacturing, and janitorial duties were dominated by men. Women, on the other hand, tended to make up the majority of HR professionals, administrative assistants, customer service representatives, and housekeeping jobs. Yavorsky decided to test her theory of bias and discrimination by submitting resumes from men and women for some 3,000 jobs. The jobs applied for were either for minimum wage and middle or working class jobs. Each job applied for received both a male and female resume.
What Yavorsky found was that in spite of qualifications for each job, both men and women suffered because of such hiring biases. The study found that hiring decisions that are based on outmoded and sexist gender stereotypes as to the assumed capability to do the job that they applied for can be just as detrimental to men as it is to women.