

Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified - howardlet03
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified/

======
dredmorbius
I'm not sure this article either supports its title or the claims the author
makes within it.

The "women don't apply" finding comes from an HP study that's been widely
quoted.

The author states:

 _Men and women also gave the same most common reason for not applying, and it
was by far the most popular, twice as common as any of the others, with 41% of
women and 46% of men indicating it was their top reason: “I didn’t think they
would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to
waste my time and energy.”_

 _In other words, people who weren’t applying believed they needed the
qualifications not to do the job well, but to be hired in the first place.
They thought that the required qualifications were…well, required
qualifications. They didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy,
relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could
overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job
qualifications._

Based on a survey of 1,000 men and women ... the results for why people don't
apply for jobs are pretty similar. I haven't checked for statistical
significance, but what I'm _not_ seeing is wildly divergent rationales by
gender.

Of course, there's an obvious experimental design failure here: the question
asked was " _if_ you decided not to apply for a job...", which fails to
capture any real sense of what response rates amongst candidates of roughly
equivalent qualifications actually were.

And yet the author continues to describe the HP study as "useful".

I'm left questioning the validity of both HP's research and the author's own
analysis.

------
Canada
False premise. Women apply for jobs they aren't qualified for all the time.

~~~
dredmorbius
If you RTFA, that's pretty close to the author's point: that _both_ men and
women tend to not pursue opportunities at pretty equivalent rates, for rather
similar reasons.

