As a result, entrepreneurial companies that start with gender disparities have a tough time correcting the imbalance., examined over a half million decisions by more than 8,000 job seekers from a job-search app focused on job listings for startup companies. Job seekers could swipe through the app’s Tinder-like interface by deciding whether or not to express their interest in each job ad they viewed. Each job description on the app included the gender makeup of the organization.
The researchers found that male-dominated startups attracted fewer women. When women made up less than 15% of an organization’s workforce, female applicants were almost 30% less likely to apply than their male counterparts. The more gender-balanced the organization, the more likely women were to apply. For organizations where women represented more than a third of the workforce, the gender composition of the company no longer had a significant impact on the gender gap in job applications.
Strikingly, women made up less than 15% of the workforce in more than one in five startups in the study, indicating that female underrepresentation is common in these new companies. And the gender imbalance becomes self-reinforcing. If men represent the vast majority of current employees, then women don’t enter the candidate pool, further exacerbating the problem.
Lead author of the research and professor at the University of Amsterdam, Yuval Engel, explains how this gender imbalance can occur in the early stages of company growth. “Hiring decisions are made by the founders themselves rather than professionals experienced in recruitment and hiring. These founders often gravitate towards recruiting from their personal networks and do not typically invest in any formalized policies or procedures to protect themselves from bias,” he says.
Why don't women start they own?
Forbes says choice is wrong. Women must run startups whether they want to or not: Do women have to become vicious or is this an emasculation story? Is being risk adverse really that bad of a trait? tt:lizpeek