Don’t Mind the Gap: Reframing Résumés Facilitates Mothers’ Work Re-Entry
Journal
Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2021-08
Author(s)
Research Team
Eugenia Bajet Mestre (PhD Student, CCDI)
Professor Dr. Gudrun Sander (PRIMA Host & CCDI Director)
Professor D, Eugenia Bajet Mestre (PhD Student, CCDI)
Professor Dr. Gudrun Sander (PRIMA Host & CCDI Director)
Professor Dr. Winfried Ruigrok (CCDI Director)
Professor Dr. Gudrun Sander (PRIMA Host & CCDI Director)
Professor D, Eugenia Bajet Mestre (PhD Student, CCDI)
Professor Dr. Gudrun Sander (PRIMA Host & CCDI Director)
Professor Dr. Winfried Ruigrok (CCDI Director)
Abstract
Becoming a mother and taking care-related leaves from work contribute to economic gender inequality: Employers’ gender role stereotypes ascribe mothers less qualification and ambition (i.e., agency), which are reinforced by employment gaps in their résumé. We integrate the judgment and decision-making literature to redesign mothers’ résumés in a way that reduces mothers’ barriers to work re-entry. More specifically, integrating signal detection theory, we theorize that by replacing employment dates with the number of years the applicant worked in each job, applicants can better convey their relevant professional abilities and ambition to employers (i.e., signals) without disclosing these distracting employment gaps (i.e., noise). In a large- scale randomized field experiment (N = 9,022), results showed that mothers with this redesigned resume´ received more callbacks than those whose résumés showed employment dates. In an online experiment (N = 667), we replicated and extended these findings to show explicit evidence of our theorized mechanism: applicant agency. By integrating these literatures, we proposed and tested a cost-free, low-effort intervention to reduce inequality by reducing mothers’ résumé gap- related agency penalties and facilitating their return to work.
Language
English
Keywords
motherhood
work re-entry
employment gap
field experiment
behavioral experiment
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SoM - Responsible Corporate Competitiveness (RoCC)
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Academy of Management
Official URL
Division(s)
Eprints ID
264747
File(s)
Loading...
open.access
Name
Kristal et al. 2021 AOMBPP.pdf
Size
101.81 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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