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decisionmakers are required to justify the decisions they make and describe the criteria they use to
evaluate candidates, as in open competition, they are less likely to discriminate against women.
In open competitions (Tab. 9), the recruitment procedure is a combination of examinations, scrutiny
of the curriculum and qualifications, and interviews.
Tab. 9 - Gender pay gap between employees recruited through open competition and without open
competition.
|
Explained pay gap |
Unexplained pay gap |
Raw pay gap % | |
|
Recruitment through open competition |
39,64 |
60,36 |
12,12 |
|
Recruitment without open competition |
33,99 |
66,01 |
12,09 |
When employees are recruited through open competition, performance appraisal is more objective,
more structured and less ambiguous, thereby reducing the conditions for gender stereotypes to
flourish. In our data (Tab. 9), when employees are recruited through open competition the
unexplained component of the gender pay gap is lower.
6 - Does an excellent educational performance reduce the gender pay gap and its unexplained
residual?
In summary, psychological research suggests that, without any information about the prior
successes of an applicant, people tend to automatically assume that male candidates are more
qualified and competent than female candidates. In order to counteract these perceptions and their
consequences, some women may self-promote and make explicitly clear that they are exceptionally
qualified candidates and top performers in their field. Sorting models of education (Arrow 1973;
Spence 1973; Stiglitz 1975; Weiss 1995; Riley 2001) suggest that education is often used to draw
inferences about unobserved characteristics of individuals: if the abilities that are correlated with
schooling positively affect productivity on the job, education may be a good signal of a worker’s
productivity.
This may be the informative role of educational performance.
But our data show that being excellent at school does not ensure that a woman will be rewarded as
an equivalently performing man, since an excellent educational performance increases gender pay
gap from 11,55% to 14,32% (Tab. 10).