It's a man's world! The role of political ideology in the hiring process for leadership positions

Previous research on gender discrimination has explored whether and why women are less likely than men to occupy leadership positions in organizations. The current research contributes to this literature by exploring one form of discrimination, subtle and rather unexpected in nature, as it occurs during the hiring process when the decision maker presents information about a leadership position to a potential job candidate. Drawing on role congruity theory and research on political ideology, we predict an interaction effect between a job candidate’s gender and the decision maker’s political ideology on the way the information about a position is presented. In the first two studies, we demonstrate that conservative (but not liberal) decision makers present more positive information about a leadership position to male, versus female, job candidates. In an effort to assess the gravity of this subtle form of discrimination, we conducted a third study, wherein we demonstrate that the position description conser...