Sex-Role Stereotyping, Gender Biases, and Job Selection: The Use of Ordinal Logit in Analyzing Likert Scale Data

Sex-role stereotyping and gender biases are examined in a study of 246 individuals. Results show that previous gender biases in job selection have all but disappeared; however, biases still seem prevalent in the assessment of individuals' long term success on the job. Specifically, the findings showed that while gender biases are found only slightly in the hiring decisions of male and females evaluators, the perception of the applicant's future job performance was generally less favorable toward the female applicant as compared to males. An important contribution of this study is in the methodology. It introduces the use of an ordinal logit framework which improves upon previous research by exploiting the simultaneous and ordered nature of a Likert scale.