Brian Lucas | The Longer List Effect: Requesting More (vs. Fewer) Candidates Increases the Consideration of Women in Male-Dominant Domains

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Women continue to be underrepresented in male-dominated occupations and leadership positions, partly due to informal recruitment practices (e.g., referral-based hiring) that can disadvantage women in the recruitment process. In this talk, I discuss two projects that test a simple, theory-driven intervention to increase the consideration of women: request a longer list of candidates. In the first project, we found that people were more likely to list female candidates when asked to generate a longer (versus shorter) shortlist for a male-dominant role, and that this occurs because continued response generation promotes divergence from the category gender prototype. In the second project, we partnered with an organization to test our intervention in the field. We found that requesting more (vs. fewer) referrals increased the number of women referred, we distinguished prototype divergence and goal-setting as two mechanisms operating in this context, and we found that a sample of HR professionals largely overlooked requesting a longer list as a strategy to promote gender diversity.

Brian Lucas is an Associate Professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His research focuses on creativity and morality in the workplace and everyday life.