High GPA Could Work Against Young Women Job Hunters

Women earn better grades than men across levels of education — but to what end? Natasha Quadlin, assistant professor of sociology, designed a novel study to find out.

She set out to get a job.

Quadlin submitted 2,106 dummy job applications to more than 1,000 entry-level positions around the country. The “candidates,” whose resumes indicated that they were recent college grads, were grouped into one of three majors (English, business and math). Within each major, they were either given a grade point average that was “low” (2.50 to 2.83 GPA), “moderate” (2.84 to 3.59 GPA) or “high” (3.60 to 3.95). For each position applied for, Quadlin sent two resumes that were essentially the same, except for the applicant’s gender, major and GPA.

What happened next disheartened, but didn’t necessarily surprise, Quadlin.

Male college graduates were called back at about the same rate regardless of their grades. The highest-achieving men received callbacks 16 percent of the time, and the men with the lowest grades still received callbacks at a rate of about 12 percent — rates that were not statistically different from each other.

“For men, GPA didn’t really matter that much,” Quadlin said.

For women, however, things went a bit differently, regardless of their outstanding academic profile.

“If women had grade point averages in the A or A-minus range, they tended to be called back less often than their male counterparts,” said Quadlin.” A lot less, in fact. The difference in the rate of callbacks between men and women with high grades was nearly 2-to-1. And the difference was even greater for math majors.

To try to figure out why women were receiving fewer callbacks, Quadlin followed up on her job applications with a survey. She asked 260 hiring managers to look at the resumes and rate the candidates on qualities such as competence and social skills, and indicate how likely they would be to recommend each person for an interview.

Quadlin found clear evidence of discrepancies in how the hiring managers perceived male applicants and women applicants when gender was the only thing that set these applicants apart from each other.

For example, the hiring managers were more likely to recommend male applicants for an interview when they viewed them as “competent” or “committed.” But when it came to female applicants, managers were most likely to want to interview candidates they perceived as “likeable.”

According to Quadlin, managers seemed to be relying on gendered stereotypes that penalize women for having good grades. And that was true regardless of the manager’s gender.

“Regardless of whether men or women were making the hiring decisions in the follow-up survey experiment, they penalized high- achieving women approximately equally,” Quadlin said.

The research also found that employers were more likely to call back moderate-achieving women, who are often perceived as “likeable,” over the top performers.

“Employers value competence and commitment among male applicants, but instead privilege female applicants who are perceived as likeable,” Quadlin said. “This standard helps moderate-achieving women, who are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, whose personalities are viewed with more skepticism.”

“We think gender inequality is something that we’ve really solved as a society and we’ve moved past it,” she said, “but there are still subtle ways that biases emerge to penalize women.”

Quadlin’s study appeared in the April 2018 issue of the American Sociological Review, available to read here: go.osu.edu/soc-gpa.