Introduction
My thesis is about gender discrimination in recruitement and work-life balance. Women are recognized as a target of gender discrimination in the worplace because in general, they don’t get the same wage as men or they don’t have the same opportunities to advance in their career. I focus my thesis on recruitement because it is another situation sensitive to gender discrimination. We can see in a lot of studies that when recruiters are looking for someone to have access to an hight-responsibility position, they better prefer to recruit a man than a woman. Work-life balance refers to the way workers live their balance between work and family. I choosed this subject because it can concern every workers and not only women. Behind the word family, we can also consider the private life in general (associations, hobbies, time-free..) and that’s why according to authors, everyone have to juggle with work and private life.
Hypothesis
This research aims to assess the potential impact that the personal life of a candidate may have on the assessment of recruiters in accessing a higher or lower professional status. The research will therefore focus mainly on the effects of gender and personal profile (career vs. family) in accessing a job with high responsibilities or moderate responsibilities. Since women are more sensitive to work-life balance issues, the aim is to explore the possible impact of the private sphere of women on the professional sphere, particularly in hiring situations. According to the studies carried out in this field, the general hypothesis of this research is that, in addition to gender, the balance between a candidate’s personal and professional life will constitute a criterion that causes discrimination, particularly in access to position with strong responsibilities.
H1: “Men will be evaluated more favorably than women”.
H2: “Candidates with career profiles will be evaluated more favorably than candidates with family profiles, especially for positions with high responsibilities”.
H3: “These effects will be accentuated by the position of the participants on the work-life balance scale”.
Methodology
The main objective of this study is to highlight a potential influence of the balance of recruiters in terms of privacy and professional life on the evaluation of a candidate in recruitment situation. To do so, through a questionnaire, students in management or human resources were asked to evaluate a candidate for a position with a high or low level of responsibility. The application is characterised by the presence of indicators relating to the candidate’s gender and profile (careerist or family).This questionnaire begins with the presentation of a fictional job advertisement (marketing manager and marketing assistant) and a report from a consultant about a candidate following an interview. The job profile is about a high status position or about a low status position. The candidate presented have the same background, only the gender and the type of profile are different (man/woman and careerist/family).There follow several questions to measure respectively the level of recommendation of hiring attributed by the participant, the level of qualification attributed to the fictitious candidate as well as its personality traits (skills and sociability) and finally the level of balance between the professional and personal spheres of the participant.
Results
To date, with a relatively small sample size, the results show a lack of gender effect on the assessment and evaluation of candidates. The effect of the type of profile is found significant only for the level of qualification assigned to the candidates. In addition, the balance of participants about the articulation between private and professional sphere does not influence any of the variables of the study. For the next exam session, the objective will be to increase the sample size and analyze participants’ discourse to the open question of the questionnaire, in order to observe if there are some discriminating arguments in their comments towards women or family profil.
Words I have learned :
Work-life balance = équilibre travail-vie privée
Background = expérience
Hiring situation = situation de recrutement
To juggle = jongler
650 words.