Originally found at Essence

Women are taking control of their professional lives more than ever, specifically when it comes to where they apply.

New research shows that women are still grossly underrepresented in a myriad of industries and the blame mostly lies on the employer. As Forbes’s Kim Elsesser pointed out, the data showed that if the earliest hiring decisions at a new company exclude women, which they often do, then the organization will have difficulty attracting female talent in the future. As a result, entrepreneurial companies that start with gender disparities have a tough time correcting the imbalance.

The data was published in the Academy of Management Journal, and analyzed over a half million job-seeker decisions made by more than 8,000 people from a startup job-search app. The potential applicants could swipe right or left on a job based on its description, in the vein of Tinder.

The researchers found that male-dominated startups attracted fewer women. When women made up less than 15% of an organization’s workforce, female applicants were almost 30% less likely to apply than their male counterparts. The more gender-balanced the organization, the more likely women were to apply. For organizations where women represented more than a third of the workforce, the gender composition of the company no longer had a significant impact on the gender gap in job applications.

Continue reading the original article at Essence.

Read the original research in  Academy of Management Journal.

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Yuval Engel, University of Amsterdam
• Trey Lewis, Virginia Tech
• Melissa S. Cardon, University of Tennessee