Separating gender biases in screening and selecting candidates for hiring and firing

A 2-stage procedure (consideration set formation and final choice) was used to track the emergence of gender biases in hiring and firing decisions. Participants were allowed to select their own strategy for narrowing choice options (which candidates to retain or which candidates to delete). Each of the 2 experiments included a condition where job candidates were considered for hiring and a condition where current employees were considered for firing. Candidate features varied across experiments but the initial set always included 18 females and 18 males with comparable credentials. In both experiments male and female respondents selected candidates of their own sex for hiring and both males and females selected mostly male candidates for firing. In each experiment the bias showed up only in the final-choice stage.