Effects of evaluators' sexism, candidates' attractiveness, and gender-congruence of occupations on employee selection decisions

The recruitment phase and subsequent decisions regarding employee selection constitute a crucial aspect in ensuring that organizations possess the appropriate workforce to fulfill their objectives. Nevertheless, scholarly investigations indicate the potential emergence of biases during the recruitment process and the employee selection decisions. These biases can lead to inequitable candidate selection influenced by factors such as perceived physical attractiveness of the candidates, candidates' gender, and the congruence of candidates' gender with the occupation. This study aimed to explore the influence of a candidate's physical attractiveness, gender, and the gender-role congruence of the occupation on decisions related to personnel selection. These decisions encompassed the candidate's employability level, the offered wage ranges to candidates, performance expectations from the candidates, and expectations regarding the candidates' job motivation. Additionally, the present research examined the impact of evaluators' benevolent and hostile sexism tendencies on personnel selection decisions. Moreover, the moderating effects of candidates' gender and gender-congruence of the occupations on the association between evaluators' benevolent and hostile sexism and the candidates' employability level, offered wage ranges, performance expectations, and job motivation expectations were tested. The data were collected from a total of 651 participants online using Qualtrics web application. A 2 (gender of the candidate: female – male) × 2 (physical attractiveness of the candidate: low – high) × 2 (gender-congruence of the candidate's occupation: low – high) mixed factor quasi-experimental design was utilized in the present study. Gender, physical attractiveness, and gender-congruence of the candidate's occupation were the between-sample variables. The within-sample variable was the sexism scores of the participants. Data analysis was completed using IBM SPSS 26th version software. The findings revealed that, as expected, attractive candidates and candidates with gender-congruent occupations were in a more advantageous position in personnel selection decisions compared to unattractive candidates and candidates with gender-incongruent occupations. Contrary to expectations, no significant effect of gender was found on the variables of employability level, offered wage ranges, performance expectation and job motivation expectation. Again, contrary to expectations, the moderating role of the candidate's gender in the relationship between evaluators' benevolent and hostile sexism levels and personnel selection decisions was not significant. However, as anticipated, the moderating effect of gender-congruence of candidate's occupation on the relationship between evaluators' benevolent and hostile sexism and the personnel selection decisions was significant. Exploratory analyses results, on the other hand, revealed that the physical attractiveness of the candidates moderated the relationship between the evaluators' benevolent sexism levels and the personnel selection decisions. However, no moderating effect of candidate's physical attractiveness was found on the relationship between evaluators' level of hostile sexism and personnel selection decisions. In summary, this study offered valuable insights into personnel selection dynamics, highlighting the influence of physical attractiveness of the candidates and gender-congruence of the occupations on employability scores, offered wage ranges, performance expectations, and job motivation expectations. Furthermore, the study underscored the pervasive influence of sexism on evaluative judgments, emphasizing the imperative for organizations to address these biases to foster equitable employee selection processes. The results were discussed by highlighting how the present study adds to existing theoretical knowledge and real-world applications, acknowledging the study's limitations, and proposing recommendations for future research.