Why Women Are Often More Hireable Than Men
We’re always hearing about the glass ceiling and other limitations women face in the workplace, but how about some good news? There’s something to be said about looking on the bright side, isn’t there? For many jobs, women are more hireable than men. In this post, we’re going to break down the reasons why.
Women are more selective
According to a recent LinkedIn Gender Insights report, women apply to 20 percent fewer jobs than men. Why? Well, you may have heard the saying that men apply for jobs when they meet 60 percent of the qualifications, but women only apply when they meet 100 percent. The data comes from a Hewlett Packard internal report and it was first quoted in Lean In, The Confidence Code. The reasons women don’t apply for jobs until they’re sure they’re qualified may not be exactly what you think. It’s not a confidence issue that holds us back. Instead, we seem to be most worried about wasting everyone’s time. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? So it’s not necessarily a bad thing that women apply to fewer jobs because we tend only to apply for jobs when we’d have a higher chance of getting them. It seems we’re more conscientious about our applications. I’ll bet most of us are even using a professional resume template to ensure we properly highlight all those on-point qualifications.
Employers trust women more
Because women are more selective in their roles and honest on their applications, employers have a better experience overall when they hire us. And the stats back it up. We know that women apply to fewer jobs than men, but when they do apply, they are 16 percent more likely than men to get hired. And if they’re upgrading their job title, they’re 18 percent more likely to get hired. Ultimately, all data seems to suggest that we should be reaching for higher-paying jobs more often. And that’s encouraging.
Women work harder
While I’d love to sit back and blab about how women are the fairer sex, it’s probably better if I rely on some research to do that for me. A survey titled Report on Workplace Culture: Does Gender Matter makes the case that women make better employees than men. And this isn’t necessarily good news for us personally, but let’s unpack the survey results before we open that can of worms. This survey of 5,250 full-time business professionals found that women work longer hours than men, and they even tend to work more days in the week. More than half of the women surveyed reported working nine-plus hours a day. Only 41 percent of men surveyed said the same. Now on to time off. Sixty-eight percent of women work on vacation, which means they’re checking emails and taking calls while sitting on the beach or touring a new city. Women are also more honest about sick time, rarely calling in sick unless they’re really sick. At least, that’s according to the survey. There’s also a chance some weren’t owning up to lying about sick time on the survey, which would skew the results. So what does this all mean? Women are more hireable than men, and the data shows it. But what it means for us women isn’t as rosy of a picture. Think about all those late nights, extra days at work and working vacays. It almost seems like men get a better deal. Sure, they have a reputation for being less honest and hardworking than women (according to this research), but they don’t have to work as many long days or spend as much vacation time working. Clearly, these are statistics and will not relate to every man or woman. There are plenty of women who lie about sick days and run out the door as soon as they’ve put in a minimum number of hours. But what we’re looking at here are statistics. And as a whole, it seems that women are more hireable than men.