Job Seeker Creates A Fake Male Resume To Prove That She's Being Passed Over For Interviews Because She's A Girl
Her experiment highlights the gender discrimination most women face in the workforce.
João Ferrão via Unsplash / Ahmed Maghraby via Canva A woman revealed an experiment she used while job hunting after realizing she was being discriminated against.
Posting to the subreddit "r/TwoXChromsomes" — an online forum intended for women to share incidents that have happened in their lives, both professional and personal — a woman shared that she recently started applying for jobs and noticed a pattern when it came to getting responses from hiring managers.
She created a fake male resume to prove that she was being passed over because of her gender.
In her Reddit post, she explained that she works in offensive security, which is a predominantly male-dominated field, and lately, she noticed that she wasn't being invited to participate in interviews despite her resume and work experience matching all of the job positions she'd applied to.
"I have 4 years experience and I'm trying to change company. I keep sending [cover letters] for the past year for red teaming roles. No response," she wrote. It's even more disheartening since she has all of the certifications and achievements needed for the role and is more than qualified enough.
Photo: LightField Studios / Shutterstock
However, whenever she does hear back from hiring managers, they either tell her that she's "too old," even though she's only 37 years old, or that the company she applied to only consists of "young males" which the hiring managers claim would be "too awkward" of an environment for her to work in.
After hearing the same things over and over, she chose to conduct a bit of an experiment by creating a fake male resume and cover letter to see if she would get the same responses. On the resume, she put down her same years of experience but didn't include any of her certifications or other outstanding achievements.
"Nearly all companies called this 'person,'" she recalled, adding that she installed a voice changer app on her phone to make it seem as if she were a man during the phone conversations with hiring managers, proving that her experiment worked and she had been discriminated against because she was a woman.
A staggering number of women have admitted to being subjected to gender discrimination in the workplace.
According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, about four in ten (42%) of women in the United States say they have faced discrimination on the job because of their gender. Among employed adults, women are also about twice as likely as men (42% versus 22%) to say they have experienced at least some kind of gender discrimination.
Women are four times as likely as men to say they have been treated as if they were not competent because of their gender (23% of employed women versus 6% of men), and they are about three times as likely as men to say they have experienced repeated small slights at work because of their gender (16% versus 5%).
Photo: Ground Picture / Shutterstock
When it comes to the pay gap between men and women in the workforce, 25% of working women say they have earned less than a man who was doing the same job, while 5% of working men say they have earned less than a female peer.
By excluding qualified women, like the Reddit poster who was forced to take matters into her own hands, from job opportunities, companies miss out on diverse perspectives, skills, and talents that could contribute to the growth of their teams.
Companies need to do better when it comes to only offering job positions to men and having their organizations be male-dominated. By refusing to hire women because of misconceived and misogynistic views of their gender, those aspiring women are, unfortunately, passed over for positions that they rightly deserve.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.