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7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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GENDER

Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume by Lauren Rivera and András Tilcsik

DECEMBER 21, 2016 UPDATED APRIL 04, 2017

https://hbr.org/topic/gender

https://hbr.org/search?term=lauren+rivera

https://hbr.org/search?term=andr%C3%A1s+tilcsik

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7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of

coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. The stakes are

high: getting one of these rare internships virtually guarantees full-time

employment after law school. The salaries are unbeatable, six-figure sums that

catapult young students to the top 5% of household incomes nationally and are

often quadruple of those offered in other sectors of legal practice. These jobs

also open doors to even more lucrative employment in the private sector as well

as prestigious judiciary and government roles. For these reasons, employment

in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1%.

Now imagine four applicants, all of whom attend the same, selective second-

tier law school. They all have phenomenal grade point averages, are on law

review, and have identical, highly relevant work experiences. The only

differences are whether they are male or female and if their extracurricular

activities suggest they come from a higher-class or lower-class background.

Who gets invited to interview?

We set out to answer this question in a series of studies reported in the

December 2016 issue of American Sociological Review. Based on prior

research showing that hiring in top professional services firms is highly skewed

toward applicants from wealthy families, we expected that an applicant’s social

class background would play a decisive role in determining interview

invitations. And indeed, we found that, in contrast to our national lore that it is

individual effort and ability—not family lineage—that matters for getting good

jobs, elite employers discriminate strongly based on social class, favoring

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/81/6/1097

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10457.html

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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applicants from higher-class backgrounds. But our research uncovered a

surprising — and disturbing — twist: coming from an advantaged social

background helps only men.

We uncovered this through a field experiment with the country’s largest law

firms. Specifically, we used a technique — known as the resume audit method —

that is widely seen as the gold standard for measuring employment

discrimination. This method involves randomly assigning different items to the

resumes and sending applications to real employers to see how they affect the

probability of being called back for a job interview. All in all, we sent fictitious

resumes to 316 offices of 147 top law firms in 14 cities, from candidates who

were supposedly trying to land a summer internship position. All applicants

were in the top 1% of their class and were on law review, but came from

second-tier law schools. This was important because graduates from the most

elite law schools (e.g., Harvard and Yale) are typically recruited on-campus. But

law school students from second-tier schools must compete for coveted

internship positions by sending in their resumes directly to firms in hopes of

attracting employers’ attention by virtue of their C.V.s.

We signaled gender by varying the applicant’s first name (James or Julia).

Directly indicating a parent’s occupation or income on a resume might be

strange for an employer to see, so we signaled social class position via accepted

and often required portions of resumes: awards and extracurricular activities.

Reflecting the fact that social class is a complex characteristic that cannot be

boiled down to income, education, or lifestyle alone, we used a constellation of

resume items to signal social class.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pager/files/annals_pager.pdf

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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For example, to capture the economic

component of class, our lower-class

applicants received an award for

student-athletes on financial aid. To

incorporate its educational competent,

they listed being a peer tutor for fellow

first-generation college students. By

contrast, our higher class candidate

pursued traditionally upper-class

hobbies and sports, such sailing, polo,

and classical music, while the lower-

class candidate participated in activities

with lower financial barriers to entry

(e.g., pick-up soccer, track and field

team) and those distinctly rejected by

higher-class individuals (e.g., country

music). But crucially, all educational,

academic, and work-related

achievements were identical between

our four fictitious candidates.

Even though all educational and work-related histories were the same,

employers overwhelmingly favored the higher-class man. He had a callback rate

more than four times of other applicants and received more invitations to

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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interview than all other applicants in our study combined. But most strikingly,

he did significantly better than the higher-class woman, whose resume was

identical to his, other than the first name.

Why did the higher-class man do so much better than the higher-class woman?

To further explore this issue, we conducted a follow-up experiment with a

sample of 210 practicing attorneys from around the country. We asked each

attorney to evaluate one of the same resumes we used in our field experiment

and to tell us whether they would like to bring the candidate in for an interview.

We also asked them to rate their candidate on factors proven to influence how

favorably people view job candidates but that vary between men and women.

These included perceptions of the candidate’s competence, likability, fit with an

organization’s culture and clientele, and career commitment.

http://asr.sagepub.com/content/75/6/894.abstract

7/23/2018 Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume

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Just like the employers in our audit study, the attorneys we surveyed favored

interviewing the higher-class man above all applicants, including the higher-

class woman. This time, though, we were able to understand why. Attorneys

viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as being better fits with the

culture and clientele of large law firms; lower-class candidates were seen as

misfits and rejected. In fact, some attorneys even steered the lower-class

candidates to less prestigious and lucrative sectors of legal practice, such as

government and nonprofit roles, positions that tend to be more

socioeconomically diverse than jobs at top law firms.

But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-

class men, attorneys declined to interview these women because they believed

they were the least committed of any group (including lower-class women) to

working a demanding job. Our survey participants, as well as an additional 20

attorneys we interviewed, described higher-class women as “flight risks,” who

might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might

even leave paid employment entirely. Attorneys cited “family” as a primary

reason these women would leave. Parenting strategies vary between social

classes, and the intensive style of mothering that is more popular among the

affluent was seen as conflicting with the “all or nothing” nature of work as a Big

Law associate. One female attorney we interviewed described this negative

view of higher-class women, which she observed while working on her firm’s

hiring committee. The perception, she said, was that higher-class women do

not need a job because they “have enough money,” are “married to somebody

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3534372.html

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