J’avais entendu dire que les femmes (plus que les hommes) répondaient aux offres d’emploi si elles avaient TOUTES les qualifications requises tandis que les hommes étaient plus “souples” avec seulement 60% des qualifications requises. Cette situation serait due à un manque de confiance en soi visiblement supérieur chez les femmes que chez les hommes.
Voici un article de la Harvard Business Review du 25 août 2014 qui donne plus de détails sur l’origine de cette situation :
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
Extraits :
- Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.
- What held them back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception about the hiring process. This is critical, because it suggests that if the HP finding speaks to a larger trend, women don’t need to try and find that elusive quality, “confidence,” they just need better information about how hiring processes really work.
- Women may be wise to be more concerned with potential failure; there is some evidence that women’s failures are remembered longer than men’s. But that kind of bias may lead us to become too afraid of failure—avoiding it more than is needed, and in ways that don’t serve our career goals.
- There was a sizable gender difference in the responses for one other reason: 15% of women indicated the top reason they didn’t apply was because “I was following the guidelines about who should apply.” Only 8% of men indicated this as their top answer. Unsurprisingly, given how much girls are socialized to follow the rules, a habit of “following the guidelines” was a more significant barrier to applying for women than men.
- For instance, a McKinsey report found that men are often hired or promoted based on their potential, women for their experience and track record. If women have watched that occur in their workplaces, it makes perfect sense they’d be less likely to apply for a job for which they didn’t meet the qualifications.
- Second, girls are strongly socialized to follow the rules and in school are rewarded, again and again, for doing so. In part, girls’ greater success in school (relative to boys) arguably can be attributed to their better rule following. Then in their careers, that rule-following habit has real costs, including when it comes to adhering to the guidelines about “who should apply.”
En conclusion, may the woman force be with us 😉
