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Introduction
Job applications are a crucial factor considered by managers in the initial recruitment stage and a critical hurdle for prospective employees. Managers use applications to assess whether candidates have the required skills, qualifications and attributes to advance to the next recruitment stage, usually an interview (Cole et al., 2009). Studies demonstrate, however, that women are less likely than men to pass the initial screening phase (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Neumark, 2010; Neumark et al., 1996; Riach and Rich, 1987, 2006), and that managers use gendered assumptions, or stereotypes, to inform their decisions (Heilman and Eagly, 2008).
It is well established that gender stereotypes limit women’s entry into and progression within organisations (Heilman, 2001; Mills et al., 2012; Rhee and Sigler, 2015). The cost of exclusion is high. In Australia, the site of this study, women’s lifetime earnings are around two-thirds those of men. Women also comprise less than a quarter of income earners in the top 10 per cent, and on average, accumulate less than half the retirement savings of men (Stewart, 2017). Organisations also pay a price. Gender discrimination in employment not only places employers in legal jeopardy, it also limits organisational access to talent and reduces profitability, as firms with greater gender diversity in their leadership outperform their less-diverse counterparts (Hunt et al., 2018).
Consequently, organisations concerned about discrimination in recruitment have turned to anonymous recruitment procedures, which remove candidates’ names and identifiers from applications. Public sector organisations in Australia, Canada, France and the UK have announced plans to anonymise job applications (Behaghel et al., 2015; Hiscox et al., 2017; Krause et al., 2012b; Manzoni, 2015; Public Service Commission of Canada, 2018), accompanied by private sector firms such as HSBC, Deloitte and KPMG (Joseph, 2016).
The logic of anonymous recruitment is straightforward: managers cannot use stereotypes to inform their decisions if candidates’ identities are unknown, thereby reducing discrimination. Interestingly, trials of anonymous recruitment have produced mixed results. Some studies have shown that anonymisation increases women’s chances of receiving an interview (Åslund and Nordström Skans, 2007; Krause et al., 2012b), whilst others have found that anonymisation reduces women’s chances (Hiscox et al., 2017; Krause et al., 2012a). Scholars hypothesise that anonymisation may...