ORIGINAL ARTICLE Gender Bias in Leader Selection? Evidence from a Hiring Simulation Study Janine Bosak & Sabine Sczesny Published online: 12 June 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The present research investigated factors that might affect gender discrimination in a hiring simulation context from the perspectives of social role theory and the shifting standards model. Specifically, the experimental study investigated whether gender biases are evident in the screening and hiring stage of the personnel selection process depending on the applicants’ social role and evaluators’ gender. A sample of German undergraduate business students (54 women, 53 men) was asked to make a personnel selection decision (short-listing or hiring) about a fictitious applicant (man or woman) in a specific role (leader or non-leader) for a managerial position. Consistent with social role theory’ s assumption that social role information is more influential than gender information, participants selected applicants described as leaders over applicants described as non-leaders, regardless of applicant gender. In addition, in the presence of role information, female applicants portrayed as leaders were similarly short- listed and hired as male applicants with the same credentials. In the absence of role information, female applicants were similarly short-listed as male applicants; however, male applicants were hired over female appli- cants, albeit by male participants only. This is consistent with the shifting standards model’ s assumption that group members are held to a higher standard to confirm traits on which they are perceived to be deficient: Male participants hired female applicants portrayed as non-leaders with less certainty than their male counterparts possibly due to higher confirmatory standards for leadership ability in women than men. The research and practice implications of these results are discussed. Keywords Gender stereotypes . Leadership . Social roles . Sex differences . Personnel selection Introduction “The intellectual, social, and economic contributions of women are vital to organizations and to economic progress in general, as well as to our communities. So why are more women not making it to the top?” (Davis 2008, p. 9). Despite women’ s greater access to leadership roles in recent years (United Nations Development Programme 2008), gender stereotypes and prejudice towards female leaders continue to contribute to the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles (for an overview, see Bosak and Sczesny 2008; Eagly and Sczesny 2009), and this appears to be particularly true in Germany. Evidence from German managers (Sczesny 2003a) and from German business students (Schein and Mueller 1992; Sczesny 2003b) shows that gender stereotypic beliefs about leadership still prevail in men’ s and women’ s view of leaders and women in Germany. In recent years, a considerable amount of research related to the question of gender bias in the selection of leaders has documented that male candidates are preferred over female candidates for masculine gender-typed jobs such as leader roles (see Davison and Burke 2000, for a review of 21 U.S. studies on gender discrimination), and that men more often than women endorse traditional J. Bosak (*) Dublin City University, Business School, Dublin 9, Ireland e-mail: janine.bosak@dcu.ie S. Sczesny University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Sex Roles (2011) 65:234–242 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-0012-7