What students say about gender in hiring software professionals

We asked students to make hiring decisions for a program manager and a software engineer for a fictitious software company. In one population of students, a pool of four candidates was provided. In another population of students, the candidates differed from the first in that the descriptions of two of the candidates were represented by the opposite gender. This poster provides evidence to help answer the following research questions: 1) Does gender matter in the rate of selection among candidates? and 2) Does gender matter in how candidates are perceived? Through analyzing students' work, we show that gender plays a role: the female candidate is more popular and assumptions and perceptions about candidates vary with gender.