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I’ve had more conversations than I ever imagined I would with my junior colleagues about whether they should wear their wedding rings to interviews. Many have been advised, or have read in some advice column, that they should not wear a ring or anything else that might show the interviewer their personal status. In my experience, most of my colleagues end up choosing not to wear a ring. They don’t want to be asked questions about their partner or children that could cause potential employers to doubt their seriousness about the position or the likelihood of a move. Clearly, your decision to disclose your personal status—as a wife, mother, or racial or sexual minority—is deeply personal.
It’s also a very consistent decision, as research shows that disclosing such information in an interview can affect how potential employers view a candidate’s seriousness about the job, their willingness to work long hours, and ultimately their likelihood of they offer him a job. In a study of academic hiring, sociologist Lauren Rivera, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, concluded from her field observations of hiring meetings that academic hiring committees “actively consider the relationship status of women, but not of men when choosing employees’ in ways that ultimately disadvantage women. In another study by psychologists Alexander Jordan and Emily Zitek, participants who discovered that job applicants were single or married from fictitious Facebook pages rated married applicants as less hardworking and less suitable for demanding jobs compared to unmarried ones candidates.
I think we can agree that someone’s marital status should not determine whether or not they get hired. Yet, whether explicitly or implicitly, it appears to play a role in hiring decisions. That’s why we have protections in place for job applicants that allow them to keep this and other information private if they choose. Questions about marital status, pregnancy, religion and mental health, to name a few, should not be asked – not necessarily because they are illegal to ask per se, but rather because they open the possibility that the candidate’s answer to the question can be used against them in the hiring process. After all, it’s better not to know that the candidate is pregnant, for example, so there’s no chance it will affect your decision to hire her.
If it’s better not to know, it’s probably better not to ask. Yet this is a place where many of us slip up. We often forget how difficult it is for people to decline a request or avoid answering a question, especially when the question comes from a potential employer.
In one survey of applicants to medical residency programs, researchers found that 66 percent — more than 7,000 of the survey’s roughly 11,000 respondents — reported being asked a potentially illegal interview question. Fifty-three percent, or more than 5,700, of interviewees reported being asked about their marital status, and 24%, or more than 2,500 interviewees, reported being asked if they had children or planned to have children. Not surprisingly, these questions are more likely to be directed at women than men. Applicants also reported being asked about their age, religion and sexual orientation — all of which are class-protected information, meaning employers cannot legally use that information to make hiring decisions. Still, as we saw above, once you have this information, it’s hard not to let it color your judgment of a candidate, for better or worse.
According to numerous interview advice articles aimed at interviewees, if you’re a job applicant and asked one of these questions, you should “politely decline to answer.” This is good advice – in theory. But the research shows that it’s much harder to refuse to answer such questions than we realize. For example, in one study, women faced with an interviewer asking apparently inappropriate sexual questions felt too uncomfortable and afraid to say no, even though they were sure they would say no when considering a similar situation hypothetically. Similarly, it is difficult to “politely decline” to personally sensitive questions about whether you are married or plan to have children. We don’t want to offend others—especially someone who controls an outcome as important as a potential job offer—and refusing to answer a question seems like a surefire way to instil the interviewer’s insensitivity for asking it in the first place. This is not exactly the kind of relationship most interviewees hope to establish with the interviewer.
Thus, most people do agree to answer personal questions in interviews, even if it means revealing information about their personal lives that they would otherwise like to keep private. As part of a field research project, organizational behavior researchers Catherine Shay, Sunita Sah, and Ashley Martin found in a study that 83 percent of interviewees felt obligated to answer personal questions. And although interviewers in this study were more likely to view these questions as a useful tool for getting to know a candidate, interviewees were more likely to view them as discriminatory. Ultimately, Shay and his colleagues found that this had negative consequences for both interviewees and employers. Not surprisingly, based on the research reviewed earlier, interviewees who were asked questions about their family and marital status were less likely to be offered a job. And as for the candidates who were offered the job? It turned out that they were less likely to accept it. Similarly, in the study of medical residency applicants described earlier, a significant percentage of applicants who were asked about this type of personal information in an interview reported that they downgraded the program in violation of the list as a result. are for ranking. Therefore, it is not only the interviewees who lose, but also the interviewers.
Most of us want to be good people. We do not want to discriminate against job applicants and try to adhere to the rules that are in place to protect people from employment discrimination. But we also want to connect with people, and we know that conversation can be awkward. We might try to split the difference by asking a personal question while assuring the candidate that they don’t need to answer. “So, do you have kids? “I shouldn’t really be asking you that, so don’t feel like you have to answer.” But, of course, interviewees don’t feel they can refuse to answer such questions. So, they answer, awkward. And our failure to recognize the pressure our questions put on other people to answer can have real consequences for individual candidates and employers, and for diversity and representation in the workplace more broadly.
Vanessa Bones is a social psychologist and associate professor of organizational behavior and psychology at Cornell University. She is the author of You have more influence than you think: How we underestimate our power of persuasion and why it matters.
Sample from You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion and Why It Matters. Copyright (c) 2021 by Vanessa Bones. Used by permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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