4 ms·

As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. Makes sense. Men are conditioned to experience

As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. Makes sense. Men are conditioned to experience rejection more than women. Considering reproductive dynamics, men may even be biologically adapted to rejection to a greater degree than women. I'll bet there's some interesting studies out there on, for example, sexually dimorphic cortisol levels/activity.

mring33621 4y ago
I don't know what women experience, or men in other places, but I would say that many American males, in my generation (Gen-X), experienced frequent rejection, from about 12 until their early 20's. Then, once women became interested in them, there was often constant pressure to get a better job, in order to move through the expected life stages. I think that this regular rejection, plus the pressure to fight upward, is what trains and motivates men to keep going.
- User23 4y ago
  I was told as a young man that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I was going to have to learn to thrive on rejection. Experience has proved it true many times over. The key of course is framing your experience. I think the submission’s parallel between interviewing and dating is a good observation. In both cases you need to be willing to realize that rejection can be because of something you can control, but it also can be because of something you can’t. Another thing is once you experience it enough rejection loses its sting. The handful of hours you spend pursuing a job or a date just isn’t a serious cost, especially if you learn something from the experience.
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Funny you say that - the article concludes with the author noting her community feedback often mentioned the same idea, though she gives it less credibility than you did; to note, I'm also convinced by this idea.
- causality0 4y ago
  While it can be quite difficult to disentangle it from political biases and bad-faith arguments, there is evidence the possibility of men to "win big" in evolutionary terms by having a large number of children has led to males being prone to more extremes of both behavior and aptitude than females. That is to say, while men and women average out the same, you'll find more men at both the top and the bottom of many measurements. More geniuses and more fools, more heroes and more villains, more big winners and more terminal losers. Though to be perfectly honest, the field is so riddled with people with an axe to grind I suspect it may be decades before we know anything definitive on the subject.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
This seems to be very much a factor in the gender gaps that exist today. This gap manifests itself in women applying for less-senior positions than men (on average), and more specific applications being biased in favor of men. It also manifests in promotion cases at big companies: men are more likely to ask, but women are a lot more likely to succeed. Women who would be qualified are less likely to try if they think they might fail. At a previous place where I worked, we had many initiatives to help women on these factors: using broad job applications for specific positions and encouraging attempts at promotions, for example. These initiatives actually worked. My wife and I experience this in terms of writing. She has an MFA and is an incredible writer, but she rarely submits or publishes her work because she is afraid that people will reject it. I am an average writer (maybe above average, but not near her skill level), and I try to blog approximately monthly and regularly post my work in various online forums. She once tried to console me when one of my blog posts got a few hundred readers, and I didn't realize what she was doing. I was happy to have a few hundred, but she told me that if it were her, she would have been very upset at the reception.

mring33621 4y ago

I don't know what women experience, or men in other places, but I would say that many American males, in my generation (Gen-X), experienced frequent rejection, from about 12 until their early 20's. Then, once women became interested in them, there was often constant pressure to get a better job, in order to move through the expected life stages. I think that this regular rejection, plus the pressure to fight upward, is what trains and motivates men to keep going.

User23 4y ago
I was told as a young man that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I was going to have to learn to thrive on rejection. Experience has proved it true many times over. The key of course is framing your experience. I think the submission’s parallel between interviewing and dating is a good observation. In both cases you need to be willing to realize that rejection can be because of something you can control, but it also can be because of something you can’t. Another thing is once you experience it enough rejection loses its sting. The handful of hours you spend pursuing a job or a date just isn’t a serious cost, especially if you learn something from the experience.

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

Funny you say that - the article concludes with the author noting her community feedback often mentioned the same idea, though she gives it less credibility than you did; to note, I'm also convinced by this idea.

causality0 4y ago
While it can be quite difficult to disentangle it from political biases and bad-faith arguments, there is evidence the possibility of men to "win big" in evolutionary terms by having a large number of children has led to males being prone to more extremes of both behavior and aptitude than females. That is to say, while men and women average out the same, you'll find more men at both the top and the bottom of many measurements. More geniuses and more fools, more heroes and more villains, more big winners and more terminal losers. Though to be perfectly honest, the field is so riddled with people with an axe to grind I suspect it may be decades before we know anything definitive on the subject.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

This seems to be very much a factor in the gender gaps that exist today. This gap manifests itself in women applying for less-senior positions than men (on average), and more specific applications being biased in favor of men. It also manifests in promotion cases at big companies: men are more likely to ask, but women are a lot more likely to succeed. Women who would be qualified are less likely to try if they think they might fail. At a previous place where I worked, we had many initiatives to help women on these factors: using broad job applications for specific positions and encouraging attempts at promotions, for example. These initiatives actually worked. My wife and I experience this in terms of writing. She has an MFA and is an incredible writer, but she rarely submits or publishes her work because she is afraid that people will reject it. I am an average writer (maybe above average, but not near her skill level), and I try to blog approximately monthly and regularly post my work in various online forums. She once tried to console me when one of my blog posts got a few hundred readers, and I didn't realize what she was doing. I was happy to have a few hundred, but she told me that if it were her, she would have been very upset at the reception.