Setting higher referral targets increases the number of women recommended: Evidence from the field and lab.
研究发现，要求推荐更多候选人（如至少四人而非两人）能显著增加被推荐女性数量，幅度达17%-88%，为组织提升男性主导领域女性代表性提供了可行干预措施。
Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations.This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes, as women are less inclined to ask for referrals and less likely to be referred than men for maledominated jobs.We integrate insights from the goal-setting and creativity literatures to propose an intervention to boost referrals of women: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals).This strategy sets a motivating goal to provide more referrals, which should mechanically increase the number of women referred.In addition, requesting more referrals in maledominated contexts may lead to prototype divergence, which should increase the rate at which women are referred as people generate additional recommendations.Across two primary studies (a field experiment and an online experiment) and four supplemental studies (another field experiment and three online experiments; all preregistered, total N = 12,615), requesting double the number of referrals increased the number of women referred by 17%-88%.We found evidence that setting more ambitious referral goals mediated the effect of asking for more referrals on the number of women referred, supporting a goals-based account.However, we found inconsistent support for prototype divergence as a mechanism across our studies.Our work establishes a theoretically motivated intervention organizations can use to bolster women's representation in recruitment pipelines in male-dominated settings, and our full-cycle approach establishes its generalizability across contexts.