Rejection matters | London Business School

“Rejection rates in employment are huge,” says Isabel Fernandez-Mateo. “Around 95% of people get rejected at some time or other, getting passed by for promotion during their journey to the top. This, in turn, leads to gender disparities in the job market. Rejection matters.”

For Isabel, Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, rejection means much more than its negative connotations. Her new research paper, written with Brian Rubineau and Venkat Kuppuswamy, reveals its impact on the job market. Titled Reject and Resubmit: A Formal Analysis of Gender Differences in Reapplication and Their Contribution to Women’s Presence in Talent Pipelines, the paper challenges popular assumptions and reaches surprising and even contradictory conclusions. 

“Women are underrepresented in top management, entrepreneurship, science and in many other contexts,” she begins. “One common explanation for this is that they exit talent pipelines at higher rates than men. This is based on a finding that when men and women seek a particular opportunity, and get rejected, men are more likely to try again for that same opportunity than women. 

“Our paper is about checking whether this is really the case and whether these implications will have important consequences for diversity in the long run.” 

Two sides of the equation

A native of Spain, Isabel has been studying gender diversity for many years, since obtaining her PhD from MIT Sloan School of Management. An expert on how relationships influence career outcomes, she teaches two elective courses at LBS – “Building your Career Strategy” and “People Analytics” – as well as teaching in the pHD programme.

In a paper she wrote on rejection a few years ago, she discovered that women were not risk-averse or more sensitive to rejection, but that many chose not to reapply for a job because they felt the hiring process was unfair. Isabel looked into this from both sides of the equation – from the applicants’ behaviour (the “supply side”) and from the job-screeners’ behaviour (“the demand side”).

“On the ‘supply side’, we found that the reason women don’t reapply for certain jobs is not because they genetically don’t like them, or because there’s something about these jobs that affects who will apply. It could be because they anticipate they’re not going to get hired, whether that’s true or not. Or they could think that the culture will make them feel like they don’t belong. 

“On the ‘demand side’, we found there can be discrimination in hiring, bias promotion processes, and unwelcoming cultures. The supply and demand side are not independent of each other – they interact and feed into each other, affecting the outcome.”