Several months ago we discussed the biases that exist against the unemployed and what changes employers can make to erase these biases. This issue has been brought up again in recent news when LinkedIn announced that it would be adjusting its profile settings to better present someone's work history who has been temporarily out of the workforce.
LinkedIn is adding a number of new job titles including “stay-at-home mom" and other caretaker titles to give users the ability to provide more accurate descriptions of their time away from work. The online professional network is also removing its requirement that any work experience entry must be linked to a specific company or employer (fortune.com).
This announcement came weeks after Helen Bolen, who was trying to return to the workforce after her maternity leave, pointed out the insufficiencies of the LinkedIn profile. There is no option to identify or explain any type of work gap, whether it's a "maternity leave, parental leave, adoption leave, sick leave, bereavement leave, elderly care leave, long term injury/illness, education/re-training, volunteering, long term travel, a gap year, a sabbatical — or for a pandemic" (bettermarketing.pub).
She goes on to connect this inconvenience with the bigger problem at hand which is the stigma against those who are temporarily not working and the difficulty these people face upon re-entering the workforce. And since women are more likely to be the ones assuming a stay-at-home caretaker role, it is disproportionately women who must overcome that bias and challenges of returning to work.
As further evidence to this, a research study from the Harvard Business Review found that stay-at-home parents were about half as likely to get a job interview as unemployed parents and only one-third as likely as employed parents. The study suggests that employers viewed both unemployed applicants and stay-at-home applicants as "less capable than continuously employed applicants" and found that stay-at-home parents were viewed as "less reliable, less deserving of a job, and less committed to work, compared with unemployed applicants" (hbr.org).
This new change to the LinkedIn profile is one small step to help address and correct these assumptions. It adds transparency as to why someone was not working for a period of time. Having the ability to explain a temporary leave from the workforce normalizes it and will hopefully help to erode the stigma.
