Who Fits the Picture? Gendered Fit Judgements in Recruitment and Promotion: A Critical Narrative Review and Conceptual Process Model

Gender disparities in recruitment and promotion are often documented as outcome differences, whereas the cognitive processes that produce gendered judgements are dispersed across social, organisational, and behavioural research. This critical narrative review and conceptual synthesis examines a purposively selected corpus of 30 primary empirical sources, seven reviews or meta-analyses, and three theoretical or methodological sources; ten additional foundational works position fit, implicit leadership, intersectionality, cultural matching, and selection validity. Because the historical search and screening record was not preserved, the corpus is treated as auditable but not reproducibly exhaustive. Claim-specific profiles report design, sample, endpoint, reported magnitude where recoverable, mechanism proximity, and transfer limits. Occupational gender composition predicts the direction of selection differences, but the selected evidence does not support a universal penalty for female-coded applicants. Direct evidence is strongest for belief expression, criteria construction, joint comparison, backlash, specific nonbinary-evaluation processes, and formal authority. Attention, memory, cue timing, the complete representation-prototype feedback loop, and the temporal ordering of fit discourse remain hypotheses. Component-by-component comparison with the closest recent syntheses identifies the added value of separating actual, symbolic, and perceived representation; validated fit constructs, fit inference, and fit discourse; binary occupational incongruity and nonbinary-specific processes; and direct evidence from cross-study integration. Twelve model connections are classified by status, and five bounded propositions are separated from four research heuristics.