Double Your Applications by
Reducing Gender Bias

Are your Job Postings Turning Off Half of Applicants?

A research paper written in 2011, showed job postings which included different kinds of gender-coded language to men and women and recorded how appealing the jobs seemed and how much the participants felt that they 'belonged' in that occupation. No non-binary people were not included in this research, and the research didn't touch on non-binary-coded words.

The results showed that women felt that job postings with masculine-coded language were less appealing and that they belonged less in those occupations. For men, feminine-coded job postings were only slightly less appealing and there was no effect on how much the men felt they belonged in those roles.

Without realizing it, many of us use language that is subtly ‘gender-coded’. Society has certain expectations and norms for what men and women are like, and how they differ, and this seeps into the language we use. Think about “bossy” and “feisty”: we almost never use these words to describe men. Linguistic gender-coding shows up in job postings as well, and research has shown that it puts women off applying for jobs that are advertised with masculine-coded language.

We found a helpful tool to check whether a job posting has the kind of subtle linguistic gender-coding that has this discouraging effect on women applying. Click the image below and try out one of your job postings to see what insights you glean.

Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, and Aaron C. Kay back in 2011, called Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2011, Vol 101(1), p109-28).

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