Study Finds That Altering Gender-Based Language in Job Postings Does Little to Attract More Women

The study included data on 487,000 job seekers and from 296,000 U.S. job postings over a two-year period. The researchers used a program that analyzed common patterns for first names to code the gender identities of the job seekers. The authors also used natural language processing to count the frequency of stereotypically feminine and masculine words in the ads, based on terms used in previous studies. Words such as “committed,” “flexible,” ‘helpful,” and “compassionate” were considered feminine and words such as “determined,” “aggressive,” “strong,” and “decisive” in the job posting were considered masculine. The authors found only a tiny difference in women’s responses to the job posting based on the “femininity score” of the language used by the recruiter.

A second experiment was conducted with 2,500 job seekers. Individuals were randomly assigned to one of three gendered descriptions for the same job posting (feminine, masculine, or neutral) and one of three gendered conditions for a recruiter (female, male, or no gender indicated). They found that there were no statistically significant connections between the gendered words, the gender of the recruiter, and a woman’s probability of applying for the job.

“In practice, employers’ efforts to simply tweak the language of recruitment messages do not matter much for gender equality and diversity,” the authors write.

A lack of gender diversity in job applicants might be due to factors like the gender-typing of occupations or a perception of a particular firm’s culture as more masculine, explains Emilio J. Castilla, a professor, co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT, and co-author of the study. Be aware of the information that’s already out there about your organization or about the open job, he advised.

“All of this information out there is shaping the search behavior of job seekers, potentially discouraging or encouraging certain groups of candidates to apply or not to apply to work in your organization,” Dr. Castilla said.