In their study, Oldford and Fiset found that women felt that they were better fits, and were more interested in applying for, the jobs whose posts were high in communal language and low in agentic language. The results suggest that tweaking the language of job postings may help to improve the gender diversity of job applicants, particularly in male-dominated fields like finance. Similar studies have shown that the same phenomenon exists in other fields as well. One multi-field study inspired behavioural designer Kat Matfield to create an online tool called Gender Decoder. Based on a collection of male-coded and female-coded words, this tool allows users to paste in the text of a job advert, to quickly determine the possible presence of subtle gender bias.
Christine Ro, ‘The coded language that holds women back at work’, BBC
