As the UK economy begins to recover from the worst impacts of the pandemic, employment rates and job vacancies are on the rise. Yet new research reveals that gendered language in job adverts could be preventing women from accessing new roles, with masculine wording reducing the number of female applicants by as much as 10%.

Pandemic pressures (including school closures and home-schooling) are already seeing women re-entering the workforce at less than half the rate of men. But research* shows that alienating job descriptions could be slowing women’s searches by discouraging them from applying to roles in the first place.

As part of this study, researchers at Applied analysed a sample of 7,563 job adverts. They ran the wording of each advert through a ‘gender score calculator’, a tool which detects words which are ‘feminine-coded’ (i.e. words that female candidates are more likely to identify with) and words which are ‘masculine-coded’ (words associated with or more likely to appeal to men), scoring the text accordingly. The calculator categorised each advert on a scale of ‘strongly feminine’ through ‘neutral’ to ‘strongly masculine’.

The impact of feminine-coded language (such as ‘together’, ‘collaborate’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘share’) on the gender of applicants and successful hires was compared with the outcomes for job adverts using masculine words (such as ‘individual’, ‘challenging’ and ‘driven’).

The findings revealed that job adverts which used language coded as ‘strongly masculine’ saw the number of female candidates applying for the role drop by up to 10%. Just 44% of applications for roles advertised using ‘strongly masculine’ language came from female candidates.

However, the study also showed that when employers reduced the occurrences of masculine-coded words and replaced them with feminine-coded or ‘neutral’ words, the proportion of female applicants could increase up to 54%.

The study also looked at the gender of the applicants who were successful in securing the role. They found that using feminine or ‘neutral’ language in a job description not only increased the number of female applicants, but also meant a woman was more likely to be offered the job. For the job adverts which featured more masculine language, a man was more likely to be the successful candidate.

Khyati Sundaram, CEO of Applied, comments: “Gendered language can be difficult to spot, as it’s so ingrained in the way we talk about certain employability characteristics, leadership skills and industries. But this research evidences the real-time impact gendered language is having on the workforce. Women are missing out on opportunities because roles are not presented in an accessible way and it’s discouraging them from applying. It’s a big problem, but thankfully one that is easily rectified by changing the words we use when advertising jobs.

“In order to level the playing fields and get applications from qualified women on the table, employers have a responsibility to neutralise the masculine language they’re using. By discouraging women from applying in the first place, we risk widening existing workforce gender gaps and enforcing historical stereotypes as to the types of jobs men and women are best suited to.

“For employers, this new research provides a fresh incentive to assess job applications for gendered language in order to attract a diverse pool of applicants and support female talent. For women (and in particular, mothers) the pandemic has made the workplace more inaccessible than ever. Employers have a responsibility to support women to re-enter the workforce by ensuring that the way they’re advertising jobs isn’t tripping women up at the first hurdle.”

*Research by Applied