“But, based on data analytics on the kinds of jobs men and women apply for, research shows that the adjectives matter.” “Of course men can be supportive and collaborative, caring and warm,” she says. “With a few simple word-choice changes-‘they look for an excellent teacher with exceptional pedagogical skills’-you have expanded the potential talent pool,” she writes.īohnet does not mean to imply that men lack the ability to be supportive or collaborative, a point she stresses when discussing the book during a recent interview in her HBS office. The easy fix: Nix “supportive” and “collaborative” from the job description. Most schools want to benefit from 100% of the talent pool and not deter skilled male applicants simply because the gendered adjectives in their advertisements signal to men that they do not belong.” ![]() “Maybe elementary schools want to add still more women to their roughly 80 to 90% female faculty,” she writes. In What Works, she cites the example of an elementary school advertising for “a committed teacher with exceptional pedagogical and interpersonal skills to work in a supportive, collaborative work environment.” The potential problem is that “supportive,” “collaborative” and even “committed” are widely associated with femininity, which may detract men from applying. Two, limit the number of mandatory qualifications to apply for the job. There are two easy key ways to take the gender bias out of job ads, Bohnet says: One, purge the gendered language. “To start with, job ads are super-low-hanging fruit.” “The idea of the book and of my research is to say that it’s easier to de-bias organizations’ practices and procedures than to de-bias mindsets,” she says. She is the author of the book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, which discusses how organizations can leverage findings of behavioral science research to fight gender bias in the workplace. “Our minds are stubborn beasts that are hard to change, but it’s not hard to de-bias the application process,” says behavioral economist Iris Bohnet, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, co-chair of Harvard’s Behavioral Insights Group, and director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. ![]() ![]() Fortunately for employers looking to narrow the applicant-pool gender gap, there is a simple way to take the gender bias out of job listings: Simply rewrite them. It’s unlikely that the world will stop associating certain words with certain genders any time soon. The word “dominant” rose by 65% in the same time period. While the word may make the job sound exciting, it may also dissuade women from applying, as society tends to regard “ninja” as masculine. Among the listings on the employment-related search engine, usage of “ninja” increased nearly 400% between January 2012 and October 2016, according to the company’s Job Trends database tool. Consider the word “ninja,” which increasingly appears in job descriptions in high tech. Yet so-called “gendered language” continues to run rampant in online employment listings. Follow-up research confirmed such words made those job listings less appealing to women. They found that job ads in male-dominated fields (like software programming) tended to use masculine-coded words such as “competitive” and “dominate” much more than job ads in female-dominated fields. ![]() For example, a few years ago, social scientists at the University of Waterloo and Duke University coded a long list of adjectives and verbs as masculine or feminine then scanned a popular job site to look for those words.
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