Without realising it, we all use language that is subtly'gender coded". Society has certain expectations of 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.
This linguistic gender coding shows up in job adverts as well, and research has shown that it puts women off applying for jobs that are advertised with masculine- coded language.
This tool is a quick way to check whether a job advert has the kind of subtle linguistic gender-coding that has this discouraging effect. Scroll down to see how it works.
This tool was inspired by a research paper written by 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).
In this paper the researchers showed job adverts 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 included in this research, and the research didn't touch on non-binary-coded words.
Their results showed that women felt that job adverts with masculine-coded language were less appealing and that they belonged less in those occupations. For men, feminine-coded adverts were only slightly less appealing and there was no effect on how much the men felt they belonged in those roles.
Below are the full lists of words that this research considered masculine- and feminine-coded. This tool checks job adverts for the appearance of any of these words, then calculates the relative proportion of masculine-coded and feminine-coded words to reach an overall verdict on the gender-coding of the advert. Some words have been reduced to a 'stem' to cover a range of noun, verb and adjective variants; for instance "compet" covers "compete", "competetive" and "competition".