Gaucher, Friesen & Kay (2011) — Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality
Gaucher, D., Friesen, J. & Kay, A.C. (2011). Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022530
What this source contributes
Five studies, two archival and three experimental. Studies 1 and 2 sampled real job advertisements and found that postings for male-dominated occupations used more masculine-coded words (leader, competitive, dominant) than postings for female-dominated ones, while feminine-coded words (support, understand, interpersonal) appeared at the same rate in both. Studies 3 to 5 constructed advertisements with more masculine than feminine wording: readers pictured more men in those jobs, and women found the jobs less appealing. Study 5 located the mechanism. The effect ran through belongingness — women reading masculine wording felt they would not fit — and not through perceived skill; they did not think themselves less able, they thought themselves less welcome.
The authors frame this within social dominance theory as an institutional-level mechanism that maintains inequality without anyone intending it: the words do the sorting before an application is written.
Analytical function in AI-Ninja
The paper never mentions ninja. What it supplies is the mechanism by which a word like it works. The link to the word itself comes from the secondary bundle: Textio’s analysis of fifty million job postings, reported by Fortune in 2016, placed ninja and rockstar among the terms after which women stop applying. Together they turn the entry’s Origin from an observation about romantic vocabulary into a claim about who that vocabulary recruits and who it turns away, and they give the entry its second axis alongside the obsolescence of the skill.
About the author(s)
Danielle Gaucher and Justin Friesen, then at the University of Waterloo; Aaron C. Kay, Duke University (Psychology and Neuroscience, Fuqua School of Business). Published online 7 March 2011.
Related entries
- AI-Ninja — the mechanism by which the word selects its audience
- Broligarchy — the same register at the top of the industry