The Gendering of Job Postings in the Online Recruitment Process

Abstract

Gender segregation remains a significant problem in many occupations and organizations. To solve this problem, many U.S. employers now seek to craft gender-neutral job postings. In this article, we investigate whether such employer recruitment efforts are successful in encouraging women and men to apply equally for jobs. Specifically, we move beyond the well-studied effects of the gender typing of occupations, organizations, and industries to study the extent to which the recruiting language used in job postings influences the actual preapplication behavior of job seekers of different genders. Using unique data from both a large-sample observational field study (Study 1) and a field experiment study (Study 2) of real online job postings, we first assess the gendered language mechanism by testing whether stereotypical femininity in the wording that recruiters use to advertise otherwise identical jobs differently influences female and male job seekers’ interest in applying. We then assess the recruiter gendering mechanism by testing whether the gender of the recruiter and the femininity in the wording recruiters use when presenting themselves to job seekers further contribute to gender job search disparities. Our analyses ultimately show negligible effects for both the gendering of job postings or of the job poster, and we therefore conclude that, in practice, employers’ efforts to simply tweak the language of recruitment messages do not matter much for gender equality and diversity. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations. Funding: The authors received financial support from the James S. Hardigg (1945) Work and Employment Fund and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4674 .