How Job Listing Language Could Be Adding to Silicon Valley’s Gender Divide | Hacker News Reader

How Job Listing Language Could Be Adding to Silicon Valley’s Gender Divide

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18 pointsnradov6 comments

I honestly don't understand how people expect to change this. Some of these terms which are apparently favoured by men are very ungendered, such as "driven person", "disciplined" or "first rate".

If a job requires "a first rate disciplined driven person" and women don't want to apply for that job, doesn't that seem to indicated they believe they aren't qualified.

Many jobs are stressful and require people who can cope with high risk activities - even in software running operations for any of the listed global companies would be hard. And it does both the company and the applicants a disservice if that level of risk isn't made clear in the advertisement.

Isn't it obvious that how you describe a job changes neither the requirements of that job nor the qualifications desired nor how you're going to select the applicants?

If certain words pull in a more gender-neutral applicant pool, that's great! You're still only going to pick the best person for the job at the end, but you'll have a better pool to pick from.

Come on man, use a little bit of reasoning skill here.

W.r.t. the now overdiscussed Google memo: isn't this hammering in that same point? Diversity programs are not going to change the jobs that appeal to different people. Company culture can change that, and men and women are largely looking for very specific company cultures that fit their personal perspectives. I get that the memo used much more divisive language, but I see the same argument here.

I could not agree more. This is advancing the idea that on the whole, men and women are different and thus "gender-neutral" language is just a different way of exposing the same fundamental truth. Much less divisive but the same underlying point.

One word mentioned here that I absolutely loathe seeing in jobs descriptions is "nerd".

I don't get why we all think "nerd" has anything to do with software engineering or the workforce in general. Is it "nerdy" to work 9-5 and juggle office politics and meetings, etc? What's "nerdy" about needing to write lots and lots of error-reporting, exception-catching, type assertions, etc etc?

"Nerd" is almost always a way of signaling that you like people who like specific cultural fixtures like Star Wars and Start Trek or comic book movies whatever else. And there's just no real reason to have that in a job description unless you're LucasFilm. You'll never achieve a diverse workforce if you're actively trying to field people who like all the same unimportant pop culture things you do.

This reads like an ad for Textio.

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