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Comment by zucchinis | Hacker News Reader

I find the categorization of masculine and feminine words in this tool to be very presumptuous.

This is what I got from a few random JD samples.

Masculine Words - manage - manages - under pressure - best-in-class - whatever it takes - drive to - exhaustive - overseeing

Feminine Words - community - interpersonal - be part of - serves - strive - care - encourages - connection - helpful - comfortable

Isn't this just enforcing false assumptions about gender differences rather than preventing gender bias? Who is to say that women don't want to oversee, manage, or have the drive to be the "best-in-class"? Who is to say that men aren't interested in fostering community, working in teams, being helpful and caring?

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http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/gendered_wordi...

Pretty interesting study that proves that gendered wording of applications actually makes a significant difference in the gender ratio of folks who apply. The gender biases we've been socialized with might be false assumptions many times, but it's still the programming many people operate on.

This is a really interesting study. But I wouldn't assume correlation implies causation here. Just because there are more male or female applicants to job postings that contain specific words does not mean the words themselves are attracting certain types of applicants. Many of the masculine words are words associated with higher-level management and higher pay jobs. There are less women who make it to this level so naturally there are less women applicants to these types of jobs.

Jobs associated with the feminine words such as "caring" and "serves" tend to be lower-level service-oriented jobs. Women don't apply to these because they are attracted to the words. They apply to them because more women are in the economic position to apply to these jobs over high-status high-skilled jobs because of historical and societal issues. I'm not sure categorizing these words as masculine and feminine is doing anything more than reflecting the existing gender-imbalance in labor although it is interesting to think about how this knowledge could be used constructively.

Did you read the whole paper? They control for the type of job in the multiple studies conducted in this paper - the job same job is advertised with differently worded postings. They also ran tests with male-dominated professions, female-domainated professions, and neutral professions - the result was the same.

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