Is your Job Ad gender neutral and diversity friendly?
Are you wondering why you are not getting women and diverse candidates applying for your jobs? Are your advertisements unintentionally encoded with language that is masculine or off-putting for some?
The subtle biases that show up in job advertisement language can really make a candidate decide whether they should apply for the role. This is because, from the language used, candidates form a perception of:
the company’s culture
their chances of fitting in and succeeding in the company.
A great tool to use in this space is the Gender Decoder. However, I also want to show you instances where the gender decoder does not tell you the whole picture. Therefore, I would rather show you a real world example.
Before I go into the example, I would like to thank the NZ Tech WomeNB slack community for providing a safe environment to ask, discuss and seek support on these topics, Sera Walker for bringing up the example and Nat Dudley for the amazing rewrite.
It is important to emphasise that we are all here to learn, not to accuse. All of us have unconscious biases, including myself. It is through these discussions in a safe environment that we learn about our unconscious biases, decide to do something about it and advance our society forward.
A real job ad
On the surface, this job advertisement doesn’t have your usual masculine words like competitive, assertive, dominant, superior and in fact when you pass this through the Gender Decoder, it shows up as feminine-coded because of the word together. However, it is the style of how it is written that one cannot help but think that this ad is asking for a particular type of person.
As a woman reading this and as other women have pointed out in our NZ Tech WomeNB slack community, we probably don’t describe our friends as buddy and won’t say it’s such a good vibe.
As an ethnically diverse person, I had to google what/who are Hans Solo and Wookiee to get that it was a Star Wars reference. It is true that a lot of engineers would have watched and love Star Wars and I am no engineer. However, if there was an applicant who has not watched Star Wars or is not into Star Wars, they would probably worry about whether they will fit in.
Here is an example for how to rewrite this by Nat Dudley, a fellow NZ Tech WomeNB slack community member and the Chief Design and Product Officer at Figure.NZ. This is their first draft of rewriting it and it reads so differently already!
You can see from the rewrite, how much more welcoming and open the advert is yet it contains all the main messages like there is a referral bonus and it is a good place to work with people you like.
If you want to check your unconscious biases in the job ads or in the interviewing process, book me in for a free chat.