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A new study released by professional networking site LinkedIn on Wednesday shows that gender bias at work may begin long before a hiring manager even sifts through a stack of résumés.
According to the social platform’s Language Matters gender diversity report, women can be deterred from applying to a position for which they are eminently qualified because of the job description’s rhetoric or the use of specific words that are traditionally seen as “masculine.” In order to attract the most diverse pool of candidates, the study says, open, non-prescriptive language is what’s needed.
The word “aggressive,” for example, was found to discourage 44% of women from applying, compared to one third of men. Conversely, both genders responded positively to a job posting when a recruiter used words like “powerful,” “strong-willed and “confident” to describe the ideal candidate.
Words like “demanding” that might reflect negatively on company culture or workload can also put off female candidates who tend to look for positions that offer flexibility. Rather, the study suggests, hiring managers should indicate that they are looking for “diligent” workers for a “fast-paced” environment.
These words carry so much weight because “they refer to speakers’ expectations about how male and female persons behave,” says Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s an expert on gender and language and the author of the groundbreaking book Language and Woman’s Place. When women read “masculine” words in a job post, she adds, “they force us to think in terms of gendered stereotypes, which virtually always are more noxious to women than to men.” Stereotyping word choices are constraining and suggest the impossibility of women finding their way into male-dominated roles.
These perceptions are especially severe for women who have children. One part of the study suggested that 66% of women would not bring up parental leave during an interview because they feared negative consequences—40% said they would not mention it even after getting hired.
“There is a standard that women are held to as being warm and compassionate, so when they take a stand, it can be seen as demanding or like they are not a good fit,” says Rebecca Greenbaum, a human resources management professor at Rutgers University. This is as true for asking for a raise as it is for discussing parental leave, Greenbaum notes.
Women, who tend to be hyper-aware of these biases, are likely to hold back in meetings so that they won’t be viewed as confrontational, she added. Women working in male-dominated industries may not feel comfortable speaking up—especially if they are one of the few women in the room.
Greenbaum also notes that women are more likely to apologize at work and thereby undermine their own credibility. Ellen Petry Leanse, an entrepreneur and a former employee of both Apple and Google, expressed her frustration with this phenomenon in a 2015 post on LinkedIn, noting that women often use the word “just” in workplace communications: “It was a subtle message of subordination. I realized that striking it from a phrase almost always clarified and strengthened the message.”
According to Lakoff, women might feel the need to behave in a “womanly” or demure manner around male colleagues. “Otherwise, they will be discriminated against and called names,” she says, adding that whether women use the word “just” more often than men “might be because being empathetic and emotional are things women—to be good women—are expected to do.”
Women do tend to be better received if they come across as warm, which they can do while also coming across as competent, observes Greenbaum. But by contrast, she says, if men are seen as too warm, it can be detrimental to them.
The LinkedIn report further noted that women identified more closely with candidate character descriptions relating to their personalities, words such as “likable” and “supportive.”
And when people in power are discussed publicly, the adjectives used to describe them vary considerably according to gender, the LinkedIn study says. Men are more likely to be characterized by their ambition, whereas women tend to be described as “amazing.” Mark Zuckerberg was called “powerful” six times more than Sheryl Sandberg was, despite her role as Facebook’s COO.
Still, says Sarah O’Brien, LinkedIn’s head of global insights, more than 50,000 job listings on LinkedIn contain the term “aggressive” and half the women who come across them will likely not apply. “We want to shed a light on insights that highlight disconnects like these,” says O’Brien, “to enable a dialogue about actions companies and individuals can take to nurture a more inclusive workplace.”
