Hopefully this doesn’t explode into a big debate...
Paste the ad into a gender decoder to ensure a roughly equal amount of masculine- and feminine-coded words. We used this one.
Before I looked at the link, this sounded plausibly good. But looking at the words highlighted, they’re just stereotypes (and apparently that’s the point, based on the research), and trying to ensure balance might come at the cost of accurately describing the role (or giving the right impression of the role, based on the emphasis), so this doesn’t seem like a good target as a hard constraint to me. Maybe it’s still good to ensure balance anyway or at least move in that direction, but I think we should be pretty careful here.
I can imagine roles where words from one list just describe them poorly, but words from the other list describe them well, so trying to ensure equal balance would mislead, although just more balance might not.
Maybe a better (but more costly) approach would be to get feedback on the posting from people of the corresponding demographics or even get them to write a version of the posting.
I care a lot about feminism and a lot about diversity in hiring practices, but I will admit that I’m skeptical about (even irritated by) most gender decoders.
EDIT: I’m so sorry, I’ve contributed to turning this into a debate. facepalm
To be honest, my gut reaction to the gender decoder was that it is itself sexist, because it promotes sexist stereotypes.
However, the negative effects are probably pretty distributed across society generally and hard to measure, while the potential benefits from more actual diversity (in EA or generally) could outweigh them. It’s plausible that it actually on net reduces gender stereotyping by increasing the visibility of women in stereotypically male roles and men in stereotypically female roles. I really don’t know, though.
EDIT: I’m so sorry, I’ve contributed to turning this into a debate. facepalm
I think these are all valid points, and yeah the words are just stereotypes. Worth using caution with these sorts of simplistic decoders (but I still think they’re somewhat helpful). I think you could probably pay for a better one but I doubt that’s worth the money.
We did also ask people of different genders to review the ad before putting it out, and I definitely think that was worth the time cost.
Hopefully this doesn’t explode into a big debate...
Before I looked at the link, this sounded plausibly good. But looking at the words highlighted, they’re just stereotypes (and apparently that’s the point, based on the research), and trying to ensure balance might come at the cost of accurately describing the role (or giving the right impression of the role, based on the emphasis), so this doesn’t seem like a good target as a hard constraint to me. Maybe it’s still good to ensure balance anyway or at least move in that direction, but I think we should be pretty careful here.
Apparently these words are masculine:
And these are feminine:
I can imagine roles where words from one list just describe them poorly, but words from the other list describe them well, so trying to ensure equal balance would mislead, although just more balance might not.
Maybe a better (but more costly) approach would be to get feedback on the posting from people of the corresponding demographics or even get them to write a version of the posting.
I care a lot about feminism and a lot about diversity in hiring practices, but I will admit that I’m skeptical about (even irritated by) most gender decoders.
EDIT: I’m so sorry, I’ve contributed to turning this into a debate. facepalm
To be honest, my gut reaction to the gender decoder was that it is itself sexist, because it promotes sexist stereotypes.
However, the negative effects are probably pretty distributed across society generally and hard to measure, while the potential benefits from more actual diversity (in EA or generally) could outweigh them. It’s plausible that it actually on net reduces gender stereotyping by increasing the visibility of women in stereotypically male roles and men in stereotypically female roles. I really don’t know, though.
Thanks. :P
I think these are all valid points, and yeah the words are just stereotypes. Worth using caution with these sorts of simplistic decoders (but I still think they’re somewhat helpful). I think you could probably pay for a better one but I doubt that’s worth the money.
We did also ask people of different genders to review the ad before putting it out, and I definitely think that was worth the time cost.