A new study suggests that the use of gender-sensitive language in the title of job advertisements may influence the level of interest demonstrated by female potential applicants. Dominik Hetjens of Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, and Stefan Hartmann of Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 14, 2024.

German is one of many languages in which every noun is grammatically masculine, feminine, or neutral. For instance, "teacher" is grammatically masculine, "sun" is feminine, and "boat" neutral. Because the German word for "teacher" is grammatically masculine, someone referring to a teacher of no specified gender will still use the masculine form.

In recent decades, concerns have grown that this so-called generic masculine form could create a problematic male bias. Thus, a variety of alternative forms have arisen to refer to a mixed-gender group or an entity of no specific gender.

To date, research on the potential social consequences of using gender-sensitive alternatives versus the generic masculine form has been limited, and most has been conducted in small laboratory studies. To add a new perspective, Hetjens and Hartmann analyzed real-world data on 256,934 German-language job listings posted on an online job platform from 2020 to 2022.

They found that, overall, job titles that used gender-sensitive language had a consistently higher proportion of female users who clicked to view the entire job ad than job titles using the generic masculine.

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