Gender references in job advertisements – relations to job status and gender equality

Hodel, Lea; Formanowicz, Magdalena Maria; Sczesny, Sabine; Vladrová, Jana; von Stockhausen, Lisa (10 July 2014). Gender references in job advertisements – relations to job status and gender equality (Unpublished). In: European Association of Social Psychology, 17th General Meeting 2014. Amsterdam. 9.-12.07.2014.

Research has shown that gender references in job advertisements play an important role for gender (in)equality in personnel selection. The use of pair forms (masculine and feminine form) in German-language job advertisements, for example, was found to reduce the lack of fit between women and leadership roles (Horvath & Sczesny, 2013). Therefore the present study addresses the question which forms of gender reference are used in job advertisements, how these forms are distributed in different countries and how language use is related to gender typicality and status of the job. We collected job advertisements published online in four countries with different rankings of gender equality (i.e., Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and Czech Republic; World Economic Forum, 2011). We randomly selected 100 advertisements per country from four branches that are characterized by different proportions of female and male employees: steels/metals, science, restaurants/food services, and health care. The advertisements were analyzed with regard to gender references as well as different indicators of job status. The results show that, in general, men and women are addressed more equally in Swiss and Austrian job advertisements compared to Polish and Czech job advertisements. The results also show that women and men are addressed more equally in branches where the proportion of women is high than where the proportion of women is low. We thus can conclude that the use of gender references is associated with the degree of gender equality achieved in a country and with the gender typicality of a profession.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Poster)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Social Neuroscience and Social Psychology

Graduate School:

Graduate School Gender Studies

UniBE Contributor:

Hodel, Lea, Formanowicz, Magdalena Maria, Sczesny, Sabine

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology

Language:

English

Submitter:

Lea Hodel

Date Deposited:

16 Feb 2015 11:05

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:40

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/63012

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