Despite decades of effort, women in Canada and the United States remain underrepresented in various areas of employment including STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] and senior-level executive positions. Researchers have proposed a cultural explanation for the maintenance of gender disparities in majority-male fields and occupations: “masculine defaults.” These defaults reflect a cultural bias that values traits and behaviours associated with masculinity over those associated with femininity.

In a recent paper, we studied how masculine defaults are used in job advertisements — a critical recruitment and selection tool designed to attract preferred candidates. Job ads for male-majority workplace contexts often communicate defaults via stereotypically masculine terms such as “competitive,” “ambitious” and “independent.” Accordingly, some have proposed removing such language as an intervention to increase gender diversity in these domains.

Some scholars have proposed a ‘feminizing’ strategy, whereby masculine wording in job ads is replaced with parallel feminine wording to increase women’s interest in those jobs. However, we believe ‘feminizing’ has several limitations, including inciting backlash and discrimination against counter-stereotypical women who don’t self-present as “feminine.” As a result, we experimented with replacing masculine language with gender-neutral language — an approach we call ‘gender debiasing.’

Our approach would ‘undo’ gender altogether — for example, by replacing terms like “fireman” or “firewoman” with “firefighter.” While we use the terms gender debiasing and gender neutral, we recognize that achieving absolute neutrality by completely removing gender may be challenging or even impossible, given the primacy of gender in shaping social cognition and perception.

Rather, our intervention aimed to approximate neutrality by replacing overtly masculine language with relatively gender-neutral language. We set out to discover if, why and for whom this might increase application behaviour.

The belonging factor

Masculine wording in job postings signals that there are many men in the field — alerting women to the distinct possibility that they might not belong there. Prior research has focused on how masculine language triggers a gender misfit among women. We felt that gender debiasing interventions could eliminate women’s feelings of misfit; and consequently, that women’s anticipated belonging and intention to apply for these roles should increase.

Gender identification describes how central one’s gender category is to one’s self-identity. Individuals who strongly identify with their gender are more psychologically attached to their category and exhibit gender-norm congruent behaviour and self-stereotyping that further reinforce identification. Individuals who are more prototypical of a particular gender category have been shown to experience stronger effects of categorization. For instance, typically male men experience fewer concerns around belonging in majority-male contexts.

Considering variation both between and within gender categories, we proposed that men who are less gender-typical would also feel misaligned with the strong male identity espoused by masculine default language. Therefore, we predicted that a gender-debiasing intervention that removes masculine language from job postings and replaces it with gender-neutral language would increase application rates among both women and among less male-typical men.

Our research

In a pilot study of 793 individuals, we explored men’s and women’s inferences about and reactions to masculine language in job postings by providing examples of such language in job ads and asking participants for their reactions in open-ended questionnaires. While women reported being less likely to apply to job postings with masculine language, almost one third of men also had a negative response to the language. This negative response was pronounced among men who self-reported as being weakly identified with their gender.

Two main themes emerged for how masculine language discourages men:

1. Misalignment with the masculine attributes of the job [e.g. “I would probably not (apply)”; “I don’t find myself to fit with expected masculine traits”]; and

2. Misalignment with the masculine culture (e.g. “In my experience, men have stricter requirements for how masculine other men should be, so I’d worry about not getting along with co-workers”).

Having confirmed one of our core assumptions in the pilot study, we moved on to study one, where we examined whether natural variation in gendered language in job ads would predict variation in gender composition of the corresponding applicant pool.

We obtained a database of 576 unique job ads and matching applicant data from 32,834 applicants from a large public company in Canada. The jobs were posted over 16 months from September 2015 to January 2017. We used the

Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) to analyze the ads for gendered language using an established dictionary. These gendered language dictionaries were composed of agentic and communal words (e.g. individualistic, competitive; committed, supportive) and masculine and feminine trait words (e.g. ambitious, assertive; compassionate, understanding).

We used applicants’ self-reported gender where available (just over half of the sample). For those who did not disclose their gender, we predicted their gender from their first names. The total applicant pool consisted of 13,086 (39.8 per cent) women, 17,725 (54 per cent) men and 2,023 (6.2 per cent) applicants of unknown gender. We examined the relationship between masculine language in the job posting and applicants’ inferred name-based male-typicality score.

Results: For men, the higher their inferred male-typicality score, the more likely they were to apply to job postings with higher proportions of masculine language. These results remained robust when we ran the same analyses with only applicants for male-dominated jobs. The inferred name-based male-typicality score for women also positively predicted masculine language in the postings for which they applied. Overall, these results suggest that name-based male typicality (reflecting within-gender-category variation) mattered for both men and women.

For study two, we partnered with a large Canadian investment firm to administer our intervention on one historically male-dominated entry-level ‘feeder’ position that was reposted roughly every month, allowing us to compare the applicant pool before and after our intervention. The sample included monthly applicant data from September 2015 to October 2019. Our intervention (the debiased job posting) was administered in January 2019. The organization does not ask applicants for their gender, so we predicted it using first names. Of 3,503 total applicants, 2,288 were coded as men (65.3 per cent), 675 were coded as women (19.3 per cent) and 540 were not categorizable and therefore unknown (15.4 per cent).

To develop the intervention, we identified stereotypically masculine words in the job posting using the LIWC and the same gendered language dictionary as in study one. We additionally coded the term “entrepreneurial” as masculine due to its strong stereotypical association with men, and the phrases "drive results" and "passion for capital markets' as masculine due to their similarity to masculine terms in the dictionary.

The baseline job posting had 1.52 per cent masculine language and 0.61 per cent feminine language. We replaced the masculine words with synonymous gender-neutral words (e.g. “motivation to achieve results,” “interest in capital markets”), working closely with the organization’s HR team to verify that the underlying substantive content remained unchanged. The debiased job posting had 0.6 per cent masculine language and 0.89 per cent feminine language, significantly reducing perceptions of masculinity compared to the original job posting, without increasing perceptions of femininity.

Results: The intervention garnered an immediate increase in the proportion of female applicants by approximately four per cent, an effect that was sustained 10 months after the intervention.

In Study three, our sample was 790 participants; 376 (47.6 per cent) self-identified as men, 396 (50.1 per cent) self-identified as women and 18 (2.3 per cent) chose another option. Participants were randomly assigned to view either the original or debiased job posting from Study two — modified to include a fictional organization name.

After seeing the job posting, participants completed a brief questionnaire, indicating their perceptions about the masculinity or femininity of the organization’s ideal applicant. Participants in the debiased job posting condition perceived the ideal candidate as less masculine than in the control condition. Perceptions of the ideal candidate’s femininity did not differ across conditions.

Job appeal was measured using a scale from one to seven (1 = weak appeal; 7 = strong appeal). Likelihood of applying was measured by the item “How likely are you to apply for a position like this one?” on a scale from 1 = very unlikely to 7 = very likely. Anticipated belonging was measured with a four-item scale: “I could fit in well in this position,” “I am similar to the people who work in this position,” “My values and this company’s values are similar,” and “The type of people who would apply for this position are very different from me.”

Gender identification was measured using a four-item measure — e.g. “Being a woman/man is an important reflection of who I am.” To closely replicate the field setting of Study two (i.e. applicants applying for a position within a male-dominated industry, in the case of Study two, finance), we focused on applicants who currently work or have previously worked in male-dominated industries.

Results: The three-way interaction between gender identification, gender and condition was significant: Overall, perceived job appeal didn’t differ between men (categorically) in the debiased and control conditions. However, probing by gender identification revealed that men below the mean of gender identification saw the debiased job posting as significantly more appealing than the control posting. There was a significant and positive indirect effect of the debiased language on job appeal through increased belonging. Conversely, for men above the mean of male identification, there was no significant difference in perceived job appeal.

We observed no difference in job appeal or likelihood to apply between the debiased and control postings among weakly identified women. Conversely, strongly identified women found the debiased posting more appealing and were more likely to apply to it than the control posting.

Key takeaways

We were able to identify and test a subtle, light-touch intervention that replaced masculine language with gender-neutral (rather than feminine) synonyms, demonstrating robust effects. Broader effects were found for women and men who did not fit with the ‘gender blueprint’. This underscores the importance of conceptualizing a continuum of gender identification rather than focusing only on discrete gender categories to understand the value of gender-debiasing interventions.

Whereas gender inequality has been understood primarily as ‘the categorical sorting of men into male-dominated jobs,’ our findings reinforce recent advances that suggest a broader reconceptualization of gender segregation as “the sorting of masculine-identifying and more ‘male-typical’ individuals of all genders into masculine jobs.” We demonstrated one way that cultural cycles of gender bias are perpetuated and how they can be disrupted: System-level policy changes can affect the composition and gender association of individuals who approach and enter male-dominated spaces, which could ultimately shift masculine default cultures.

In practical terms, our approach represents a concrete intervention that can increase gender diversity. Our findings suggest that the intervention led to increased application rates among women and men who were weakly identified with masculinity or who appeared less male-typical in male-dominated job contexts.

Our results suggest that gender debiasing interventions in male-dominated domains could effectively increase gender diversity among applicants. We believe this represents an easy and cost-effective way for organizations to instigate changes to their recruitment process.

Our predictions focused on gender typicality and identification as important predictors for men, but our results showed that these processes also moderate women’s responses to masculine language: Women who are more female-typical and gender-identified were especially likely to respond negatively to masculine language, and thus exhibit even larger increases in belonging and application behaviour in response to a gender-debiasing intervention. A major limitation of our work is the focus on people who identify as women and men. Gender identification extends beyond this binary, and more research is needed to examine how people of all genders react to gender cues in job advertisements. Future research should explore how the current effects relate to individuals who have more flexible gender identities.

Overall, our approach advocates for moving toward neutrality. It may not always be feasible to replace masculine language with perfectly synonymous gender-neutral terms, but again, our approach emphasizes striving for equivalence.

The intervention we recommend is relatively light-touch and low-cost, making it an appealing first step for organizations beginning or seeking to amplify their gender diversity change efforts. To be clear, this intervention does not qualify as a comprehensive solution to gender inequality, but rather, a starting point — a foot in the door toward more substantive policies that dismantle biases within organizational systems for, such as redesigning personnel processes to reduce bias.

We encourage organizations and policymakers to view our findings as a nudge to begin to reflect on the language used in their job postings, especially as generating job postings becomes more systematized and automatic. This extra level of internal scrutiny could lead to a realignment between what organizations value, what they wish to convey and how they communicate it more accurately, intentionally and inclusively.

This article summarizes the paper, “Debiasing Job Ads by Replacing Masculine Language Increases Gender Diversity of Applicant Pools,” which was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This article originally appeared in the fall 2025 issue of the Rotman Management magazine.