Gender-inclusive language in labour markets

This study leverages a digital field experiment in a labour market setting to examine whether attitudinal effects translate into real-world behaviour, while offering broader lessons for the design and interpretation of such experiments.

Gender-inclusive language in job descriptions has been shown to impact perceived fit, belonging, and occupational attractiveness, but its impact on actual behaviour remains uncertain. We used a crowdworking platform as an experimental labour market, where sign-up for our advertised study itself serves as an outcome variable. In this setting, we thus tested whether the use of gender-inclusive language in a job advertisement for a maths task increases both the share of women who sign-up and their subsequent performance.

We find no effect of gender-inclusive language on either the share of women or their performance. We provide a look behind the scenes of running a digital field experiment, reflecting on challenges along the way. We used the opportunity to learn about design elements that may have prevented the predicted effect from arising, and the moderating theoretical variables they allude to. One key conjecture that emerged from our assessment is that in tight labour markets, such as the crowdfunding platform we studied, participation is less gendered, with an attenuating effect on gendered performance expectations.

The paper is co-authored with Klarita Gërxhani and Arnout van de Rijt.

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