Exploring Gender Bias in Academic Job Descriptions - What influences masculine gender bias in job ads?

Women have been historically underrepresented in academia due to various factors of systemic gender inequality including: lower social capital, numeric underrepresentation and stereotypes (Casad et al., 2020). Gaucher et al. (2011) demonstrate that job descriptions in male-dominated areas are more likely to use words associated with masculine stereotypes (such as leader, competitive, dominant) than those in female-dominated areas. It is thus essential to investigate job descriptions in a male-dominated field such as academia to assess the linguistic construction of job descriptions in terms of gender bias.
While women are generally underrepresented in academia globally, we see a wide disparity in women employed in academic positions across geographic regions. Gendered language used in job advertisements within academia can also be influenced by the geographical location of the institution. Universities in different regions, such as Asia, Europe, and America, may inadvertently perpetuate gender disparities through the language employed in job descriptions. UNESCO reports that in 2020, Central and Eastern Europe had around 55% of women in tertiary education, compared to South and West Asia, where there were about 40% women in academia. Additionally, there were about 47% women employed in tertiary education in Northern America and Western Europe. The data implies that the geographic region of a university has an impact on the number of women employed in academic positions in that region. Apart from geographical location, the field of study can also impact language used in job ads. Different academic disciplines may have varying norms and language conventions in job postings. Santos et al. (2021), state, “In the field of social sciences, the participation of women relative to men is more balanced than in the fields associated with hard sciences, health sciences, technology and engineering”. This project investigates whether variables such as subject, region, job type (whether a position is research-oriented or teaching-oriented), and ranking of a university affects the number of masculine-coded words in job descriptions written by the university