The Wording of Job Offers as a Barrier to Application: Does Language Affect Women’s Labor Insertion?

The increase in female labor participation is associated with economic development. Different socioeconomic and cultural factors account for women’s greater labor insertion in the past decades. However, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 emphasizes the importance of achieving gender equality and empowering all women. Moreover, some factors affecting female labor participation have not been analyzed in traditional studies. For instance, gender-neutral language contributes to reducing structural asymmetries in the labor market, therefore appropriate wording in job advertisements is important to promote gender equity. The research aim is to understand how language impacts women's labor insertion. In order to capture this aspect, this paper proposes an innovative approach to estimate the effects of gender inequality on female participation, focusing on online labor demand. We have used national household surveys and original data sources. We have built a database of online job offers and designed a survey capturing human perception of advertisements with different grammatical genders. Based on these data, we have calculated: (1) descriptive statistics and (2) a subjective index of inequality, which is later included in a probabilistic model as an additional factor affecting female participation. The latter is calculated as a ratio that reflects how likely women are to apply for a job relative to men. When this indicator is close to one, the gender bias is lower and there is a tendency towards greater equality. The results for the main urban agglomerations in Argentina in the third and fourth quarters of 2020 indicate that women are less represented in hierarchical and full-time positions. In addition, gender bias in employment demand is a significant variable, which accounts for an average increase of 6(7) pp in female participation when it moves up from the 0.85–0.90 range to the 0.90–0.95(>0.95) range.