How do you write a job advertisement that appeals to both men and women? This question is particularly pressing in French, where every noun has a clearly visible grammatical gender. University researcher Benjamin Storme investigated how employers can best deal with this issue.
'Traditionally, in France, the rule is that you use the feminine form for a group consisting solely of women,' says Storme. 'If there is one man in the group or if it is not clear exactly who you are addressing, then you use the masculine form. In theory, this language use should come across as neutral, but we have known since the 1970s that people do indeed think of men when they read that form.'
As a result, job advertisements that are intended to be neutral are more likely to appeal to men than women. But what is the right approach? Storme: 'In our research, we looked for forms that are "gender fair", and tested two strategies. The first involves using both the masculine and feminine forms, for example "étudiants et étudiantes" if you want to address a group of students. The second strategy involves finding a word that is not gender-marked, such as "les élèves", which is used for both men and women.
Neutralising stereotypes
This research has been conducted before, but it always used virtually neutral examples. 'Take "étudiants" and "élèves", for example,' says Storme. 'These words refer to a group consisting of roughly equal numbers of men and women. As a result, the studies showed that people did not necessarily think of a man when they read these words, regardless of the strategy chosen. We were curious to see if this would be different when we chose examples that are strongly associated with a male or female stereotype, such as "engineer", "pilot", "hairdresser" and "dancer".'
Test subjects were presented with job vacancies in which either the general form was used, such as 'pilote', or both the male and female forms, such as 'aviateur' and 'aviatrice'. They were then asked to indicate who they thought these job advertisements were intended for. 'Our results show that people automatically think of the stereotype when they see the neutral form,' says Storme. 'A hairdresser is a woman, a pilot is a man. Only when you explicitly use the other form do they also think of the other gender. The language used then diminishes the stereotype.'
This means that the strategy of explicitly mentioning both genders is often the most neutral choice. Storme: 'This seems counterintuitive, because it feels more neutral to remove gender from the text altogether, Our research shows that it is precisely this emphasis on both forms that helps readers feel that the vacancy is also intended for the non-stereotypical gender.'
Wikipedia
Storme has now started to disseminate his results. 'Together with students, we adapted various Wikipedia articles on gender-fair language use. It was great fun for them to see how much impact they suddenly had: those articles together reached two million people. And Wikipedia is also an important source for Large Language Models such as ChatGPT.'
