Altering gendered language in job postings doesn’t attract more women
A new MIT Sloan study finds that tweaking the amount of masculine or feminine language in online job postings doesn’t increase gender diversity in the applicant pool.
Faculty
Emilio J. Castilla is the NTU Professor of Management and a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Castilla is currently the co-director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research. He joined the MIT Sloan faculty in 2005, after being a faculty member in the Management Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT, as well as a Research Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, and at the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.
His research primarily focuses on the sociological aspects of work and employment. Castilla is particularly interested in studying how social and organizational processes influence key organizational and employment processes and outcomes over time. He tackles his research questions by examining different empirical settings with longitudinal datasets, both at the individual and company levels. His focus is on the recruitment, hiring, development, and job mobility of employees within and across organizations and locations, as well as on the impact of teamwork and social relations on performance and innovation. His work has been published in top academic journals and edited volumes, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, American Journal of Sociology, and American Sociological Review. He has also written a book on the use of longitudinal methods in social science research (Elsevier/Academic Press).
Castilla has taught in various degree programs at MIT Sloan, the Wharton School, and a number of other international universities. His teaching interests include Strategic Human Resource Management, Strategies for People Analytics, Leading Effective Organizations, Talent Management, Career Management, and Organizational Behavior. In addition to teaching full-time MBA and executive courses, he has taught several PhD-level courses.
Castilla, Emilio J., and Hye Jin Rho. Management Science. Forthcoming. Download Replication Files.
Ben A. Rissing and Emilio J. Castilla. In Sage Research Methods: Business, 2023.
Castilla, Emilio J. and Ethan J. Poskanzer. American Sociological Review Vol. 87, No. 5 (2022): 782–826.
Castilla, Emilio J. Organization Science Vol. 33, No. 6 (2022): 2364-2403.
Kelly, Erin L., Emilio J. Castilla, Thomas A. Kochan, Barbara Dyer, Paul Osterman, and Nathan Wilmers. Boston Review, September 4, 2020.
Castilla, Emilio J. Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work, and Inequality Blog. American Sociological Association, June 2020.
A new MIT Sloan study finds that tweaking the amount of masculine or feminine language in online job postings doesn’t increase gender diversity in the applicant pool.
In an effort to attract a diverse pool of talented candidates, many contemporary U.S. employers seek to craft gender-neutral job postings by editing language in the postings that may have masculine or feminine connotations. But how much difference do such practices make in reality? Not that much, suggests new research by MIT Sloan Professor Emilio J. Castilla and Michigan State Assistant Professor Hye Jin Rho.
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