Name: Behind Walmart's Gender Bias Problem
Uploaded: 2017-04-03
Duration: 2 min 50 s
Description: And why companies need to pay attention.

Multiple voices: Caring and compassionate, compassionate. We are a determined company that delivers superior plumbing. We motivate others to reach their potential. Speaker 1: What if I told you that a couple of seemingly harmless words in the job description could make a job perfect for you or entirely invisible. Job- posters are filled with words to either attract you to the job or deter you from it. Sometimes just based on your gender. Decisive. Decisive. Leader. Leader. Confident. Confident. A study in 2011 in the Journal of personality and social psychology shows that gender any quality starts from the very beginning of the hiring process. Affectionate. Affectionate. Polite. Polite. Let's take this sample post. We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients. They are determined to stand apart from the competition .>> It's sound alright, doesn't it? But according to multiple studies, words like dominant and determined evoke feelings of power and leadership, words that usually attracts men. Now take the same job post, what was different in wording ?>> We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients. We are committed to understanding the engineering sector intimately. According to studies, women are perceived as more interpersonal than men. Making words like community, relationship, and commitment more attractive to them. In early 2017 Fortune analyze thousands of postings on Walmart's website. Our number one on the Fortune 500 list, it alone employee 1 % of the US workers. Force. We partnered with textio, a machine learning platform. That analyzes job descriptions for effectiveness and gender tone. It turns out 51 % of Walmart's job postings contain masculine leaning language, and of the management and leadership job postings we looked at, 70 % of those included very masculine language. Its gender tone score was negative 0. 3. That means language used in the post was deemed slightly masculine, and Walmart's not alone. Text [ INAUDIBLE ] scrubbed through job postings from Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. Amazon's gender tone also leans slightly masculine. Target was neutral and Best Buy was also neutral, but closer to being slightly feminine. During Fortune's data analysis, we discovered Wal Mart had already been working on a new career site, which just launched. The company told Fortune, the stats don't make you feel very good about how long it would take to reach parity. But Wal Mart's confident if they get it right, others will follow. Techs DO for its part says if companies just wrote job Descriptions with fewer adjectives. They wouldn't skew as far one way or the other on the gender scale, and the result? Jobs get filled faster and the workforce becomes more equal. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]