The words listed have come from academic research into language that is ‘coded’ as masculine and feminine, reflecting existing societal bias about these genders. That means that we associate each gender with those qualities, often at an unconscious level. For instance, we stereotype women as being more polite/cooperative/kind than men, and stereotype men as being more active/innovative/driven than women. Of course, we all know that people of any gender can possess any of those properties.

The evidence underlying this tool comes from a research paper published by the University of Waterloo and Duke. The tool checks for the appearance of specific words, then calculates the relative proportion of masculine-coded and feminine-coded words to reach an overall verdict on the gender-coding of the advert. Some words have been reduced to a ‘stem’ to cover a range of noun, verb and adjective variants; for instance “compet” covers “compete”, “competetive” and “competition”.

The results showed that women felt that job adverts with masculine-coded language were less appealing and that they belonged less in those occupations. For men, feminine-coded adverts were only slightly less appealing and there was no effect on how much the men felt they belonged in those roles.

When you paste in your job description and click the “check” button, the text is analysed for coded language. It is not shared, stored or posted elsewhere. No-one else will receive or have access to the results.