Event Description

Shades of Gender in Employee Discourse “Gendered (male-shaded) cultural conceptions of jobs and organizations raise questions about whether women are competent for many jobs and how well they fit into organizations. We study gendered cultural conceptions in the tech sector, which is economically important but has gender problems in terms of demographics, culture, and workplace practices. We expect to see variation in the gendering of cultural conceptions because tech firms differ in many ways. We apply natural-language-processing techniques to tech employees’ descriptions of their workplaces, deriving a gender axis in semantic space. We find some progress in ‘ungendering’ workplace discourse. Many associations of the gender axis with gender stereotypes (e.g., assertiveness, concern for others) and corporate values (e.g., innovation) are as expected, but some associations reveal the erosion of gendered expectations. Employee discourse about tech firms is largely shaded male, although there is variation across reviews and firms. Finally, employees who are female, more satisfied with their jobs, and working in publicly traded and larger firms are less likely to use male-shaded language; the gendering gap is wider among less-satisfied employees and those in publicly traded and larger firms. This suggests that despite some ‘degendering’ of the tech workforce, cultural barriers to gender inclusivity persist.”

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