Hindering Women’s Careers in Academia: Gender Linguistic Bias in Personnel Selection

This paper addresses the role of language abstraction as a means to discriminate female applicants in academic personnel selection. The level of abstraction of 814 judgments, which were drawn from publicly available archival material, was coded. Results reveals that judgments of female applicants were formulated using negative terms at a more abstract level and positive terms at a more concrete level than those of male applicants. Moreover, this gender linguistic discrimination was perpetrated only by male committee members. Further analysis of the use of linguistic category shows that this discrimination was mainly based on the use of negative adjectives. The implications of language abstraction as a subtle means through which women’s academic careers are hindered are discussed.