Hindering women’s career: The implicit yet powerful role of language abstraction

The struggle for gender equality in accessing job resources and opportunities still represents one of the major challenges for contemporary societies. The persistence of gender barriers is particularly worrying in workplaces such as academia, which in principle are meant to promote knowledge and societal change. Indeed, converging evidence across different countries shows that women are less likely to access academic careers and reach the highest positions. Given that laws of democratic countries explicit forbid gender discrimination at work, why do those gender inequalities in science still persist? In the present contribution we suggest that language abstraction of the terms used to compose applicants’ evaluations works as a subtle, strategic, and powerful means to bypass formal rules and discriminate women in academic personnel selection. The sample consisted of 814 judgments on 194 applicants (118 men; 76 women) composed by 139 committee members (93 men; 46 women) during 36 selection procedures for faculty positions at the University of Bologna. Language abstraction was coded according to the Linguistic Category Model (Semin & Fiedler, 1988). Results showed that male applicants were described with more concrete negative terms and more abstract positive terms than female applicants. Interestingly, this linguistic discrimination was perpetrated only by male selectors, while female selectors did not vary the language used to describe men and women. In other terms, male selectors portray female applicants less favorably than male ones by ascribing them more abstract, enduring negative characteristics. Convergent evidence on gender linguistic discrimination derives also by a sample of judgments on applicants for a job positions advertised by an international bank group. The implications of language abstraction as a subtle and ‘legal’ means through which women reputation and career is hindered are discussed.