Wording of Advertisements Influences Women’s Intention to Apply for Career Opportunities

Abstract

Women’s self-directed gender stereotypes can lead to self-limiting behavior such as a lower propensity to pursue career opportunities or leadership positions. In this paper we investigate which factors impact women’s as compared to men’s decisions to apply for prestigious scholarships, which would prepare them for leadership positions. Specifically, we focus on the impact of communal and agentic wording in advertisements as well as male or female organizational representatives. Using experimental designs in Study 1 (N = 45) and Study 2 (N = 50) we showed that women reacted more positively to communally worded as compared to agentically worded advertisements with regard to appeal, belongingness and intention to apply. For men wording did not have an impact on their evaluation of the scholarship advertised and their intention to apply. In Study 3 (N = 159), an experimental video study, we tested if female representatives of an organization can ameliorate the negative effects of agentic wording on women’s evaluations. We found that indeed agentic wording had a negative effect on women only if the recruitment message was communicated by a male representative. If the representative was female women evaluated agentically and communally worded advertisements similarly. Overall, our findings suggest that the way career opportunities are communicated has an important impact on women’s propensity to apply.

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