224 Gender Coding in Job Advertisements for Academic, Non-Academic, and Leadership Positions in Emergency Medicine

Abstract

Gender disparities continue to exist in emergency medicine (EM) despite increasing percentages of women in medical school and residencies. Prior studies in other male dominated industries have shown using masculine or feminine coded language in job advertisements affects the proportion of male versus female as well as the total numbers of applicants who choose to apply for a given job. The goal of this study was to determine if sex coding exists in EM job advertisements, and to see if there were differences in coding of job advertisements between academic vs. non-academic jobs or administrative vs. non-administrative jobs. This was a cross sectional study of EM jobs advertised in the United States on 16 academic and non-academic medical job databases from September 2020-February 2021. Job advertisements were cut and pasted verbatim for the purposes of the study. Using a sex decoder program based on prior research by Gaucher et al on sexed wording in job advertisements, we analyzed each job to determine if the job advertisement contained any sex coded words and if the advertisement was overall highly masculine, masculine, highly feminine, feminine, or neutral. We also recorded which individual words were coded out as masculine or feminine in the advertisement. Each job was categorized as academic (core faculty at a training program) or non- academic, administrative (director, chair, vice chair, chief, or assistant or associate director or chief) or non-administrative. The location of the job in terms of region of the US was also recorded, as was any notation that the job required subspecialty/fellowship training. After data was gathered, it was manually reviewed to remove duplicate listings across multiple websites. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square analysis. The study was reviewed by the IRB and found to be exempt. Seventy-four job advertisements for EM were posted to the 16 websites during the study period. 44 (59.4%) of these coded out as masculine or strongly masculine, 18 (24.3%) coded out as feminine or strongly feminine, and 12 (16.2%) were neutral. Only one job advertisement contained no sex coded words. There was no difference in the sex coding of jobs when compared by region of the country (p=0.45), subspecialty requirement (p=0.87), academic vs non-academic (p=0.75) or administrative vs non- administrative (p=0.59). Job advertisements for emergency physicians tend to contain more masculine coded language. Almost all job advertisements for emergency physicians in this study contained at least one sex coded word. Further studies could explore whether changing the language of job advertisements in EM has an impact on the proportion of women who choose to apply to EM jobs.