Hollywood’s gender problem starts in its job postings

As Hollywood kicks off the Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, a spotlight is being trained on the gender imbalance among this year’s Oscar contenders. As usual, the 2017 nominations are strikingly lopsided: Four out of five nominees overall are men. Every single one of the 9 Best Picture nominees is directed by a man.

Meanwhile, a report surfaced last week that all of the major Hollywood studios are all in settlement talks with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission over systematic discrimination against female directors. It will be hard for them to dispute the facts: just 7% of films made in 2016 were directed by women, and that’s down 2% from 2015.

We checked the Textio Index to look for gender bias patterns in the job postings coming out of the film industry, and sure enough: the job listings for 8 out of 9 major film companies are written with gendered language that statistically attracts more male than female applicants on average. The only exception is Lionsgate—which is notable since they scored the highest number of Oscar nominations this year, led by their musical hit La La Land.

Here are the numbers, see for yourself:

As we’ve reported before, the language you use in your job postings predicts the gender of the person that you hire. So it's no surprise that if an entire industry writes job ads that on average appeal more to men, they will consistently hire more men than women.

Textio’s predictive engine surfaced the most frequently occurring phrases with masculine bias that appear in these job posts. Typical words that appear thousands of times are: “strong,” “maintain,” and “drive.” While they might appear innocuous, the data shows that when these words appear in a job post, men are more likely to apply than women. Textio has uncovered whole categories of words that have similar effects on hiring outcomes. And its no surprise that these gendered phrases also usually slow down the hiring process, increasing your time to fill.

If you want to look up the average Textio Score and bias tone of any company, just go to textio.com and search the Textio Index for free.