Gendered Constructions of Leadership in Norwegian Job Advertisements

Abstract

Women are traditionally underrepresented in managerial positions, and especially considering top managerial positions. Several factors might contribute to keeping women from reaching their full potential and rise to top positions in corporate contexts (Askehave & Zethsen, 2014). One factor that might contribute to keeping women from rising to these types of positions might be that the wording used in job advertisements do not appeal to them. Thus, the theme of this thesis is the wording used in job advertisements, and how this may have contributed to underrepresentation of women in managerial positions. The theoretical framework used was based on a traditional distinction between masculine and feminine stereotypical traits, such as women being more communal, transformational and relationship-oriented, whereas men are being more agentic, transactional and task-oriented. The present study is a replication study of Askehave & Zethsen (2014) where we used a mixed methods approach and conducted two different studies in order to investigate if job advertisements for Norwegian top management positions were gender biased. In study 1, we collected 50 Norwegian job advertisements and analyzed these into semantic fields and categorized these according to theory on gender stereotypes. Most of the semantic fields (7 out of 9) were identified as male biased. Moreover, findings from this study also suggest that all job advertisements were gender biased, and that an overwhelmingly majority of the advertisements were male biased. For study 2, we conducted a questionnaire with 20 authentic sentences from our corpus of job advertisements and asked potential job applicants to rate each sentence as male or female biased. Findings from this study suggest that the potential job applicants mostly agreed with theory and our findings from study 1 (in 18 out of 20 sentences). In conclusion, these findings imply that job advertisements for top managerial positions in Norway are male-biased, even though most of the job advertisements also mention several female characteristics in their advertisements.