Combatting Bias in Police Recruitment

The All Police Jobs website has produced a system to help police forces analyse their job adverts for gender bias. Academic research tells us that certain words are gendered and when used in job adverts will sustain gender inequality.

All Police Jobs has written software that looks at each police recruitment adverts for gendered wording and counts these coded words. Each job is given a score for words with a feminine and masculine leaning, to quickly show if a job advert has gender bias. There are about 100 words identified by research, that carry gender bias, and our software quickly identifies any that have been used.

Each job listing has a summary below the advert wording, visible to administrators only, indicating the totals and the words contributing. An example is shown below.

♂ 2 3 ♀
Masculine Language Used:
·      decisions
·      determination
Feminine Language Used:
·      collaboration
·      committed
·      trust

We also analyse the adverts across an entire force, or by job type, such as new recruits, Chief Officers, transferees.

Notes

All Police Jobs lists all current UK police jobs. 25,000 visitors a week use the site to search for jobs in UK policing, and at any time there are around 800 live vacancies listed from across policing. We count each time a job is clicked, given us huge amounts of data on what jobs are attractive to job seekers, and produce an annual report on police recruitment trends. We will also now be producing an additional annual report regarding gendered wording in police recruitment adverts.

The research used to provide the words has been widely used across recruitment in all industries. The research paper, titled “Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality” was produced by Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen and Aaron C. Kay.
The full paper can be seen here https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gaucher-Friesen-Kay-JPSP-Gendered-Wording-in-Job-ads.pdf
Please note that we have omitted the word “force” from the list of gendered words, as its use in almost all adverts in the phrase “Police Force”, as opposed to its use as a verb, we felt would skew the analysis.

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