The job description that was rewritten

An organisation rewrote one job advertisement and the number of applications from women tripled. The job did not change.

The original listed nine requirements, four of them marked essential, and used a set of words that research has repeatedly linked to a male-skewed applicant pool: competitive, driven, dominant, self-starter. The rewrite did three things. It cut the requirements to five, moved three to a clearly labelled 'desirable' list, and replaced the adjectives with descriptions of the work itself. It also added one line stating that candidates meeting most of the criteria were encouraged to apply.

The mechanism is documented and fairly simple. Long requirement lists are read differently by different candidates: some treat them as a wish list, others as a checklist to be met in full, and the second reading is more common among candidates from groups that expect to be scrutinised. A list of nine therefore filters by confidence as much as by capability, and confidence is distributed in ways that have nothing to do with the job.

The measurable outcome was not only the application count. The shortlist was stronger on the panel's own scoring, which is the part that persuaded a sceptical hiring manager: the original advertisement had been excluding people who would have scored well, and he had no way of knowing it because they never appeared.

That last point generalises. A selection process can only be judged on the people who entered it, so any filter applied before entry is invisible to every check that happens afterwards. The advertisement is part of the method, and it is almost never reviewed.