Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis between job advertisements published for the German and the Italian labour markets

Abstract

The e-recruitment phenomenon has changed the way companies address job seekers around the world, but, whereas numerous academic studies have focused on e-recruitment and its social, cultural and psychological effects, little is known about its linguistic features and about the related gender issues.The main purpose of this contribution is to investigate generic masculine forms and gender-fair alternatives used in job advertisements published by German and Italian companies on their websites for the German and Italian labour markets.The initial hypothesis is that gender-fair language is used more often in German than in Italian both by Italian and German companies. In order to test this hypothesis, a sample of job advertisements has been collected from the career section of the websites of some German and Italian companies and two corpora have been built, one in German and one in Italian.The results of the analysis indicate that the initial hypothesis is only partially confirmed. Gender-fair strategies do appear more often in German job advertisements, especially concerning the use of the pronoun Sie, but, at the same time, due to both linguistic and cultural reasons, generic masculine forms remain the most common alternative both in German and in Italian.

Keywords

• e-recruitment
• gender and language
• corpus linguistics
• job advertisements