An inclusive job description leads with skills, drops gendered and coded language, separates true requirements from wish-list items, and states a salary range. Three edits move the needle fast: swap masculine-coded words for neutral alternatives, replace "5+ years" with task-based competencies, and publish pay bands. Field research from Chicago Booth found that job postings with measurable diversity goals raised application rates among women and racial minorities by 6.5%, without lowering candidate quality.
TL;DR:
- Using measurable diversity goals in job postings can increase applications from women and racial minorities by around 6.5%.
- Replacing masculine-coded words with neutral, competency-based language consistently improves application rates from underrepresented groups.
- Separating essential requirements from preferred qualifications and replacing experience years with specific skills broadens candidate pools.
- Clearly stating pay ranges, listing specific benefits, and including concrete inclusion signals enhance employer credibility and attract diverse applicants.
- Regularly auditing and benchmarking job descriptions against peer companies helps refine language and improves diversity and quality of candidates.
Table of Contents
- What Makes a Job Description Inclusive: A Quick Checklist
- Language and Bias: Gender, Age, and Cultural Coding
- Structure and Requirements: Fixing Must-Have and Experience Bias
- Accessibility and Disability-Inclusive Wording
- Benefits, Transparency, and Credibility Signals
- Before and After: Micro-Templates You Can Adapt
- Auditing Job Descriptions: A Repeatable Workflow
- Why Peer Benchmarking Beats Guessing
- Scale Inclusive Hiring Practices With Peer Benchmarking
- Sources
What Makes a Job Description Inclusive: A Quick Checklist
Before you touch tone or formatting, run every draft against this list. It works as a rewrite guide or a QA pass on postings already live.
- Strip coded language and apply gender debiasing to verbs and adjectives throughout the posting.
- Split qualifications into "must-have" and "nice-to-have," not one long block.
- State a salary range and list benefits that signal real inclusion, not boilerplate.
- Explain how to request accommodations and confirm the application itself is accessible.
- Format for readability: short sentences, bullets over paragraphs, no wall of jargon.
Each item above gets its own section below, with the reasoning and the edits behind it.
Language and Bias: Gender, Age, and Cultural Coding
Words carry gender associations most writers never notice. "Dominant," "competitive," and "ninja" read as masculine-coded; "collaborative," "supportive," and "nurturing" read as feminine-coded. Neither category belongs in a skills-based posting, because both filter applicants before they ever apply.
Peer-reviewed research summarized in PMC found that gender debiasing, meaning the swap from masculine-coded terms to neutral, skill-based phrasing, produces small but consistent increases in applications from women and from men who don't fit masculine norms. The effect held across lab and field studies.
The pattern: Neutral, competency-based language outperforms "feminized" language, which can trigger its own backlash. Skills-first phrasing is the more durable fix.
Age bias shows up as "digital native," "recent graduate," or "energetic team." Cultural bias hides in phrases like "excellent English" (instead of specifying the actual proficiency needed) or "must fit our culture" (a proxy that often means "must look like us"). Replace each with the literal skill or behavior you're testing for.
Measurable DEI goals help when paired with specifics: a stated hiring target plus named benefits performs better than a vague mission statement. They risk backlash only when unsupported by real programs behind them.
Structure and Requirements: Fixing Must-Have and Experience Bias
Long qualification lists filter out qualified candidates before they apply, particularly candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. Studies summarized by Textio recommend separating true requirements from preferences to reduce this self-selection effect.
- Split every list in two. Label one "required" (capped at 4 to 6 items) and one "preferred." Anything vague enough that you can't picture how you'd test for it doesn't belong in either.
- Replace years-of-experience language with competence statements. "5+ years managing budgets" becomes "has managed a department budget of $500K or more." This measures the skill directly instead of using tenure as a proxy.
- Rethink degree requirements. If a bachelor's degree isn't legally or technically required, list it as preferred and accept portfolios, certifications, or skills assessments as alternatives.
Pro Tip: Run your "required" list past three current team members who didn't write the posting. If they can't explain why an item is non-negotiable, move it to "preferred."
Accessibility and Disability-Inclusive Wording
Ableist phrasing sneaks into postings through generic physical language that has nothing to do with the actual job. "Must be able to stand for long periods" or "must have excellent vision" often describes a default assumption, not a genuine requirement. Mass guidance recommends function-based language instead: describe the task, not the body.
- Replace physical descriptors with the actual function ("lifts 30 lbs occasionally" instead of "must be physically fit").
- List only genuinely essential functions, and state them separately from preferred skills.
- Include a clear line on how to request accommodations, with a named contact or process.
- Check that application PDFs are screen-reader compatible and that images carry alt text.
These are small edits. The signal they send to candidates with disabilities, and the compliance protection they offer a large employer, is disproportionate to the effort.
Benefits, Transparency, and Credibility Signals
Salary ranges and specific benefits do more to signal inclusion than any mission statement. State the pay band plainly, along with the factors that move a candidate within it (experience, certifications, location).
- Publish a real salary range, not a placeholder like "competitive."
- Name benefits specifically: "16 weeks paid parental leave," "flexible start times," "dependent care FSA," not "great benefits package."
- Point to concrete inclusion infrastructure, such as employee resource groups or mentorship programs, if they exist.
Research from Stanford GSB on public firms after the 2020 Regulation S-K amendment found that credible, specific DEI disclosures, the kind backed by real benefits and policies, correlated with stronger external DEI performance. Vague statements didn't carry the same signal. Employers weighing how to describe their culture for recruiting benefit from the same logic outlined in workplace diversity guidance for growing firms: specificity is what makes a benefits claim credible.
Before and After: Micro-Templates You Can Adapt
Small rewrites change the signal a posting sends without changing the job itself.
- Title: "Marketing Ninja" becomes "Marketing Specialist." The second version is searchable, translatable, and free of gendered slang.
- Requirements intro: "You're a rockstar who thrives under pressure" becomes "You manage multiple deadlines and communicate clearly under time constraints." Same expectation, described as a skill instead of a personality type.
- Experience line: "10+ years in finance" becomes "Experience building and presenting quarterly budget forecasts." This opens the door to candidates with non-linear career paths who have the skill without the tenure.
- Benefits closer: "Great culture and perks" becomes "Includes 20 days PTO, hybrid schedule, and a $1,000 annual learning stipend."
Keep the actual job content untouched. What changes is tone, specificity, and the assumptions baked into word choice.
Auditing Job Descriptions: A Repeatable Workflow
Treat every posting like a document with an owner, not a one-time draft. Assign a JD owner, route it through a reviewer outside the hiring manager's team, and run it through an automated bias checker before publishing. Tools like Weekday's bias checker catch gendered, ageist, and jargon-heavy phrasing quickly, though tool suggestions still need a human pass, since automated flags can miss industry-specific language that's genuinely necessary.
- Track applicant diversity by role, not just company-wide, to catch postings that underperform.
- Watch time-to-fill and interview-to-offer ratio as quality proxies alongside diversity metrics.
- Pilot new phrasing on a subset of open roles before rolling changes company-wide.
Pro Tip: Benchmark your JD language against peer companies before assuming a rewrite worked. A shift in application volume can reflect market conditions, not your edit.
Why Peer Benchmarking Beats Guessing
Most JD rewrites happen in isolation, one recruiter, one template, no outside check on whether the language actually works. That's the gap I keep seeing: teams change a job title or drop a degree requirement based on instinct, then never learn whether it moved applicant quality or volume. Peer groups that compare real hiring data close that gap faster than any internal audit alone.
— Simon
Scale Inclusive Hiring Practices With Peer Benchmarking
Rewriting one job description is straightforward. Proving that the rewrite actually improved your applicant pool, across every open role, every quarter, is where most talent teams get stuck without outside data to compare against. Ixcommunities gives corporate TA and recruiting leaders a structured alternative to guessing: benchmarking reports that show how your posting language and pipeline metrics stack up against peer companies, template libraries built from tested language, and peer review sessions where other talent leaders critique your drafts before they go live.
Members also get training courses on writing and auditing job descriptions, plus access to a proprietary search consultant database for roles that need outside recruiting support. If you're piloting new JD language this quarter and want a way to validate it against what peer companies are seeing, explore Ixcommunities membership and get access to the current benchmarking reports.
Sources
- Advertising measurable hiring goals attracts a more diverse pipeline — Chicago Booth Review
- Gendered wording in job advertisements and effects of debiasing interventions — PMC
- Human capital disclosure and labor market outcomes — Stanford GSB
- Mass
Use the government guidance for compliance language and required disclaimers. Use the academic studies when building the business case for a rewrite internally. Use the tool pages as a first-pass check, not a final sign-off.