10.6092/issn.2421-2695/6858
Il fenomeno della ricerca e selezione del personale attraverso il web ha modificato le modalità attraverso le quali le società si rivolgono a chi cerca lavoro in tutto il mondo. Mentre molte ricerche scientifiche si sono concentrate sugli effetti sociali, culturali e psicologici dell’e-recruitment, le caratteristiche linguistiche, e in particolare quelle collegate al genere, non sono state oggetto di adeguato approfondimento.Lo scopo principale di questo contributo consiste nell’analisi del linguaggio maschile generico e delle alternative linguistiche rispettose delle istanze di genere negli annunci di lavoro pubblicati sul web da imprese italiane e tedesche nell’ambito dei rispettivi mercati del lavoro. L’ipotesi iniziale è che il linguaggio gender-fair sia usato più spesso in Germania che in Italia sia dalle imprese italiane che da quelle tedesche. Per verificare questa ipotesi, è stato raccolto un campione di annunci di lavoro dai siti web di alcune imprese tedesche e italiane e sono stati creati due corpora, uno in tedesco e uno in italiano.All’esito dell’analisi, l’ipotesi iniziale è confermata soltanto parzialmente. L’uso di un linguaggio rispettoso delle istanze di genere è più frequente negli annunci tedeschi, specialmente attraverso l’uso del pronome Sie, ma allo stesso tempo, a causa di ragioni linguistiche e culturali, le forme linguistiche maschile generico rimangono l’alternativa più comune sia in Italia che in Germania.
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Chiara Nardone
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Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis between job advertisements published for the German and the Italian labour markets
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Chiara Nardone
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Young, J. & Foot, K., Corporate E Cruiting: The Construction ‐ of Work in Fortune 500 Recruiting Web Sites, Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 2005, 11.1, pp. 44-71.
Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis between job advertisements published for the German and the Italian labour markets
https://labourlaw.unibo.it/article/download/6858/6657
3
Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis
 between job advertisements published for the
    German and the Italian labour markets



               CHIARA NARDONE
               University of Bologna




                 vol. 3, no. 1, 2017
                   ISSN: 2421-2695
   Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative
analysis between job advertisements published
for the German and the Italian labour markets


                                                            CHIARA NARDONE
                                    PhD student in Interpreting and Translation
                                                         University of Bologna
                                                     chiara.nardone2@unibo.it

                                  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.
                 C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis between
  job advertisements published for the German and the
                 Italian labour markets
TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Introduction. – 2. E-Recruitment. – 3. Gender and Language. –
      3.1. Gender and Language in Italy. – 3.2. Gender and Language in Germany. – 3.3.
      Generic masculine forms and gender-fair strategies in Italian and in German. – 3.4.
      Generic masculine formsand role names. – 4. Hypothesis. – 5. Method. – 6. Results.
      – 7. Conclusions

1. Introduction

        The e-recruitment phenomenon has changed the way companies
address job seekers around the world, but, whereas numerous academic
studies (Marschall 2002; Young et al. 2006) have focused on e-recruitment and
its social, cultural and psychological effects, little is known about its linguistic
features and about the gender issues it calls upon. The subject of gender and
language has been deeply investigated in the Anglophone countries, in
Germany this issue has gained considerable interest in institutional and
academic contexts since the 1980s and, as a matter of fact, the use of gender-
fair strategies has gradually increased and the diffusion of generic masculine
forms has seen a decrease in the last 30 years. In Italy, the debate around
gender and language has received scarce attention both in academic research
and by institutions, and, consequently, generic masculine forms are still
extremely common and widely accepted.
        Even though several psycholinguistic studies (i.e. Gygax et al. 2008;
Gabriel et al. 2008) have shown that using masculine generic forms for
referring to role names conceals an overall male bias in the readers' and
listeners' understanding, very few studies have analysed the way men and
women are addressed in job advertisements and which kind of consequences
these forms of addressing could have on labour markets.
        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 labour
markets of the two countries.
        The initial hypothesis is that gender-fair language is used more often in
German than in Italian by both Italian and German companies.
        In the next sections of this paper, I will firstly introduce the main
features of e-recruitment, secondly I will point out how the debate around




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



gender and language arose and spread in Italy and in Germany, then I will
summarize the gender-biased phenomena in Italian and German and the
gender-fair strategies that have been proposed by guidelines published in the
two countries. Additionally, I will illustrate the findings of psycholinguistic
studies that demonstrated that the perception of generic masculine forms may
lead to linguistic invisibility of women. I will then describe the methodology,
based on Corpus Linguistics, which has been employed in order to test the
initial hypothesis.
         After that, I will report in detail the results obtained by the analysis on
the German and Italian job advertisements and eventually I will draw some
conclusions that focus on the cultural and linguistic elements that influence
the way German and Italian companies address job applicants in the two
countries.

2. E-Recruitment

        E-recruitment has substantially changed the way companies address job
candidates around the world. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that «e-
recruiting reduces cost for recruitment, increases the number of suitable
applicants, enables time savings for both organizations and applicants and
improves the corporate image» (Lang et al. 2011).
        Scholars from different fields of study and professional stakeholders
have given different definitions of e-recruitment; in this article the following
definition has been chosen: e-recruitment refers to the «practices and activities
carried out by the organization with the primary purpose of identifying and
attracting potential employees» (Wolfswinkel 2009). In the last years, interest
towards e-recruitment has flourished in various disciplines, e.g. Psychology,
Marketing, Human Resources Management and has taken different directions.
For instance, in Marschall (2002) the ideological discourses of employment-
related Web pages have been explored and in Young (2006) the meaning of
work, as constructed and represented by companies, has been investigated
through the analysis of recruitment websites. Furthermore, a considerable
amount of studies on e-recruitment have focused on two aspects of this
process, that is, how the navigational usability affects applicants’ organizational
attraction and how commercial and corporate recruiting websites can be
evaluated through different methods (Wolfswinkel 2009). The categorization
of the e-recruitment sources has also been studied in detail. In the academia
and among professional stakeholders, the most accepted categorization is the




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                   C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



one that recognizes, on the one hand, corporate career websites and, on the
other hand, recruiting service providers and job boards1.
        On the grounds of this brief review that summarizes some trends of e-
recruitment research, it can be assumed that neither the linguistic aspects nor
the gender perspective of e-recruitment have been deeply investigated. It is
particularly worth mentioning that the intersection of these two dimensions
(language and gender) in job advertisements has been the focus of a very
limited number of publications, i.e Askehave (2014).
        In this contribution, I will investigate e-recruitment from a perspective
that intertwines language and gender, thus analysing the language of German
and Italian job advertisements with a particular focus on generic masculine and
gender-fair forms used for role names.
        In the next sections I will briefly introduce how the debate gender and
language originated and developed in Italy and in Germany and I will illustrate
the gender-fair alternatives that have been proposed for Italian and German.

3. Gender and Language

3.1 Gender and Language in Italy

        Academia and institutions began to show interest towards gender and
language in the 1970s. The attention to the issue arose firstly in the U.S.,
where, in 1973, Lakoff published the seminal work Language and woman’s place
that shed light to «marginality and powerlessness of women [that] is reflected
in both the ways women are expected to speak and the ways in which women
are spoken of» (Lakoff 1973). In the wake of the debate that originated in the
U.S., interest on this issue spread across several European countries, especially
Germany and France, among others. In Italy, Alma Sabatini was the first one
who wrote about sexism in language. In 1987 she published Il sessismo nella
lingua italiana, which contained the first recommendations aimed at avoiding
male bias in Italian and at fostering women’s linguistic visibility. However,
even if the above-mentioned publication was officially supported by the Italian
government, her voice remained unheard during the following years. The
recommendations she presented were neither applied in the official
documents, nor this publication encouraged a vivid debate about sexism in the
language, as happened in Germany, for example.

        (1) In recent years the professional networking service LinkedIn has also been a subject of
academic interest. It is worth mentioning that Giuliana Garzone presented the contribution
“LinkedIn, corporate image construction and employer branding” at the DICOEN VIII conference.




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                     C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



        In the 1990s very little was done by institutions2 to reduce the male bias
of Italian language. Even in the academia very few scholars dedicated their
research to this issue, one of the few academic initiatives that it is worth
mentioning was the conference Donna & Linguaggio organized by Gianna
Marcato in 1995, where different scholars focused their contributions on
gender and language. In recent years, new voices both inside and outside the
academia have shed new light to the gender and language debate from
multidisciplinary perspectives. In 2012, the Accademia della Crusca, the most
important institution concerned with the Italian language, alongside the
Municipality of Florence (Comune di Firenze), published new gender-fair
guidelines3 for the language used by institutions in official documents. These
guidelines have been written by the prominent linguist Cecilia Robustelli, who
has been one of the leading figures in several projects4 whose aim is to spread
the awareness towards the importance of gender-fair language among
institutions and citizens.
        Furthermore, Cavagnoli (2013), Formato (2014) and Merkel (2013) are
some of the scholars who are dedicating their research to sexism in language,
thus contributing to expand the interest towards gender and language in Italy.
        Outside academia, it is worth mentioning that Laura Boldrini, the
President of the Chamber of Deputies of Italy, officially asked deputies to use
female nouns when referring to female members of Parliament5. Furthermore,
the REI (Rete per l’eccellenza dell’italiano istituzionale), a network created by the
Italian translators of the European Commission, focused its 10th meeting in
2010 on the use of male and female forms for nouns of role and professions.
        This renewed interest during the last few years among academia and
institutions towards sexism in Italian language could be interpreted as a sign
that citizens, especially in some professional areas, are becoming more aware
of the importance of using gender-fair language in order to overcome
women’s discrimination in language which is also strongly associated with



           (2) The only official document that followed Sabatini’s guidelines was Codice di stile delle
comunicazioni scritte ad uso delle amministrazioni pubbliche edited by Sabino Cassese and published by
Dipartimento per la Funzione Pubblica della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri in 1993.
           (3) The strategies proposed in these guidelines will be further illustrated in the section: Generic
masculine forms and gender-fair strategies in Italian and in German.
           (4) The most relevant project was Genere e linguaggio organized by the Municipality of Florence
in collaboration with the Accademia della Crusca. For further information see the following URL:
http://www.provincia.fi.it/pari-opportunita/puntiamo-sul-pari/genere-e-linguaggio/.
           (5) La lettera di Laura Boldrini sulla parità di genere linguistica, in Il Post del 5 marzo 2015.
http://www.ilpost.it/2015/03/05/boldrini-parita-genere-italiano/.




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



social discrimination within the labour market, as we shall see in more detail in
the following sections.

3.2. Gender and Language in Germany

        In the previous section, my focus has been on the debate around
gender and language in Italy, from the 1980s to the most recent initiatives, the
present section will thus consider how this debate originated and developed in
Germany.
        In 1978 the German linguist Santa Trömel Plötz published the article
Linguistik und Frauensprache, she was the first one who introduced the issue of
women’s discrimination in German language. She pointed out that the
invisibility of women in language was strongly associated with the
subordinated role they had in the society: in order to achieve social equality,
linguistic discriminatory forms should be overcome. Santa Trömel Plötz and
Luise F. Pusch, who also played an important role in supporting feminist
linguistics in Germany, focused their attention on how the so-called generic
masculine did not allow women to be clearly visible in the language. They
strongly criticized the use of generic masculine and therefore fostered the
introduction of new forms, i.e. feminine pronouns when referring to women
only, in order to avoid forms like «Jemand spricht über seine Entbindung» (in
English «Someone talks about his delivery») (Trömel-Plötz 1978). Trömel
Plötz, Pusch und Grabrucker understood that the need of adopting gender-fair
forms was particularly strong in the official language used by institutions. In
fact, they were convinced that the language of institutions could turn to be a
remarkably powerful tool, even more effective than the every-day language,
which could contribute to transform society in a more equal place for both
women and men.
        The introduction of the gender and language issue in the late 1970s and
in the 1980s prompted a vivid debate among scholars and a widespread
response by institutions. In fact, since the 1990s federal and local institutions
have published guidelines and regulations in order to introduce and to apply
gender-fair forms in the institutional language.
        Moreover, during the same years several German universities published
guidelines for the use of gender-fair language and even in DUDEN’s 2001
edition, one of the most relevant dictionaries for German, generic masculine




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                     C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



forms were not considered acceptable anymore, whereas in the 1984 edition6
the use of generic masculine was recommended, especially for role names.
        One last remark about the debate around gender and language in
Germany focuses on the fact that recently scholars have committed not only
to ensuring women’s visibility through the introduction and spread of gender-
fair forms, but also to overcoming the binary system constituted by women
and men and introducing thus new linguistic strategies that allow people who
do not consider themselves either men or women to be represented in
language. The most discussed of these strategies are the * and the _ (i.e.
Student*innen, Mitarbeiter_innen). It is worth mentioning that these non-binary
strategies have been introduced, among others, in the guidelines published by
the University of Cologne7 and the * has been employed by the German
Green Party in all the official documents8 since November 2015.
        From this description about how the debate around gender and
language originated and developed in Germany and in Italy, it can be argued
that German institutions and academia have shown a stronger interest towards
the issue of gender and language than their Italian counterparts have.
        The mismatch in the attention and awareness towards this theme
between the Italian and German contexts may well mirror the way they use (or
don’t use) gender-fair language in texts and documents produced and
published in these two countries.

3.3 Generic masculine forms and gender-fair strategies in Italian and in
German

       For the sake of completeness and clarity, this section will consider
generic masculine forms in German and Italian and gender-fair strategies that
have been proposed for Italian and German.
       Italian and German are gender marked languages whereby «the gender
of a character in a text is - in general - explicitly given by the form of the
determiner and by the morphological form of the noun» (Gygax et al. 2008).


           (6) S. Metz-Göckel, & M. Kamphans, Zum geschlechterbewussten Sprachgebrauch, Info-Papier,
2002, 3.
          (7) Die Gleichstellungsbeauftragte der Universität zu Köln. ÜberzeuGENDERe Sprache
Leitfaden für eine geschlechtersensible und inklusive Sprache. Köln: Die Gleichstellungsbeauftragte der
Universität                 zu                Köln,               2014.              http://www.gb.uni-
koeln.de/e2106/e2113/e5726/2014_Leitfaden_UeberzeuGENDEReSprache_11032014.pdf.
          (8) M. Kohlmaier, Gendern in der Sprache. Ein Sternchen für alle, in Süddeutsche Zeitung del 22
novembre 201, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/gendern-in-der-sprache-ein-sternchen-fuer-alle-
1.2748572.




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                    C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



Although they are both gender marked languages, the linguistic phenomena
that reveal a male bias in the two languages overlap only partially. The so-
called generic masculine that refers to both women and men exists both in
German and in Italian, but the use of masculine forms to address women,
especially in case of prestigious role names (i.e. ministro Valeria Fedeli in English
male minister Valeria Fedeli) appears only in Italian. Both phenomena may turn
the understanding of a message more difficult for readers and hearers and, in
some cases, they may compromise the correctness of the language (i.e. il sindaco
è incinta, in English the male mayor is pregnant). Furthermore, the generic
masculine, which the following analysis will focus on, may lead to an
ambiguous interpretation, because masculine forms can be used both
specifically, referring only to men and generically, by addressing women and
men, the only way readers and hearers can understand the referent of these
forms is by processing contextual information.
        As already pointed out before, in Germany several guidelines on
gender-fair language have been published since the late 1990s, whereas the
only Italian publications of this sort are those written by Sabatini in 1987 and
by Robustelli in 2012.
        In this contribution, Braun’s (2000) and Metz-Göckel & Kamphans’
(2002) guidelines have been followed as far as the German side is concerned,
and those by Robustelli (2012) for the Italian side.
        Braun in Leitfaden zur geschlechtergerechten Formulierung. Mehr Frauen in die
Sprache summarizes that there are two main strategies in order to avoid generic
masculine forms: feminization and neutralization. Table 1 shows the gender-
fair strategies9 recommended by Braun and Metz-Göckel & Kamphans.

         TABLE 1
        Gender-fair                    Gender-fair                              English
 strategy                         example                                translation

       Double                            Schülerinnen            und            Female            and
 formulations                     Schüler                                male students

          Slash                             Assistent/in                           male assistant

          (9) Braun and Metz-Göckel & Kamphans also suggest the use of further strategies. Some of
these strategies are not listed in the table for different reasons: in some cases (i.e. Binnen-I), their
application goes beyond the scope of this research, in other cases they have been excluded because
their analysis (i.e. the changing of the structure of a sentence) with Corpus Linguistics tools is
extremely time-consuming.




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                 C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis




 formulations                                                      + female suffix

        Plural                         Stellvertretende                     deputies

        Neutral                        Lehrkraft;                           teaching staff;
 suffixes and words                    Lehrperson                           teacher

        Collective and                 Präsidium                        presidency,
 institutional names                                               committee

       Direct form of       Liebe                                      Dear male and
 address              Benutzerinnen                         und female users
                      Benutzer


       Robustelli in Linee guida per l’uso del genere nel linguaggio amministrativo
suggests the use of the strategies listed in table 2.

       TABLE 2
        Gender-fair                Gender-fair                            English
 strategy                     example                              translation

        Double                i consiglieri e le        male                           and
 formulations, also in consigliere;              female                             council
 the      abbreviated         i/le consiglieri/e members
 forms.

       Neutral words       persona;                      essere         person;
 and periphrases     umano                                         human being

        Collective and                 corpo docente;                       teaching staff;
 institutional names                   presidenza                           presidency,
                                                                            committee

        Relative and                   chi arriva in ritardo                who      arrives
 indefinite pronouns                                               late


       As already mentioned, the analysis of role names will be based on the
generic masculine forms and the gender-fair strategies described in this
section.



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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis




3.3 Generic masculine forms and role names

        Generic masculine forms may encourage women’s invisibility and
subordination in language.
        Since language influences our thought and our individual perception of
reality (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), women’s invisibility and subordination in
the language have also consequences in different areas of «the real world», i.e.
in the labour market and in the recruitment process. The correlation between
generic masculine forms and women’s discrimination in the labour market has
been investigated for the first time by Bem & Bem in 1973. Their findings
demonstrated that «sex bias in the content of a job advertisement does serve
to aid and abet discrimination by discouraging both men and women from
applying for "opposite-sex" jobs» (Bem & Bem 1973).
        Recently several psycholinguistic studies have indeed demonstrated that
the use of generic masculine for role names does not lead to a «gender-open»
representation (Gabriel et al. 2008), meaning that the use of the masculine
plural is more strongly associated with men compared to gender neutral and
gender balanced forms (Gygax et al. 2008).
        Particularly pertinent for the sake of this paper is the study about the
effects of gender-biased language on role names that has been carried out by
Gygax et al. in 2008.
        They demonstrated that «masculine forms intended as generic are
typically not interpreted as such.[...] The use of masculine plural does not lead
to a gender-open or gender-spread representation, but to a specifically male
representation». As Gygax et al. point out, these «results show that the so-
called generic use of the masculine biases gender representations in a way that
is discriminatory to women». This kind of linguistic discrimination may have
social implications. In the recruitment process, for instance, from an initial
observation, the use of generic masculine forms seems indeed to be frequently
employed by companies to address job applicants. Bearing these elements in
mind, it is important not to underestimate the extent to which generic
masculine forms may influence readers’ perception towards a male-oriented
representation of job applicants.
        In these sections an overview on how the debate around gender and
language originated and developed in Italy and Germany has been depicted,
the most relevant generic masculine forms and gender-fair strategies for




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



German and Italian have been listed and psycholinguistic studies' results
shedding light on the discriminatory effects that generic masculine forms may
have on women, have been provided. The following section will present the
purpose and the initial hypothesis of this study.

4. Hypothesis

        Considering that psycholinguistic studies have provided evidence that
generic masculine forms may foster the discrimination of women in language,
and consequently in society, 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 job advertisements than in Italian ones, the advertisements being
published by both Italian and German companies. This hypothesis is justified
on the one hand by the greater attention that academia in Germany has given
to the theme gender and language in comparison to the interest shown in Italy
since the 1980s; on the other hand, by the fact that Italian and German
institutions have answered very differently to the requests of renovating their
languages in order to overcome male bias they entailed.
        As emphasized before, since the 1980s federal and local institutions in
Germany have published gender-fair language recommendations and
guidelines and the use of generic masculine has strongly diminished, especially
in official documents. In Italy, the requests to reduce and/or eliminate the use
of generic masculine forms have been scarce and isolated and the institutions
have given an unsatisfactory response. Therefore, although the first
recommendations regarding gender-fair language were published almost 30
years ago, the use of masculine forms to refer to both women and men
remains in Italy often unquestioned.

5. Method

        In order to carry out the analysis and confirm or reject the initial
hypothesis, a sample of job advertisements has been collected from the career
sections in the websites of 65 German and Italian companies. The companies
included in the analysis are either members of the German Italian Chamber of
Commerce or they have been included by the Italian Trade Agency in the list
of Italian companies with branches in Germany.



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                   C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



       Two comparable corpora have been thus built, one in Italian and one
in German. Both corpora are composed by 260 job advertisements published
by 65 companies. Despite the same amount of job advertisements, the
German and the Italian corpora have a different number of types 10 and
tokens11, therefore, in order to compare the results, the frequency of
occurrences has been normalized to a common base of 100.000 words. Table
3 summarizes the most relevant quantitative information of the two corpora.

         TABLE 3
                                                   Italian                        German
                                                Corpus                          Corpus

           Number of job                                260                            260
        advertisements

             Number of                                  65                              65
           companies

          Number of tokens                            53,866                         74,326

           Number of types                            5,724                          10,223


        After collecting the job advertisements, masculine generic forms and
gender-fair forms in German and in Italian have been analysed with the corpus
analysis toolkit Antconc and, as already mentioned before, their frequency has
been normalized to a base of 100,000 words in order to compare the results in
an accurate and rigorous way. As previously suggested, the most relevant
linguistic phenomena in terms of gender-fair language have been selected
according to the guidelines on gender-fair language written by Robustelli
(Italian) and by Braun and Metz-Göckel & Kamphans (German).




          (10) Type: a single particular wordform. Any difference of form (e.g. spelling) makes a word
a different type. All tokens comprising the same characters are considered to be examples of the same
type. (CASS, Corpus: some key terms, 2013).
          (11) Token: any single, particular instance of an individual word in a text or corpus.(CASS,
Corpus: some key terms, 2013).




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



6. Results

         In this section the results obtained by the analysis on generic masculine
forms and gender-fair forms employed in German and Italian job ads will be
reported.
         Results show that generic masculine forms are extremely frequent both
in Italian and in German job advertisements. The strategies that explicitly refer
to both men and women - slash formulations and double formulations - that
are thus recommended by the guidelines mentioned above, appear in few job
advertisements both in German and in Italian.
         Bar chart 1 and bar chart 2 show that the generic masculine forms
candidato and candidati (male job applicant/s) in Italian and Mitarbeiter (male
employee/s) in German occur much more frequently than the corresponding
gender-fair alternatives, that is, the slash formulations candidato/a, candidata/o
and candidati/e in Italian and Mitarbeiter/in, Mitarbeiter/innen in German and the
double formulations i candidati e le candidate in Italian and
Mitarbeiter/Mitarbeiterinnen, Mitarbeiter und Mitarbeiterinnen and Mitarbeiterinnen und
Mitarbeiter in German.

BAR CHART 1

   250

   200                                                               Candidato
                                                                     Candidato/a
   150
                                                                     Candidata/o
   100                                                               Candidati
                                                                     Candidati/e
     50
                                                                     I candidati e le candidate
      0
                 Normalized Frequency/100.000 words

BAR CHART 2

        Bar charts 3 and 4 show that the frequency of slash and double
    250
formulations   of the Italian laureato (male graduate) and the German Kaufmann
(businessman)
    200       approaches the frequency of the corresponding     masculine generic
                                                             Mitarbeiter
                                                             Mitarbeiter/in
forms. This trend is nevertheless an exception, since in the Italian corpus most
                                                             Mitarbeiter/innen
role150
     names appear only in their masculine forms, as table 4 shows.
                                                                     Mitarbeiter/Mitarbeiterin
   100                                                               Mitarbeiter
                                                                     und Mitarbeiterinnen
     50                                                              Mitarbeiterinnen
                                                                     und Mitarbeiter
      0 3, No. 1, 2017, ISSN: 2421-2695
LLI, Vol.                                                                             45
                 Normalized Frequency/100.000 words
                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis




BAR CHART 3

 50

 40                                                                    Laureato
                                                                       Laureati
 30
                                                                       Laureato/a
 20
                                                                       Laureata/o
 10                                                                    Laureati/e

  0
            Normalized frequency/100,000 words

BAR CHART 4

 25

                                                                     Kaufmann
 20
                                                                     Kauffrau
 15                                                                  Kauffrau/-mann
                                                                     Kaufmann/-frau
 10
                                                                     Kaufmann/Kauffrau
  5                                                                  Kaufleute

  0
             Normalized frequency/100.000 words

       TABLE 4
 Masculine form           Occurrence Feminine form                         Occurrences
                              s

 Ingegnere (male                     28      Ingegnera (female                        0
 engineer)                                   engineer)

 Operatore (male                     17      Operatrice (female                       0
 operator)                                   operator)

 Traduttore (male                    11      Traduttrice (female                      0
 translator)                                 translator)




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis




 Programmatore                       13      Programmatrice                        0
 (male programmer)                           (female
                                             programmer)


       In the German corpus, even though few role names appear only in
their masculine form, e.g. Informatiker (male computer scientist), the
corresponding gender-fair alternatives of generic masculine forms appear in a
very limited number, as table 5 shows.

       TABLE 5
 Masculine form Occurrence                Masculine form             and Occurrence
                s                         feminine suffix                s

 Ingenieur    (male            24         Ingenieur/in         (engineer       1
 engineer)                                m/f)

 Leiter       (male            62         Leiter/in (director m/f)             1
 director)

 Manager      (male            78         Manager/in          (manager         3
 manager)                                 m/f)


         In German job ads the abbreviations m/w or w/m that stand for
männlich/weiblich and vice-versa (in English male/female) are often added to the
generic masculine nouns; the two forms occur respectively 363 and 65 times
out of 100.000 words. These abbreviations make more explicit that the job
advertisements refer to both women and men, though, even in these cases, the
visibility of feminine forms is subordinated to the one of masculine nouns.
         Similarly, in some Italian job ads the statement la ricerca si rivolge a
candidature di entrambi i sessi that occurs 82 times out of 100.000 words, specifies
that both male and female job applicants are addressed by the company.
         So far, gender-fair strategies that make women and men visible have
been analysed. As introduced before, the guidelines on gender-fair language
recommend not only these strategies but also gender-neutral alternatives,
which refer explicitly neither to men nor to women.




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                   C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



      Table 6 and table 7 show the frequency of some neutral and epicene 12
words analysed in the Italian and the German corpora.

        TABLE 6
          Neutral or epicene word                                Occurrences

          Persona (person)                                       43

          Clientela (customer)                                   37

          Stagista (trainee)                                     6

          Responsabile (person in charge)                        22


        TABLE 7
          Neutral or epicene word                                Occurrences

          Menschen (people)                                      66

          Aushilfe (temporary worker)                            5

          Fachkraft (qualified employee)                         31


          Results reported in table 6 and table 7 show that in both Italian and
German job advertisements neutral alternatives are not frequently employed.
Even when gender-fair alternatives are easily available, companies seem to
prefer the corresponding generic masculine forms.
          Similar trends observed both in German and in Italian job
advertisements have been so far reported. In the last part of this section a
strategy that occurs only in German will be highlighted: in German job
advertisements readers are often addressed directly with the formal pronoun
Sie. This strategy is recommended by guidelines for the use of gender-fair
language and is extremely common in the language of job ads, as its frequency
shows (1899 out of 100.000 words).
          In Italian job advertisements, this strategy is not employed at all; on the
contrary, companies address job seekers using impersonal forms, i.e. si richiede
(it is required).

        (12) Nouns that may refer to a male or a female, such as teacher as opposed to businessman
or shepherd (Collins Dictionary, http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/epicene).




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                C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



       In this section results of the analysis carried out on the role names in
German and Italian job ads have been provided. In the last section of this
contribution conclusions on the grounds of the results described in this
section will be drawn.

7. Conclusion

        The results reported in the previous section indicate that the initial
hypothesis is only partially confirmed by the analysis. On the grounds that
institutions and academia have given more attention to the gender and
language issue in Germany than in Italy, we could assume that gender-fair
language is used more often in the German corpus than in the Italian one.
This is indeed true, as gender-fair strategies do appear more often in German
job advertisements, especially in the form of the formal pronoun Sie.
However, at the same time, generic masculine forms still remain the most
common structure both in German and in Italian.
        Results also suggest a lack of consistency in the use of gender-fair
language and a low degree of awareness about the importance of using gender-
fair language in both German and Italian job advertisements.
        These results may be influenced by different social and cultural reasons:
        On the one hand, as already mentioned above, German institutions and
academia have given importance to the gender and language debate and
several gender-fair strategies have been introduced and gradually adopted over
the past 30 years. By contrast, in Italy very little attention has been given to the
gender and language issue, few gender-fair guidelines have been published and
their application has been very limited. The different level of attention given in
Germany and Italy to the gender and language debate may thus influence why
gender-fair forms are more used in German than in Italian job advertisements.
        On the other hand, the masculinity of both countries – according to
Hofstede's cultural dimensions – may explain why masculine generic forms are
still extremely common both in the Italian and in the German job
advertisements, regardless of the fact that, as many several psycholinguistic
studies have demonstrated, the use of generic masculine forms biases gender
representation in a discriminatory way against women.
        The study illustrated in this paper and the conclusions drawn from this
analysis are only the first step of a wider research that will explore not only the
reasons underlying the use of gender-fair language, but also its social and
cultural effects for women.




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                    C. NARDONE, Gender and e-recruitment: a comparative analysis



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