Analysis finds Walmart’s new job approach is likely to attract men than women

An analysis of jobs posted to Walmart’s careers website between January and March found that more than half of the listings used gender-biased language. Fifty-one percent of job descriptions are more likely to attract men than women.

Fortune and Textio collected and analysed 4,400 US-based Walmart job postings with an algorithm that ingests 10 million job openings per month, searching for language patterns and utilising them to produce scores that foresee how fast a job will fill and how widespread gender-biased language is in the post. The analysis found that 84 percent of director-level job descriptions and 53 percent of manager positions skew male.

Out of 599 managerial positions, twenty-six percent had a gender bias rating that qualified them as very masculine. Of 49 director jobs analyzed, which included a global accounting director at the retailer's Bentonville home office and a user experience director in San Bruno, Cal., only seven utilised language that qualifies as neutral. One was classified as feminine while twenty of the director level positions used language classified as very masculine.

Jacqui Canney, the company's executive vice president of global people, said they will continue to grow their point of view and get better. Known as the largest private employer in the US, Walmart, in the last eighteen months, overhauled its career website, which it said is a step in its "recruitment to retirement" overhaul.

The company’s site now features more images of people of colour and women. The site also displays tourism-style profiles of regions, such as Northwest Arkansas, where its Bentonville, Ark. headquarters is situated.

Textio's algorithm produces an overall score to determine how well a job post will perform against similar ads. For instance, a wanted ad for a store manager opening in Chicago with a score of 75 will appeal to more qualified candidates compared to 75 percent of retail store manager listings in the same location. Gender tone is scored on a scale from -1, very masculine, 1, very feminine to 0 representing a neutral score. Slightly and somewhat feminine or masculine are other categories that fill out the scale.

Last year, Walmart was recognised for its inclusive employee benefits policy by the Human Rights Campaign, which awarded the retailer a perfect score in its annual Corporate Equality Index. But it also deals with allegations of gender discrimination. Fortune reports that five women "reached a confidential settlement" last year and voluntarily withdrew their discrimination lawsuit against the company.

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