Sport Canterbury has been proactively working to ensure its job descriptions and position advertisements are free from gender bias.

In line with the Regional Sports Trust’s dedication to implementing its Women & Girls Strategy, the internal Women & Girls Group evaluated the organisation's progress in achieving gender equity within all its job advertisements and descriptions. Launched in September 2023, the strategy’s vision is an equitable physical activity system for wāhine that is safe and enables them to unleash their potential

Sport Canterbury recently analysed its job advertisements and descriptions through the gender decoder tool – a mechanism inspired by a 2011 research paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The results were encouraging: 53 out of 55 recently reviewed job advertisements and descriptions at Sport Canterbury were found to be gender-neutral, marking a positive accomplishment for the organisation.

In the 2011 study, which inspired the gender decoder, researchers presented job descriptions with several types of gender-coded language to men and women. They assessed how appealing the jobs seemed and how much the participants felt they “belonged” in those roles.

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The findings revealed women found job advertisements with masculine language to be less attractive - and felt a reduced sense of belonging in those roles. For men, ads with feminine language were only marginally less appealing - and their sense of belonging in those positions remained unaffected, the study found.

Sport Canterbury’s Women & Girls Group says the gender decoder tool is an easy place to start for organisations wanting to make their job advertisements and descriptions more gender-neutral, diversity their workforce and lay the foundations for recruiting more women

“As we strive to get more females into leadership and governance positions within sports, we need to look at how we are advertising, where we are advertising and who we are shoulder-tapping for roles,” the Women and Girls Group says. “By becoming more aware of where biases or inequities exist, we can think about how we could do things differently, to make sport a space where women, and other ‘priority populations’, feel included and seen”

“The organisation's openness to scrutinising their processes for supporting women in roles was commendable,” the Women and Girls group adds. “The results demonstrate a commitment to gender equity and an alignment with our strategy.”

Sport Canterbury's Chief Executive Julyan Falloon says the result reflects the organisation’s ongoing commitment to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace and a testament to Sport Canterbury’s dedication to ensuring everyone, regardless of gender, has equal opportunities.

“This is another simple but significant step in addition to our gender pay gap analysis and the adoption of additional benefits within our parental leave policy which is all part of committing  to ongoing improvement in this area and we hope this encourages other organisations to join us.”

Sport Canterbury plans to continue using the gender decoder tool moving forward.

For any organisations interested, below are some links and tips

Seek’s tips for creating inclusive job advertising:

• Ensure key position terms are not gender specific
• Use clear and concise language and be aware of the tone
• Check your advertisement for patterns or phrases that are repeated or emphasised and assess if they promote negative or positive, bias towards groups or candidates
• Implement a review process to pick up language, tone or structure that is biased or exclusive
• Be clear about your organisation’s goals around diversity and outline this in the copy

Additional resources

Bias Interrupters

Addressing bias - Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission

Inclusion Nudges | Inclusive Organizations Using Behavioral Design (inclusion-nudges.org)