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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

I do worry that this is deeply circular logic. Words like "challenging" are considered strongly masculine by the Gender Decoder they linked to. I don't see how calling that word masculine is doing anything other than entrenching gender stereotypes even further.

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I'll take a company trying to be cognizant of such things, and over adjusting, over not at all.

I think it's great that Circle is trying to do their part in being as inclusive-minded as the can be from the research they've collected.

If at the end of the day that is somewhat misguided, I'm sure they'll readjust, given that they have already proven they will, where many others have either explicitly not cared, or never even thought to.

I think you're right about treating language this way can further entrench those stereotypes. But I think if we want to change that, we do have to recognize that people respond differently to different language, and adjust our messaging accordingly. Then maybe some of the damage can be undone.

Or, they could just make sure to figure out what they really want and say that directly, instead of having a bag of positive attributes they like then picking the ones that give the right amount of a certain demographic that they want to hire.

There are multiple ways to say the same thing. Why do you think they aren't saying what they want directly if they aren't using language that deters women?

And what if feminine-coded job descriptions are a turn-off for men of under-represented backgrounds? Or non gender binary persons?

By trying this hard to become "inclusive" for women they are potentially discriminating against others.

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