Recruitment gender bias revealed in LinkedIn report

Male job applicants stand a 13 percent higher chance than their female counterparts of having their resumes opened by recruiters and a 3 percent higher chance of receiving a response, a report said.

Moreover, some employers use masculine wording in job descriptions in recruitment notices that will make women candidates feel irrelevant. For example, when "aggressive" is used in a recruitment notice, 44 percent of women turn their back on applying for a job, according to the report released Thursday by the professional networking site LinkedIn.

The report is based on global LinkedIn user data and surveys polling more than 10,000 employees and employers in more than 20 countries and regions.

Unconscious gender bias in the workplace still exists across the world with China not being an exception, said Zhang Jingyi, the human resources head at LinkedIn China.

"Nowadays, career ceilings for women aren't a result of women's inferiority to men but how the workplace environment is constructed," Zhang said, adding that both enterprises and women themselves should make efforts for a better future for this environment.

"For working women, they should never underestimate themselves or set limits for themselves regarding their career paths," Zhang added.

While unconscious gender bias still exists, it has been alleviated by economic, social and business environment developments and women's increasingly stronger professional performance over the past decade, Zhang added.

"Today in China roughly 70 percent of recruiters examine and verify that wording with biased implications doesn't appear in their recruitment notices and 28 percent of recruiters have taken gender diversity into consideration when drafting such notices according to the report findings," she said.

Human resource experts said that they believed women will play a bigger role in the worldwide workplace when soft skills – women's advantages – become the future trend. For example, women leaders usually pay more attention to cultivating their teams and fostering team members' future development, they said.