"ads with lengthy bullet points detailing the role's responsibilities will face a drop-off in women applying for the job"
Maybe women just don't like too much responsibility or hard work? Maybe for that matter, no one does? Have they even checked what effect their proposed changes have on male applicants? For example "coding ninja" would surely also be off putting to many men.
Wasn't there a study concluding that women tend to under-estimate their skills and men the opposite? If we assume that to be true, a long list of responsibilities is more likely to put off women because they don't think they can cover everything (or enough of it).
There are all sorts of feminist studies. I bet most of them will be found to be flawed and unsubstantiated - like many of sociology studies have been found in recent times.
In any case, I don't think there is a law of nature or a biological force that makes women underestimate their skills. Plenty of women don't underestimate their skills.
Nobody suggested there’s a force of nature or biology behind women underestimating their skills, only you - have you considered that many women may be socialised to do so?
It’s not like the job application/interview/etc dance is perfectly neutral towards every characteristic and background a person might have all the time as it is - words used, interview styles, and so on and so forth are never neutral.
"Being socialized" would be a force of nature. Anyway, they are not - who would do that, and why? The mostly female teachers? And somehow girls would still do better than boys in school, despite constantly being told they are bad? Actually the opposite is the case - studies have shown that boys tend to get worse grades than girls for the same level of performance. So wouldn't that be socialization of underestimating their skills for boys? (Of course those studies might also be flawed, like the feminist ones).
Being socialised is not a force of nature, because that implies that it’s non-changeable. It’s a societal choice to prioritise certain things and deprioritise others, to raise our kids to believe certain things, to allow the use of marketing in ways that reinforce existing beliefs, and so on and so forth. I find it weird that you consider “women” to be a homogenous group who all want the same thing and agree on exactly the method of achieving it, btw, as implied by your suggestion that a female teacher would never do anything that might hurt a girl’s sense of self worth.
I don’t know why studies suggest that boys are often better at correctly estimating (or maybe overestimating?) their skill level, but there’s lots of potential reasons aside from “biology” and “bad study”. Perhaps boys are just told “fake it til you make it” more often, and do so. Perhaps girls focus more on grades than boys in school for whatever reason, and the grading system is just set up to demoralise people in general. There’s a hundred thousand possible explanations - but they’re irrelevant to the point being made that if this is happening, then in order to encourage people who already believe these things about themselves to apply for a job, thinking about how to change your job posting to fit people with those beliefs is a good idea.
Um, it is you who refers to women as a homogeneous group that underestimates their skills.
It is fine to try to attract more people to your job, if that is what you want. However, if the problem is "women underestimate their skills", perhaps it would be better to work on women having higher estimates of their skills, than on downscaling the demands of jobs.
Women are free to go to career counseling and learn to correctly estimate their skills. Like everybody else. Bookshops are full of books with career counseling, too. I bet you can even get free advice on the internet. If you want to, you can learn to succeed, even as a woman.
The whole discussion is moot. You are free to believe that women tend to underestimate their skills, and men tend to overestimate. It just happens to neatly align with feminist theory that men are worthless windbags, but if that is your world view, ok.
If you are looking for papers, you can find plenty that contradict your theory. For example today I saw another big study showing "Stereotype Threat" has no effect on girl's performance on Maths. So even if girls are told they are bad in Maths (which I doubt is happening on significant scale, but whatever), at the very least it doesn't affect their performance.
