Even Trump’s job ads predict that he pays women less
Not long ago we released some data showing that the presence of gendered language in your job post predicts the gender of the person you eventually hire. It makes sense: If your job post draws more women into your applicant pool, you’re that much more likely to hire a woman at the end of your process.
In light of those results, we took a look at two of our country’s most prominent employers to see how their staff jobs stack up: the Republican and Democratic nominees for president.
Much has been written about the demographic composition of the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaign teams. Trump’s staff has had a lot of turnover in recent months, but throughout the campaign, his staff has been about 75% men, almost all white. The women on his team earn less — about 35% less, an even greater pay disparity than the national average. By contrast, the Clinton campaign staff is much larger, evenly balanced between men and women, and there’s no statistical indication of a gender pay gap (but men and women both earn less than Trump’s team).
Given what we’ve found about gendered language in the past, it seems logical to ask: Does the language used in job posts for presidential campaign staff predict the composition of their respective teams?
Jobs you can’t apply for
All hiring managers will tell you that they get some of their best hires from word-of-mouth. However, even where in-network hiring is prevalent, open jobs are generally posted — not only to attract great potential candidates, but because posting open roles is an important component of equal opportunity hiring.
Clinton’s jobs were easy to find, but the first thing we noticed about Trump’s campaign jobs is that you can’t find them. You can submit your resume on his campaign site, and you can donate. But when you click “Get Involved,” you land on a page that lets you sign up to receive text messages.
The site does not list paid staffer positions, internships, or even volunteer organizer positions. The gop.com site doesn’t list these positions either, which is notable given that Trump has explicitly called on the RNC to hire campaign staff on his behalf. This is in-network hiring at its most fundamental.
Predicting the performance of Clinton’s job posts
By contrast, Clinton not only has one clear job site, she has two. One site lists tech jobs and the other lists all other roles. This fragmentation is itself interesting. It reveals that hiring is not centralized, which is either empowering or disorganized depending how you see it. (How you see it might depend who you’re voting for.)
Because Clinton’s job site is so highly structured, it is straightforward for Textio to analyze the score and tone of her job posts.
At the time of this analysis, Clinton’s jobs performed well, both in terms of their overall effectiveness and in terms of their implicit gender bias. This Senior Android Engineer role is typical of the tech jobs on her site. Textio predicts that it will fill faster than 98% of similar engineering roles on the market, and the overall tone is gender-neutral — two factors that our data shows are often related.
The Textio score across Clinton’s jobs is above the mean, both compared to jobs in government and within the market overall. The 41 distinct job posts on her sites have an average Textio score of 59, and tech jobs are particularly strong, with an average score above 90.
More notably, the bias tone of the jobs on her sites averages just on the feminine side of neutral — which is the point on the bias spectrum that many of our clients are aiming for. This tone statistically draws the richest mix of applicant backgrounds and fills roles up to 2 weeks faster than roles with a more highly gendered tone.
The last few open tech jobs on Clinton’s job site were closed as filled shortly after this analysis was complete, which made us feel pretty good about what Textio had predicted.
Predicting the performance of Trump’s job posts
Neither Trump nor the RNC makes direct job posts available for candidate consideration. However, Donald Trump is a large employer even outside his presidential campaign. Trump Hotels lists 114 jobs at the time of this analysis.
We decided to take a look at these jobs even though they are not an apples-to-apples comparison with campaign roles. Trump himself has accentuated the relevance of his business experience on the campaign trail, arguing that we can tell a lot about what kind of public leader he will be from the kind of business leader he has already been. Textio is constantly scoring all public job listings on the internet anyway, so it was easy to get the data.
On average, Trump Hotel jobs receive scores that are below the mean for the hospitality industry, with an average score of 33 — meaning that, on average, his jobs will fill more slowly than 67% of similar listings on the market.
The bias tone of his jobs is consistent. Roles that are conventionally filled by women, such as housekeeper and nail artist positions, are loaded with language that statistically predicts that only women will apply. Roles that are conventionally filled by men, such as golf pro and bellhop positions, are packed with language that statistically selects women out of the applicant group.
Trump’s management roles are also more likely to be male-biased, even in disciplines where women are traditionally more dominant. Consider the following two listings, one for a line-level housekeeper and the other for a more senior housekeeping manager. The housekeeper role shows a moderate female bias in tone. The gender tone of the manager position, however, is pinned almost all the way to masculine, indicating that many more men than average are likely to apply.
Gendered language and who you hire
It makes sense that Clinton has a visible and well-structured job site, given that her staff has driven their own campaign staffing and she has hired a huge team. Based on what we’ve seen about gendered language and hiring outcomes for our customers, we also expected the correlation between her jobs’ neutral gender tone and her gender-balanced campaign staff.
Since Trump has staffed his campaign team without publicly posting any jobs, we can’t say anything definitive about the tone of his campaign job posts. But it is perhaps unsurprising that the candidate with a pattern of gender bias in his company’s professional hiring documents also shows a strong gender imbalance and pay gap in his campaign staff. If you create a professional environment where men and women are expected to fill traditional gender role assignments, then it’s not shocking to see a gender pay gap perpetuated within your staff.
Learn more about how language impacts your hiring at textio.com
