As only 17% of the cyber security workforce are women, they represent an untapped potential workforce for this sector. In this advisory report, BETA examined whether the way Australian cyber security job ads are written could be discouraging women from applying.
We conducted a literature review to identify aspects of job ads that discourage women from applying. Following this, in partnership with Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA), we used the Lightcast database, a database of 12 million Australian job ads, to measure the current state of Australian job ads. We focused on aspects identified in the literature review, including whether businesses are offering flexible working conditions, require a long list of skills, and use masculine language in their job ads.
We found that cyber security job ads performed poorly on all the measures we looked at. Cyber security job ads do not offer flexible working conditions, require long lists of skills, and use the most masculine language of any occupation. These results suggest there is room for significant improvement in how job ads are written in both cyber security and the technology sector more broadly.
While we did not directly test the impact of gendered language in job ads on application rates by women, we have outlined a number of options for such a trial in a separate document, also available for download.
