NEW YORK CITY, NY – 27/09/2025 – (SeaPRwire) – In the evolving conversation about workplace equity, a new collaboration between academia and industry is turning attention to the subtle but powerful role of language in shaping hiring outcomes. Coresignal, a global provider of large-scale public web data, has entered into a research partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Economics to support an ambitious study on the wording of job advertisements and its potential impact on gender representation in New York’s finance sector. The project seeks to bridge data science with labor economics by exploring whether certain linguistic patterns may contribute to gender disparities in professional opportunities.
The study, formally titled “The Power of Words: Gendered Wording in Job Ads and Female Hiring,” will focus on evaluating the degree to which job postings between 2020 and 2024 employed what researchers define as “masculine-coded” language—terms and expressions often associated with stereotypically male traits such as assertiveness, dominance, or competitiveness. Researchers will then examine whether these linguistic cues correlate with measurable differences in hiring outcomes for women. By leveraging Coresignal’s rich datasets on job advertisements and professional profiles, the University of Edinburgh team aims to quantify how words that seem neutral on the surface may nonetheless influence who applies for, and ultimately secures, jobs in finance.
The research design combines advanced natural language processing (NLP) with gender inference methods to produce empirical evidence on a question that has attracted increasing scholarly and social attention: Do the words used to describe a role subtly exclude or discourage certain candidates? To address this, the Edinburgh economists will employ gender stereotype lexicons created through machine learning to scan job ads, identifying linguistic markers that are statistically associated with male-coded or female-coded phrasing. These findings will then be linked with inferred gender data of employees actually hired into those advertised positions, enabling a rare, data-driven view of how recruiting language interacts with labor market outcomes.
Victor Saldarriaga, an Early Career Researcher at the School of Economics and the project’s lead investigator, emphasized the significance of the initiative: “This study provides a unique opportunity to evaluate, at scale, how language in job advertisements can perpetuate or mitigate gender biases in hiring. The finance industry, particularly in New York, offers an important case study given its global influence and long-standing challenges in achieving gender parity. With Coresignal’s data, we can move beyond anecdote and test these questions empirically across multiple years of hiring data.”
Coresignal’s contribution lies in its ability to deliver comprehensive and continuously updated datasets that capture both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Its database includes billions of structured records covering companies, professionals, and job opportunities worldwide. According to Karolis Didziulis, Product Director at Coresignal, the company views its role in the project as part of a broader mission to support responsible research: “Language shapes how opportunities are perceived, and this project demonstrates the real-world importance of analyzing those effects. We are proud to see our data powering academic research that not only advances knowledge but also has the potential to inform more equitable hiring practices across industries.”
The University of Edinburgh expects to release preliminary findings in late 2026. These results may provide fresh insights for HR professionals, policymakers, and corporate leaders seeking to design job advertisements that attract more diverse pools of candidates. Beyond finance, the methodology developed in this project could serve as a model for studying hiring practices in other industries where gender imbalances remain entrenched, such as technology, engineering, or executive leadership roles.
Founded in 1583, the University of Edinburgh is recognized as one of the world’s leading research universities, with a long-standing commitment to producing scholarship that informs public debate and shapes policy. As part of the UK’s Russell Group and the League of European Research Universities, it has consistently ranked among the global leaders in research excellence and innovation.
Coresignal, founded in 2016, has established itself as one of the foremost providers of AI-ready public web data, supplying over three billion fresh records to clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to academic institutions. The firm is a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, underscoring its commitment to transparency and responsible use of data. With customers in more than 700 organizations worldwide, Coresignal continues to demonstrate how large-scale data can generate meaningful insights for both commercial and academic applications.
Together, this partnership between Coresignal and the University of Edinburgh embodies the growing recognition that interdisciplinary collaboration—combining the precision of data analytics with the insights of social science—can illuminate the hidden mechanisms that shape workforce diversity. As the finance industry and other sectors grapple with calls for greater inclusivity, such research may prove vital in helping employers move from intention to evidence-based action.
source https://newsroom.seaprwire.com/technologies/edinburgh-economists-partner-with-coresignal-to-examine-how-job-ad-wording-shapes-gender-equality-in-finance/
