Is there a gender bias issue with tech job listings?

Just over 10 percent of U.S. engineers are female, and only around a quarter of computer programmers hail from the double-X crowd.

According to a paper recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there could be a subtle gender bias in the way companies word job listings in such fields as engineering and programming. Although the Civil Rights Act effectively bans companies from explicitly requesting workers of a particular gender, the language in these listings may discourage many women from applying.

The paper — which details a series of five studies conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo and Duke University — found that job listings for positions in engineering and other male-dominated professions used more masculine words, such as “leader,” “competitive” and “dominant.” Listings for jobs in female-dominated professions — such as office administration and human resources — did not include such words.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hiring-women/

that is really dumb
Engineers and techs generally are compeditive there is that element to the industry to be first and best because most factors of perfomance can be numerically compared and turned into dollar values.

Office Admin and HR are all dominated by softskills that are much harder to put on a numeric scale, making them harder to compare and therefore harder to be compeditive in.


And that doesn't even take into account that men and women are not the same, while there are great female programmers generally the male brain is going to be better at it as Males value Logic and Solutions (how many women say "I just want to talk but he always has to try and solve it") while females value Relationships and Emotions.
Computer are 100% Logic driven so naturally men will feel greater satisfaction working with logic and solutions while women may feel unsatisfied by the lack of emotional bonds that something like HR would require.
(this doesn't say ALL females or males but the statistical average of the genders)

Well ... is that nature or nurture? There are, after all, plenty of dominant and competitive women -- they're actually sort of my favorite kind, so long as "dominant and competitive" isn't coupled with "physically massive" -- but I think society still has a strong urge to raise women to be otherwise.

And in the abstract world of computer software, don't "competitive" and "dominant" really mean "creative" and "ingenious"? After all, we don't really seek toughness in our software; we seek cleverness, which I think is a gender-neutral quality.

@ben
"creative" and "ingenious" is easily stolen i.e. Apple and Microsofts Whole History

Tech is less and less the pair of genius in a basement and more teams of professionals.
it is far less abstract than it could be, mainly due to finances it is far cheaper to manipulate existing processes for new purposes than build it all from scratch, plus more time efficent to use what has already been built (or aleast run off those plans).

but it is also the Solutions aspect of it. Men are solution based Women are not. yes there are solution based women and dominate ones etc but on average they are not. And they know they are not, even mentioning it in a advert will make them go "oh thats not for me" which is the point of the article.

In Austalia this week the same argument has come out about "front line soliders" how come after being allowed to become front line soliders we don't have 50/50 split? it is more exterme example of the same. Genders are Not the Same, millions of years of evolution have gone into giving us specific skills for the challanges our ancestors were most likely to meet.

Programming and engineering like solidering favours the traits more common in males.