Inclusive recruitment: writing job ads that attract women
Most hiring teams who tell us they cannot find women are not wrong about the shortlist. They are wrong about where it went wrong. By the time a shortlist is thin, the filtering happened weeks earlier, in a job advert that was written in twenty minutes by copying the last one.
The advert is the only part of your hiring process that every candidate sees and no candidate can ask you about. It is also the cheapest thing to fix. This guide covers how to write inclusive job adverts that widen your applicant pool, what the evidence actually supports, and where the legal lines sit under the Equality Act 2010.
What makes an advert quietly exclusionary
Four things separate inclusive job adverts from the rest, and none of them look like a problem to the person writing them.
Masculine-coded wording. The foundational study here is by Gaucher, Friesen and Kay, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011. They found that adverts in male-dominated fields used more agentic, masculine-coded language, and that when women read those adverts they found the roles less appealing and reported a weaker sense of belonging, even when they judged themselves equally capable of doing the job. Words like “dominant”, “competitive”, “aggressive”, “ninja” and “rockstar” are not neutral flavour.
Long lists of essential criteria. Tara Mohr’s 2014 survey for Harvard Business Review asked over a thousand people why they had not applied for jobs. The most common reason women gave was that they did not think they would be hired because they did not meet the stated qualifications, so applying felt like a waste of time. Worth noting honestly: the widely repeated statistic that men apply at 60% of the criteria and women at 100% comes from an internal Hewlett-Packard report with no published methodology, so treat it as folklore. Mohr’s finding, that stated requirements are read as hard rules rather than a wish list, is the part that holds.
Coded language about culture and age. “Recent graduate”, “digital native”, “young and dynamic”, “work hard play hard” and “no clock-watchers” all signal something about who is expected to fit, and some of it strays towards age discrimination.
Silence. No salary, no mention of flexibility, no named contact. Silence is not neutral. Candidates fill it with their least optimistic assumption, and the candidates with the most to lose fill it fastest.
How to write inclusive job adverts, section by section
The title
Use the ordinary industry title, not the internal one. “Marketing Manager” is searched for. “Growth Ninja, Level 3” is not, and it tells women who have been the only one in the room exactly what kind of room this is.
The opening paragraph
Lead with what the person will actually do and why it matters, not with how prestigious the company is. Two or three sentences. If you cannot describe the job clearly, the advert is not the problem.
The criteria
This is where most of the improvement is available.
Split the list into what is genuinely essential on day one and what can be learned in the role, and say so explicitly with a line like “we do not expect anyone to arrive with all of this”. Cap essential criteria at around five. Anything you would waive for an internal candidate is not essential.
Then check each one for proxies. “Ten years of continuous experience” penalises career breaks. “Degree required” excludes capable people for no reason in most commercial roles. “Must be able to travel at short notice” is often untrue and always filters out carers.
Pay
Publish a range. There is currently no UK legal requirement to do so, unlike in EU member states where the Pay Transparency Directive applies from 2026, and that is precisely why it is a differentiator. Adverts without pay force candidates to guess, and candidates who have been underpaid before guess low. Our explainer on pay transparency in the UK covers the direction of travel.
Flexibility
Say what is actually true, in specifics. Employees have had a day-one right to request flexible working since 6 April 2024, so “we consider flexible working requests” tells a candidate nothing except that you comply with the law. “This role is four or five days, we have people doing both, and core hours are 10 to 3” tells her something.
The close
Name a real person and give a route to ask questions informally. State what the process is, how many stages, and roughly how long. Offer adjustments plainly, and mention that interview questions can be shared in advance, which costs nothing and changes who performs well.
What the Equality Act 2010 lets you say
This is where teams get nervous and usually overcorrect into vagueness. The lines are clearer than people assume.
You cannot advertise a role as open only to women. Under the Equality Act 2010 an advert must not indicate an intention to discriminate, and doing so risks a claim from an excluded applicant. The narrow exception is a genuine occupational requirement under Schedule 9, which applies to a small set of roles such as some support work in a women’s refuge, and it must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
You can encourage applications. “We particularly welcome applications from women, who are currently under-represented at this level” is lawful positive action under section 158, and it is the single most effective sentence most employers are not using.
You can use section 159 at the point of decision. Where two candidates are as qualified as each other, an employer may choose the candidate from an under-represented group. It applies only to a genuine tie, it must be a case-by-case judgement rather than a policy, and it cannot be used to appoint someone less qualified.
You can run targeted outreach, mentoring or development programmes for an under-represented group, again under section 158, provided the recruitment decision itself remains open.
ACAS publishes free guidance on inclusive recruitment and job descriptions, and it is worth reading alongside your own policy. Our practical guide to inclusive recruitment for hiring teams sets out how the advert fits into the rest of the process.
Test the advert before you post it
Four checks, ten minutes, and they catch most of what stops job adverts being inclusive.
Count the essential criteria. If there are more than five, cut until there are five.
Read it aloud. Anything you would be embarrassed to say to a candidate’s face comes out immediately.
Show it to two women who do that job, not to the hiring manager who wrote it, and ask them what it signals rather than whether it is good.
Then measure what happens. Track the gender mix of applicants at every stage, not just at the top of the funnel. If your applicant pool is balanced and your shortlist is not, the advert was never the issue and the problem is in screening. How to reduce bias in your hiring process covers that stage, and why CVs flatten women explains why the screening step loses so much information.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to say a job is open to women only in the UK?
Almost never. The Equality Act 2010 prohibits adverts indicating an intention to discriminate. The exception is a genuine occupational requirement under Schedule 9, which covers a narrow set of roles and must be justified as proportionate.
Can I say we especially welcome applications from women?
Yes. Encouraging applications from an under-represented group is lawful positive action under section 158 of the Equality Act 2010, as long as the selection process itself stays open to everyone on merit.
Does putting a salary in a job advert really increase applications from women?
The evidence in the UK is largely employer-reported rather than experimental, so treat confident percentages with caution. The mechanism is well understood though: without a published range, candidates anchor on their own pay history, and women are more likely to have been underpaid previously.
How many essential criteria should a job advert have?
Around five. Anything beyond that is usually a wish list, and Tara Mohr’s Harvard Business Review research indicates that stated requirements are read as hard rules, which suppresses applications from exactly the candidates you are trying to reach.
What is the quickest way to make job adverts more inclusive?
Publish the salary range and cut the essential criteria to five. Both take minutes and both change who presses apply. Our guide to building balanced teams that last covers what to do once they do.
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This is educational information, not legal advice. Employment and equality law is fact-specific, and positive action provisions in particular need care. For free and impartial guidance, contact ACAS, or check the Equality and Human Rights Commission and gov.uk.
Last reviewed: August 2026