Masculine, feminine or both? Gender marking in Polish online job advertisements
Abstract
This study investigates linguistic patterns of gender coding in Polish job titles used in online recruitment advertisements, with the aim of determining the extent to which these patterns reflect gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive linguistic practices. Drawing on a large corpus of contemporary job postings, the analysis examines the distribution of gendered forms in occupational titles across a range of sectors and professional domains. The findings demonstrate an overall predominance of masculine forms across the corpus, while inclusive strategies constitute a secondary pattern, most notably realised through masculine–feminine pairings and, more marginally, abbreviated gender markers. However, item-level statistical analyses reveal substantial internal differentiation, indicating that patterns of gender coding tend to be aligned with the gender structure of the Polish labour market. Inclusive practices appear to be weakest in traditionally maledominated technical and manual occupations, particularly where established feminine equivalents are lacking, and stronger in feminised sectors where comparable word-formation constraints do not occur. Lexical distributional analysis further reveals a Zipfian pattern across all coding categories, with a small number of high-frequency, semantically generic job titles accounting for a disproportionate share of tokens. Overall, the results demonstrate that gender coding in Polish recruitment discourse is neither random nor chaotic, but systematically shaped by both linguistic factors and the extralinguistic realities of occupational gender stratification.