Gender Framing in Kenya’s Online Recruitment Advertisements: a Content Analysis of Brighter Monday.co.ke Website

Abstract

This study set out to investigate how recruitment advertisers frame gender in recruitment advertisements. It identified gender frames used in Kenyan online recruitment advertisements, investigated to what extent employers frame gender in recruitment advertisements and what determines gender frames in recruitment advertisements. The study adopted the quantitative content analysis approach to establish how employers use recruitment advertisements as they respond to gender inequality in society and within their own institutions. The population was specified; the sampling frame was the list of 988 online recruitment advertisements that appeared on brightermonday.co.ke’s website on the 25th of August, 2017.Sampling was done systematically - every third advertisement starting from the last one on the sampling frame was selected. The variables analysed were masculine and feminine phrases and words, obtained from a sex-role inventory first proposed by Bem & Bem (1973) in their investigation of femininity and masculinity in recruitment advertisements. Sex-role words and phrases were tallied using the Simple Concordance Programme 4.07. The study’s theoretical base was the Framing Theory. Two other theories, the Social Dominance Theory and the Rational Bias Theory, helped to interpret data. The study found that Kenyan online recruitment advertisements are complicit in feminism’s gender equality agenda that uses stereotypical words to amplify its cause; that the most common advertising frames in recruitment advertisements are ‘risky choices’, ‘attributes’ and ‘action’ and; that employers have embraced affirmative action - framing femininity in advertised manager positions as a method of increasing the number of feminine individuals in senior positions and changing organisational gender perceptions in the process. It recommends that employers adopt policies that guard against undue gender advocacy influence in human resource practice, that governments encourage responsible masculine gender activism to counter forms of feminisms that promote dichotomous world-views of gender and ensure that affirmative action does not interfere with equal access to opportunities for either gender. It further recommends that development experts who promote affirmative action models review their policies to ensure that everyone regardless of gender has equal access to opportunities.