Search for Women in Your Industry: 5 Tips and a Bonus

booleanstrings Boolean, Diversity 2 Comments

I live in a very diverse area (and love it). Let me demonstrate what it is like in the streets and parks, when people are out, by showing a screenshot for local Python Developers (no diversity filters applied):

However – search for CEOs in the same area and you will see a very different picture:

(A stunning difference, isn’t it?)

Different industries, locations, and career levels have their diversity employment challenges. And every company, at every level, benefits from hiring diversity for all roles.

Let’s talk about searching for Women, with the purpose of including them in the talent pipeline. Our webinar this week will serve as a Complete Guide to Sourcing Females. I have forty slides on that. 👩👩‍🦰👱‍♀️ In a short blog post, I will mention a few approaches that will complement your diversity efforts.

1. Searching in a Diverse Area? Use Women’s Names for Ethnicities.

It is highly applicable here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Indian and Asian Software Engineers are a majority. I wasn’t finding many profiles on LinkedIn for my diversity project by searching for common (English) women’s names until this occurred to me! Strings I had started using then, like an OR of Indian women’s names – (Aditi OR(Bipasha) OR(Damayanti) OR(Eva) OR(Gayatri) OR(Harshita) OR(Indira) OR(Jesminder) OR(Kanika) OR(Lata) OR(Madhumita) OR(Nadia) OR(Padmavati) OR(Rajadhi) OR(Saloni) OR(Tanisha) OR(Uma) OR(Varsha) OR(Yamini)) (etc.) – brought the desired results.

2. Continuing on the fruitful “image for *” technology exploration, started by my friend @theBalazs, search for diverse colleges and organizations. For example:

or, just this (add your terms):

Note that you will find additional results with

Switch to the Image Tab to see how accurate your search is.

3. Have you noticed that diversity searches often require long lists of terms, such as relevant associations or schools, as part of the approach? Custom Search Engines can automate relevant searches for you.

Here is my X-Ray LinkedIn for Women’s Names.

4. Some sites allow us to X-Ray by gender:

We could also create one for CrunchBase, since member profiles have the gender info.

5. Every industry has associations oriented toward women, which you can find by Googling. For each site, you could potentially be constructing searches like:

and find profiles of females in that industry.

Bonus. Here are two additional Diversity CSEs:

Please join me at the fully reworked webinar “Sourcing for Diversity” on April 15th, 2020. Seating is limited.

Comments 2

  1. In french, we have the chance (could be a big problem, I’ll explain it later) to have specific titles for women and men
    Directeur (man), directrice (women)
    Traducteur (man), traductrice (woman)

    Some titles are epicene
    Journaliste (man and woman)
    Documentaliste (man and woman).

    The chance is that when the title is not epicene you can specifically search for women profiles.

    The problem is that Linkedin “don’t deal” with female/male words. So, when somebody simply search for “expert” (without thinking he/she will only find men), he/she will not find any “experte”. The women will only be “visible” if they insert, somewhere in their profile (anywhere) the word “expert”.

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