[kevinpet]

There's a tacit assumption that the discrepancy in emphasis and word choice is based on gender stereotypes, completely ignoring the possibility that men actually tend to be more aggressive and women actually tend to be more communal.

The statement "Subtle gender discrimination continues to be rampant," is completely unsupported by the evidence.

If we accept the common claim that women are discouraged from being assertive and behaving in "male" ways, then wouldn't we expect to see an behavioral difference? If there is a behavioral difference, wouldn't we expect that to be reflected in letters of recommendation?

This is shoddy science (failure to control for confounding factors) and implies shoddy social policy (maybe we shouldn't use letters of recommendation). What makes it worse is that it ignores what would be actual useful questions like the study that asked people to describe a video taped baby's behavior with some told the baby was a boy and some told it was a girl.

[mattdw]

Of course, you then have to take into account what attributes people value when hiring, and if (as seems probable) employers prefer the 'agentic' attributes to the 'communal' ones, then you still have a problem.

[nopassrecover]

Your problem is then either a) people should be dishonest when describing communal people or b) communal people don't have useful skills.