What does m/w/d mean in a Swiss job advert?

Shorthand in Swiss job adverts

The gender markers are not legally required — they are convention, and which one a company picks says more about the company than about the role.

Reading the letters

Four abbreviations cover almost everything you will meet on a Swiss board. m/w/d and w/m/d are the German pair plus «divers». m/f/d and f/m/d are the same construction with the international letters for male and female. h/f and f/h are the French pair, homme and femme, and they belong to the Romandie rather than to German-speaking Switzerland. A fifth form, written out as «(all genders)», appears in English in adverts of every language, because it usually comes from an employer's brand guidelines rather than from its HR department.

The third slot varies more than the first two. «d» accounts for 95,5 per cent of third letters across the whole index; «x» takes 4,2 per cent and «i» 0,2 per cent. Only «d» has a legal referent, and it is a German one — the German civil status act names «divers» or no entry at all, and nothing else. If you see «m/w/x», it means the same thing in practice, but it is a house style rather than a term of law.

What you will almost never see is a tag naming one gender only. That is the case Swiss law actually addresses, and it addresses it through the hiring decision rather than through the wording of the advert.

Why the letters tell you where the advert came from

This is the part that is specific to Switzerland and that no international guide to job adverts covers. In a country with four language regions, the language an advert is written in and the language its employer works in are often not the same thing, and the gender tag is one of the few places where that shows.

Of the tags in German-language adverts we index, 95,4 per cent use «w» for weiblich. Of the tags in English-language adverts, 66,9 per cent use «f» — but 30,3 per cent still use «w». An English advert carrying «(m/w/d)» is therefore an advert whose title line was assembled in German and then partially translated. That is a genuinely useful thing to know before you apply, because it tells you which language the interview is likely to be conducted in and where the hiring manager sits, and neither of those is usually stated.

The ordering points the same way. English-language adverts put the female letter first in 41,6 per cent of their tags, against 31,6 per cent in German-language ones and 20,2 per cent in French-language ones. Employers that write natively in English are disproportionately the large internationals with a formal diversity policy, and the reversed order is one of the visible outputs of that policy.

One caveat we would rather state than hide: a single employer accounts for 21,1 per cent of all tagged titles in our index and uses «(m/w/d)» without exception. Exclude that employer and the overall tag rate falls from 28,7 to 24,1 per cent and the third-letter share from 88,4 to 85,3 per cent. The English-language figures above are unaffected — that employer does not advertise in English.

What Swiss law says, and what it does not

Article 8 paragraph 3 of the Federal Constitution reads: «Men and women have equal rights. The law shall ensure their equality, both in law and in practice, most particularly in the family, in education, and in the workplace.» The statute that implements it is the Gender Equality Act — Gleichstellungsgesetz in German, and the source of the initials GlG you will occasionally see cited.

Its Article 3 paragraph 1 provides that employees «must not be discriminated against on the basis of their sex, whether directly or indirectly». Paragraph 2 says where that prohibition bites: «This prohibition applies in particular to hiring, allocation of duties, setting of working conditions, pay, basic and continuing education and training, promotion and dismissal.» Hiring is covered. The wording of the advert is not mentioned anywhere.

German law is built the other way round, which is why the abbreviation exists at all. Section 1 of the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz names sex among the protected grounds, section 7 paragraph 1 prohibits disadvantage on those grounds, and section 11 applies that prohibition directly to the advertisement: «Ein Arbeitsplatz darf nicht unter Verstoss gegen § 7 Abs. 1 ausgeschrieben werden» — a job must not be advertised in breach of section 7 paragraph 1. In Germany the advert itself is the regulated object; in Switzerland the process is.

The second difference is the register. Article 8 of the Swiss civil status ordinance lists the data recorded in the civil register, and against sex it says exactly «Geschlecht: männlich/weiblich» — male or female, with no third value. Since 1 January 2022, Article 30b of the Civil Code lets a person change that entry by declaration to a civil registrar, but the declaration moves between the two values; it does not add a third. So the «d» in a Swiss advert points at a category the Swiss register does not hold.

One practical note on sources: the English texts of both the Constitution and the Gender Equality Act are published by the federal authorities as translations for information. The German, French and Italian versions are the ones that govern. If a distinction matters to your case, read one of those three.

What the tag does not tell you

It is not a measure of how inclusive an employer is. The tag varies between companies rather than between roles: only 29,2 per cent of the employers in our index ever use one, and among those that use it and have advertised at least five roles, 35,1 per cent put it on every single title. Someone added it to a template once, and after that it appears above the warehouse role and the office role alike.

It is not a hint that the employer is German. The convention has been naturalised here for years and is now used by Swiss cantonal utilities, retailers and insurers with no German parent at all.

And its absence is not a restriction. 71,3 per cent of the titles we index carry no tag. «Elektroinstallateur EFZ» with nothing in brackets is the single most common shape of a Swiss job advert, and it is open to everyone — because Article 3 of the Gender Equality Act says so, not because the title line does.

If you think you have been disadvantaged in a hiring decision because of your sex, the thing to look at is the process — who was invited, who was not, and on what stated grounds — rather than the advert. The title line is no evidence either way: at almost every employer that uses one, it is identical above every role. How any individual case is assessed is a question for legal advice; the cantonal conciliation boards established under the Act are the usual first step.

Using it when you search

Leave the tag out of the search box. It is an appendage to the title, not part of the occupation, and typing «Sachbearbeiter m/w/d» restricts you to the minority of adverts that carry one — you would be hiding roughly seven adverts in ten before you started.

Search on stems rather than whole words. German-language titles also carry a second convention that puts the gender inside the word itself — «Verkäufer:in», «Projektleiter*in», «Elektroinstallateur/in» — and 34,1 per cent of German-language titles use one of those forms. A colon or an asterisk in the middle of a word breaks a whole-word match, so «Verkäuf» finds more than «Verkäuferin» does. The two conventions are alternatives rather than companions: of the German-language titles using the in-word form, only 16,7 per cent also carry a bracket tag.

And remember what a Swiss title is actually made of. After the occupation itself, the two things most likely to be in that line are the gender tag and the Pensum — the workload, written as a percentage or a range such as «80–100 %». Neither is part of the job name. Strip both and you are left with the term the employer files the role under, which is the term worth searching for.