Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

Funny how a job gets more important when it sounds technical, right? Marketing job titles are being rebranded to ‘Narrative Engineer’ or ‘Go-to-Market Engineer’. Same work, but suddenly it sounds harder and more technical.

Miranda Does Brands explores this in a recent TikTok that you can watch here. She argues that marketing roles aren’t changing that much, but the language surrounding the roles is. Miranda discusses how entire fields have flipped gender dynamics based on perceived value. When certain work is seen as valuable, we don’t just pay it more, we reframe it to sound more ‘masculine’.

She uses the example of programming, which was originally considered clerical work and largely done by women. It was seen as “soft” compared to men building hardware. When software became valuable (1980s PC boom), programming was rebranded as “software engineering”. This shift elevated status and gradually pushed women out of the field.

We’ve seen this across many other industries as well:

We even see this within marketing itself. Women tend to be overrepresented in more creative, brand, and content-focused roles, often associated with being “right-brained.” Meanwhile, roles like “product marketing manager” (61.6% of PMM’s in the US are men) skew more male and are framed as strategic, analytical, and revenue-driven. Same discipline, but one side is seen as creative support, the other as business-critical.

At Toast, we are also looking to change perception by helping more women step into roles that have historically been male-dominated. We talk about skills differently, rewrite job descriptions, and remove biased signals through blind recruitment and more neutral candidate profiles. So you could argue: Aren’t we doing the same thing? Reframing roles. Changing language. Shifting who applies?

Here’s where we see the distinction: there’s a difference between expanding access and reinforcing gatekeeping. What we’re seeing in some of these “engineer-ification” trends is adding jargon, increasing perceived barriers, and signalling exclusivity. It raises the ceiling but often narrows the doorway. What we’re trying to do is the opposite - strip away unnecessary language, focus on transferable skills, and make the doorway wider without lowering the bar.

Titles don’t just describe work, they shape who feels qualified to do it. So maybe the question isn’t: “Should we change how roles are positioned?” It’s: “Who benefits when we do? and who gets quietly filtered out?” It’s not about feminizing or masculinizing work, we want to ensure that when the value of work changes the people who’ve already been doing it don’t get left behind.

Team Toast 🥂

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