Women Interviewing For Tech Jobs Actually Did Worse When Their Voices Were Masked As Men's (fusion.net) 499
Kristen V. Brown, reporting for Fusion:It is well-trod territory at this point that biases against women's technological abilities hold women in technology back. Study after study has shown bias persists at every point of the employment process. So the start-up interviewing.io decided to try and do something about it. It masked women's voices to sound like men's and vice versa during online interviews to see if interviewers would like them better. It was inspired to do the experiment because it was seeing some alarming data. Interviewing.io is a platform that allows people to practice technical interviewing anonymously and, hopefully, get a job in the process. After amassing data from thousands of technical interviews, the company noticed a troubling trend, writes founder Aline Lerner in a blog post: "Men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn't faring that well either -- men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women."
Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly - the trouble here is that it exposes female privilege, and according to the powers that be, that doesn't exist.
At some point, some enlightened civilization of the future will have a culture that accepts that men and women are different, and that's perfectly okay and not due to any sort of nefarious mythical patriarchy.
Re: Why is it troubling? (Score:3, Insightful)
it's less about female privileges and Kore about that we can't state facts anymore because someone (can be women, minority etc) is offended.
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Exactly which "facts" do you think that women have problems accepting?
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anon for obvious reasons.
I will hire a woman over a man for a tech role, even if the man is marginally better. If it's drastic, I'll hire the man - but if it's close, the woman wins out on one very simple factor: male dominated offices/teams/companies have a higher probability of disfunction. Having a female perspective, presence, and balance is actually worth the hit on pure skill.
In other words, a boys club is bad for life balance, moral, and eventually product quality and employee retention.
So this doesn't really surprise me. Hiring managers WANT women in the office. Yeah, this is sexist. But I've worked on teams where there have been zero women, and it's not a good balance.
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One thing to add:
I get 30+ male resumes to one female resume. Unless they're completely wrong for the role from their resume, they get an automatic interview just on the basis of being a woman.
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, glad to see sexism is alive and well at your job. :)
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Affirmative Action and society will punish you if your hiring policies *aren't* sexist in a field where women are not 50% of the work force (unless it's a distasteful or dangerous job, then it's fine.)
Re: Why is it troubling? (Score:2, Insightful)
And that's complete sexism. And it's working against the cause of equality, because people who would otherwise be advocates of equality now don't give a shit because they see that those they would help want to make it unfair in the OTHER direction.
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STEM workforce is ~30% female, but when you go to technical fields like software development, only ~5% is female.
Most women don't like being the only one so if you want to raise the retention rates, you'd need 2 women for each programming team of 10. That's three quarter of the programming teams don't have any women.
And that doesn't take in consideration that big names need those women because of
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Funny)
FTFY [dailymail.co.uk]. Having too many women is not likely to be an issue for a tech company, but it's still worth noting. (Though I suppose you could argue that the problems in that case arose more from the fact that it was intentionally all-woman, which probably wouldn't attract the most healthy applicants...)
Rob
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Insightful)
HAHAhahahaha...
Really? Sounds like someone has never worked in a "hen house" where the majority of the employees are women. The backstabbing and drama is even worse than a typical man-heavy workplace.
Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
...on what you consider "disfunction".
If you're looking to build a consensus driven organization, that cares about feelings, work life balance, and considers a functional team by their internal happiness, then by all means, women are often the ticket (though, there are cases of severe feminine dysfunction as well).
If you're looking to get product delivered, quality built in, and durability of your deliverables, then maybe going with second and third string techs is truly dysfunction. You'll need strong man
Re:Depends... (Score:4, Insightful)
If only there was some middle way where people act like normal human beings instead of extreme sociology caricatures.
Here's another radical idea. Some people are born without intimate knowledge of CS, and have to be trained. It's a terrible handicap for them, but occasionally they overcome.
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Having a female perspective, presence, and balance is actually worth the hit on pure skill.
Yes, if the existing team is largely men.
If the existing team is largely women, the opposite is true. Because, surprise, surprise, this is actually about balance and variety and not about which gender is somehow "better" then the other. Anyone who ever worked in a women-dominated team will tell you war stories about how bitchy women can be when they have the floor to themselves.
You are right that zero women is bad. The same is true for zero men.
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The article goes on to point out that men who's voices were masked as women also had a tendency to do better than unmasked men. The big thing of note, however, was that women were more likely to drop out of the whole process after 2-3 bad interviews, whereas men would keep interviewing. It's not a matter of studying, or skill set, we need to give women the same levels of false confidence that men have in the face of constant rejection.
You want women to be forced into trying to date other women ?
Lets face it, flying the plane into certain Ack Ack fire is part of being a man.
Re: (Score:3)
I can certainly support the idea of instilling more confidence despite rejection because that's perfectly rational, but I don't think the insulting label of "false confidence" is warranted.
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's troubling about this is that it shows men get advanced due to skill and not because they're men. And that's unpossible in the feminist world where male privilege can be the only reason women aren't preferred.
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:5, Funny)
It's troubling because we actually know what is happening here. This is just some weird start up company that apparently didn't bother to read any of the academic work in this area.
It's not the pitch of the speaker's voice. It's the way they speak. The choice of words, the level of confidence and self promotion. And as these people found in their experiment, when "feminine" speech patterns are associated with a male they are perceived as being even worse, because the subconscious "ideal man" doesn't speak that way. This is true regardless of the gender of the interviewer, it's institutional bias in society rather than individuals being sexist or anything like that.
True (Score:5, Interesting)
So who were the jokers who modded this funny? It's actually quite insightful. An extreme example of how women talk and speak like women (and men talk like men) can be found in cultures where there's a fairly great segregation between the sexes, even if the country has liberal/open attitudes toward sexuality (not Al Qaeda-prudish, etc). In Japan, for example, there are clear gender markers in speech, so that an American man talking with feminine speech patterns is clearly marked out as a Japanese woman's boyfriend (i.e. he learned Japanese mostly from his conversations with the woman).
Who knows, maybe men talk more to the point than women, even to the point of offending the other party, something that might be bad in the real, "social" world (where tact is an advantage), but good within the time-constrained frame of an interview. I wonder, how women would rank if the interview took place in stages. Would this male advantage still hold?
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Thanks for responding properly. This is my take on this situation as well.
My anecdote: I have been on dating websites. Sometimes you come accross a profile of a woman, where the flow and feeling of the text is all off. It feels really off, like "what is going on here?". Then I see that somebody listed themselves as transgender. And then I understand where it is coming from.
Not to start another discussion, but the use of language of a transgender who is now a woman, still has many male patterns .
If you've ev
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It's troubling because we actually know what is happening here. This is just some weird start up company that apparently didn't bother to read any of the academic work in this area.
It's not the pitch of the speaker's voice. It's the way they speak. The choice of words, the level of confidence and self promotion. And as these people found in their experiment, when "feminine" speech patterns are associated with a male they are perceived as being even worse, because the subconscious "ideal man" doesn't speak that way. This is true regardless of the gender of the interviewer, it's institutional bias in society rather than individuals being sexist or anything like that.
I think this is an important point.
For example interviewers like confidence and given the same level of expertise men tend to speak more confidently than women. Therefore a good interviewer will tend to balance the effect by downgrading the confidence a man shows while upgrading the confidence a woman gives.
If you switch the gender of the voices this backfires and you end up exaggerating the bias instead of cancelling it.
The good news is there isn't a conscious bias against women.
The bad news is that employ
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It's troubling because we actually know what is happening here. This is just some weird start up company that apparently didn't bother to read any of the academic work in this area.
It's not the pitch of the speaker's voice. It's the way they speak. The choice of words, the level of confidence and self promotion. And as these people found in their experiment, when "feminine" speech patterns are associated with a male they are perceived as being even worse, because the subconscious "ideal man" doesn't speak that way. This is true regardless of the gender of the interviewer, it's institutional bias in society rather than individuals being sexist or anything like that.
If you'd actually bothered to read the article instead of reaching for the patriarchy playbook you wouldn't be spouting such nonsense. The discrepancy went away when they corrected for "dropouts". IOW, men bother taking more attempts after repeated failures.
This supports my previous assertions that men cope with rejection much better than women do; until you manage to get women to ask 50 men out, get turned down 50 times and not be bothered about it, men are going to have an advantage.
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I did read the article, it clearly says that there was a small but significant gender bias that was reversed when the voice modulation was introduced. Of course the drop out issue is the greater one, but we were talking about the voice modulation bit. Hope that clarifies.
Re:Why is it troubling? (Score:4, Informative)
There are plenty of theories that explain the data just as well as yours. Such as the voice modulation didn't mask their gender effectively (the demo videos are not very convincing), or women have different personalities to men which can be noticed in the types of things they say as much as the voice they say it in, or there's a selection bias in the types of women that use this site meaning the ones in the study are actually of a lower skill level but that women in general are not, or the same thing but with a selection bias for highly skilled men. Since there's a well known gender bias in the hiring practices in the tech industry, it's highly likely that there's a bias in the genders of people looking for work in the tech industry too. Since it's harder for women to get tech jobs, they're much less likely to quit a job on a whim.
Then there's the theory put forward in the blog post which was that women tend to become discouraged more quickly after one or two bad interviews where fewer men did. Once they excluded data from both men and women that only did one or two interviews the discrepancy went away.
Speaking of biases, if the first and only theory you come up with fits your own biases and strokes your ego it's very easy to stop there and smugly feel superior to half the human race, while being unaware of how wrong you are.
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I fail to see how this is a troubling trend if its not based on any external force. Maybe men just studied harder and learned whatever skillset they needed better. Hell the only "troubling trend" is that women with subpar skills were hired more often when people knew they were women.
It isn't troubling.
This is showing what folks have been saying all along.
The study should be thrown out though, as the researchers are clearly biased and looking for more bullshit lies about "poor oppressed women because they are women" when the performance, knowledge, and hard work is the real difference. Nothing they can do further should be trusted, soon a "corrected" study will be out that results in demands for more favors for women.
Re:Women.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, clearly the fact she doesn't want to sit around all day cooking and cleaning for you is because feminism has "ruined" her, and not because cooking and cleaning suck and she'd rather spend her life on something that interests her rather than being an unpaid maid.
Re: Women.... (Score:3, Informative)
Heh ? I love cooking and cleaning. Give me an alpha wife in a heartbeat.
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Me too.....
Cooking and cleaning doesn't take that long, I'm a little OCD so I stretch it out.
I'll even take care of and rear the kids.
Just leave some beer in the fridge and a computer to code on for myself. A man has to have his hobbies.
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I have an alpha wife. She makes bank. It rocks.
I am doing laundry right now.
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2-3 hours? Shit, must be a big house.
As for hobbies, I've had to give up doing some of the things I enjoy because there just isn't enough time.
Re: Women.... (Score:3, Interesting)
My husband is a house husband. I make the money, he takes care of the household. I love it. He'so not so keen on it. He's realized it's actually a LOT of work with very little reward.
Re: Women.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact we don't see the super wealthy going "now that I've amassed a fortune, I've decided to retire so I can finally indulge my true passion, which is scrubbing people's toilets for them" should be enough to tell you that.
Re: Women.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe you should look around more. Lots of wealthy people retire from their jobs to do things like hobby farming or frequenting wilderness retreats. There's a guy who runs a pizza parlour down the street who retired from some kind of executive position. He scrubs the toilets there, and also the kitchen, and waits tables. I know another guy who retired from aerospace engineering to teach sailing. I've seen him scrub a marine head. And a deck.
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The key difference is that it's a choice. They can pay someone else to do it if they want a day off or fancy taking a six month break. It's surprising what can be enjoyable when you do it by choice.
It works the other way too. A friend of mine wanted to become a pilot. At first he woke up every day and though "wow, I get to go flying today", but after six months it become "oh no, I have to go flying again today".
Re: Women.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really understand this. I live alone and don't have kids. I have to work for a living AND take care of the house. I guess if your partner is a slob it might be a lot of work. Or if you have some kind of massive frankenhouse. Or if you have kids.
There, fixed that so you see why your situation is probably different.
But I do agree any stay at home spouse with no kids at home is just taking early retirement with a few chores to do each day.
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Feminism has many definitions, and definitely has many varying practices, despite what the actual definition happens to be.
I see women being told they have a choice every day, but when they make a choice that does not suit some "feminists", they are derided for it. It seems that a woman only has one real choice, get a job or be considered a housewife enslaved to the Patriarchy. Having kids on top of that scores bonus points, especially if they are perfect kids in every way, but the woman has to keep her j
Re:Women.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're prepared to marry her without a prenup, I think her opinion is valid. If you want her to stay home, she'll need the long-term guarantee that she'll have money to survive. Otherwise you're asking her to give up her future financial stability on the basis that "right now" she doesn't need to work.
Re:Women.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So pay her ... if you think her spending most of her time doing homework is so valuable convert that value into cold hard cash. That would make the decision a whole lot easier for your girlfriend. She's not your wife, she can't claw the value and lost opportunity/experience back if you leave her (unless your state has common law marriage).
I'm closer to a nazi than a feminist, but I can still see that she's the one thinking clearly here.
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So pay her ... if you think her spending most of her time doing homework is so valuable convert that value into cold hard cash. That would make the decision a whole lot easier for your girlfriend. She's not your wife, she can't claw the value and lost opportunity/experience back if you leave her (unless your state has common law marriage).
I'm closer to a nazi than a feminist, but I can still see that she's the one thinking clearly here.
So is he - if she's bringing in next to nothing then he should find someone who brings in what he wants her to earn. I once had a wife who earned less than it took for me to get her to work; the cost of the car payments, car insurance, fuel for 55km daily and her lunch money added up to less than her income. Had she simply sat at home and watched the maid work all day I would have been slightly better off.
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Not wanting to be your slave != feminism
Re: Women.... (Score:3)
Maybe if she was your wife rather than your girlfriend, the applicable laws regarding post-divorce asset division and alimony would me staying home seem less risky to her?
Whoops - the women AREN'T up to the job (Score:4, Insightful)
and are getting advanced out of political correctness. That's not good.
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Talk for yourself, we in Europe think it's great that you work hard on destroying your competitiveness.
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Europe is also busy at work instituting "gender quotas". Some European nations have entire government departments for women. Go look it up.
So I guess it's settled? (Score:2, Insightful)
Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
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Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
I wouldn't say that. We still have trouble with women pursuing the educations. Which I think is tragic, I have never seen anything to suggest women are worse at Computer Science than men, but many believe somehow it is wrong, and many CS girls I have talked with have talked about how they treated negatively by family and friends due to their choice.
Due to this women that end up in IT, are usually shorter careers chosen much later after talking a job-less education, and not long degrees. So that fit with wor
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Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
Not so.... This is more about INTEREST than aptitude. Men and Women, in general, have different interests. I may sound sexist to some, but it's obvious to this parent that boys and girls don't just come with different plumbing but are wired differently as well. I've met some excellent programmers in my day, only a few have been women, not because women cannot do the job as well but because few WANTED to do the job in the first place.
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There are many things you just can't be any good at unless you, at least, start off with a passion for the subject.
Being 'not interested' is the same as 'unable'. I'm 'not interested' in ballet, guess what?
noooooooo! (Score:4, Funny)
But my preconceived notions! My social justice!
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Hold up your gender card and repeat after me.....
It's not fair for women.... It's not fair for women.... We are the oppressed....
"Female lives matter.... Female lives matter.....
Or, you can just re-run a Hillary campaign stump speech a few times....
Just in time for Ellen Pao's upoming book (Score:2)
That's not what I read. (Score:5, Informative)
They don't "do" worse. It's that "women leave... roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview." [interviewing.io]. It's like looking at unemployment figures without checking to see who gave up looking for a job.
Self esteem issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the title here is particularly bad, but I guess it's part of the Science News Cycle [tapastic.com]
Re:Self esteem issue (Score:5, Insightful)
We can do a lot to encourage girls as they are growing up, and to remove some of the gendered put-downs like describing them as "bossy" when we say boys who do the exact same thing are leaders.
No we don't. A kid who orders the other kids what to do and how to play is called bossy no matter what gender. A kid who ask the other kids what they want to do and lets everyone get involved with the game is a leader. These are two very different behaviours.
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No we don't. A kid who orders the other kids what to do and how to play is called bossy no matter what gender. A kid who ask the other kids what they want to do and lets everyone get involved with the game is a leader. These are two very different behaviours.
Can you share the secret for faster than light travel with us? It could advance humanity by millennia. At least I assume that's how you got here because your experiences appear to be from a different planet.
Men are forced to compete... (Score:5, Insightful)
...women are sheltered from competition.
Women don't have to be aggressive, competitive leaders to be valued in our society - they have inherent value simply by being women, and we would never admonish a little girl who didn't want to compete to "man up".
Men, on the other hand, must compete with each other and demonstrate, through action, that they have value.
While you might feel like calling a girl "bossy" can be damaging to a girl, boys get it even worse - "boys don't cry", "never hit girls", "man up".
If you're really going to get women used to competing, they need to be able to survive the converse - "girls don't cry", "never hit boys", "woman up". They're also going to have to survive, on their own, when anyone calls them "bossy" :)
tl;dr - if girls can't handle being called "bossy", they'll never be able to compete
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This exactly. Men are more used to competing from an early age, and at promoting themselves with confidence. It's the same issue that results in the gender gap with salary negotiation.
We can do a lot to encourage girls as they are growing up, and to remove some of the gendered put-downs like describing them as "bossy" when we say boys who do the exact same thing are leaders. And most importantly, let's kill the stupid meme about girls just not being interested in or good at engineering and computers.
This is the unintended consequences of "sheltering" one half of the population. Good luck on your next social engineering exercise, 'cos this one is showing all the signs of backfiring horribly.
This can't be right (Score:2)
Do you mean that the data shows interviewers valuing knowledge over gender?
Sacrilege! Quick, someone write another piece about the gender gap and hiring practices in technology before anyone notices that interviewers value knowledge over gender .
I know: reading TFA is doing it wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Not only did the summary leave out the actual conclusion from the study (what was mentioned were stats before the masking) but also failed to mention the important finding:
Both men and women perform better when two lessons are learned:
(1) Failure is not permanent, try again;
(2) Practice and training are valid ways of progressing in a technical field. The ability you are born with is not fixed for life.
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I don't see why you think that is an "important finding". The fact remains that women do worse on interviews than men, and hence it's not surprising that companies hire them less. Furthermore, if badly performing women didn't quit after one to two interviews, the average performance of women on the platform would be even worse (your belief that all they need is a little more interview practice is unsupported and implausible).
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I don't think that's what it's saying. It's saying that 1.4 times as many men get a job through their site because they stick with it longer, where 7x more women than men just leave after 1 or 2 failed attempts.
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I think as well, purely anecdotally, that women tend to be treated more gently when they are refused. Much more likely to get a phone-call with "I'm sorry, though your experience is very good we just had someone with a better matching skillset" than the standard "Dear XXX, I am sorry to tell you that your application has not been successful at this time".
Dealing with the blunt rejection is something that they might not be used to, so they are more likely to be discouraged.
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A really interesting take I heard on NPR was from a woman from GirlsWhoCode and her take on why women fare worse in programming than men.
She told a story about a high school CS class where the students were given an assignment and told to code it. An hour goes by and the boys in the class all turn their assignment in before the class is over, some got the best solution, some got an acceptable solution, some turned in code that didn't even compile. The girl in the class walked up for help because she said
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This explains why women fare worse and give up sooner in interviews than men. Boys are taught from a young age to keep getting up, keep trying, failure is okay and is how we learn. Praises and complements don't make us stronger, failure and pain make us stronger. Girls are taught that the prettiest girl gets a free ride in life. She was innately born to be beautiful, she was perfect without trying. Their self worth is programmed to be externalized from a young age to where validation and praise from others defines who a young woman is.
Women suck at programming because the patriarchy programmed them to be that way.
You don't get to call it "the patriarchy" when it's the girl's mother who programmed her that way. And her sisters and her female classmates and her fashion magazines (written by women).
Women are more social (Score:3)
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I somewhat agree although that has been changing a little bit as I get older. I might drink after a day of coding.
I think I would be a good candidate for a long haul space voyage. Say they perfected cryogenic sleep... I'd be perfectly happy being the babysitter/pilot.
Just keep beeming me my sci-fi programs.
Bandwagon Effect (Score:2)
At what point (Score:2)
At what point do we simply accept what is blatantly obvious: there is, by and large, no "bias" against women in the tech sector. Women aren't under-represented because men are pigs and want to preserve some paternalistic male bastion. Women do poorly because women have historically shunned the tech and engineering fields. Most women don't like the field despite how much feminism tells us they do. As a result, they're usually less experienced and have less education in the field.
Note I'm speaking in gene
That point is not in sight (Score:3)
We accept it at the point when it is no longer "blatantly obvious" that the bias is happening.
I really don't get why you are pretending that such a thing is not happening. Are you insecure and worried about someone taking your job so wish to cut down on the competition? Well you shouldn't be since the number of women in tech has been diminishing dramatically in the last few decad
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Instead of commentary. . . (Score:3)
. . . why not read the ACTUAL BLOG POST at Interview.io [interviewing.io] ?
No spin, no agenda, just laying out the data that they found in the process of running their organization. . .
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You lost me at "respected psychic".
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Well, they are the only thing here anymore, so that's kinda by default.
The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and funny (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, the anti-feminist backlash is like... whoa. Poeple are saying the most idiotic things in the comments here that don't in any way comport with the experiment, or even the experimenter's conclusions.
Why? Because they only read the summary, which misleadingly suggests that this was the conclusion of the study:
"Men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women"
No, this was the disturbing trend that PREDATED and inspired the study. The ACTUAL conclusion of the study was:
"...gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women."
So a very mild statistical bias. Still, the fact that these idiots above swarmed immediately to comment "take that feminazis" gives you some indication of how thirsty they were for validation of their conclusions. The cause, speculated by the blogger, was that "As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.", which sounds less like it's less about performance and more about discouragement, lack of self-confidence, and other factors.
There were 234 total interviews (roughly 2/3 male and 1/3 female interviewees). That's 77 female interviews. 77.
But hey, I doubt most of the commentors read this important line either: "On the subject of sample size, we have no delusions that this is the be-all and end-all of pronouncements on the subject of gender and interview performance.
Re: The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and f (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and f (Score:4, Interesting)
And it didn't occur to you that men enjoy the privilege of competing in a culture designed specifically to showcase the strengths that geek-oriented men have?
As soon as you feel that there is an objective function to rate something on a one dimensional axis, you've already baked in a set of cultural assumptions about how things must be approached. Not only that, but there's a decent chance that you aren't even aware of what you've done.
I'm a pretty hard-core geek, but at least I realize that *my* favorite company culture is massively exclusionary of most of the planet, and more to the point, there are many, many ways to be be just as effective a company that don't incorporate my culture at all.
Massive lack of awareness != uncomfortable truth.
Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)
So is the implication here just that it's harder to find highly competent women in technical fields rather than men?
I think that's the problem exactly -- companies want to hire good people, and while women are just as capable as men when it comes to tech jobs (my company has some *very* strong female senior developers), there just aren't as many female tech applicants of any level. Nearly all (95+%) of our developer job applicants are male so it's much harder to find a strong female applicant given that for every female application we review 20 male applications. We are completely gender agnostic when we hire, but that's true agnosticism, not giving preference to any applicant based on gender.
The only way to fix that problem in the present is to go back in time 20 or 30 years and get more females interested in tech early on. It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
We have a much better male to female ratio in our intern programs, so things are getting better, but even there we're seeing around 80% male applications.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The funny thing is, if you go back 40-50 years, women dominated programming. Because it wasn't seen as a male career path, men didn't bother with it. People forget how many women were at the roots of early computer design and programming.
Now certain male brogrammers act like that history never existed and women have always been uninterested in tech, which is extremely self serving.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Citation Needed (Score:4, Informative)
I was around, alive, and in office environments 40 years ago and there were only women in the typing pool and as AAs - secretaries, actually, back when ash trays were an office feature.
If you mean women got to do the punched cards, yes, but that isn't programming. It is data entry.
What you just foisted on us is a canard.
To punched cards era I'd add: database programming. Working in system administration at both startups and large corps, I've been struck by two facts:
1) The Oracle DBA group at three companies were almost entirely female
2) Almost everyone else in the technical/operations side of the house was male
I've known a number of women (older than I) that kicked ass (as far as I know) at Delphi, Filemaker Pro (back when small businesses were running on it), and Access.
With regards to "punched cards", though, I think that's part of the distinction between operator and administrator. When computers were primarily "business machines" it would be perfectly normal (even then) for it to be seen as a business administrative task. Is that different than "Linux Systems Engineering" as it was understood 6 years ago? I don't know. Is SysEng an awkward middle period between batch processing job operations + Oracle design and high-level cloud/container/dynamic app management? I don't know that either.
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You must have never met Grace Hopper, who wrote the first compiler, or the women who programmed the ENIACs. Where would Apple be today without Smalltalk, co-developed by Adele Goldburg?
Honestly, in the environment at that time, did you even notice the women as people or did they all just lump into "secretary" in your head? Where they couldn't threaten you.
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It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
If companies like Google actually did everything necessary to even their own numbers, to make everyone happy, then the rest of the entire tech industry would end up being 100% male.
That, IMHO, is the real problem with picking on a few choice large tech companies for this issue.
Sure, they could do more than all the smaller shops to help the situation 15-20 years from now, but they can't really do anything to solve the problem in the short term.
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So is the implication here just that it's harder to find highly competent women in technical fields rather than men?
DING DING DING! We have a winner!
Look I am all for equal pay for equal work and have no problems with working with women in the team or project.
I do have issue with someone being incompetent who is trying to do the job (be it a man or woman). And as you just stated, if the system really is anonymous skill assessment, then the people scoring the skill assessments don't know the gender, which simply means there are more highly skilled men that used the system than women, and that on average, the men that ha
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Nowhere in the article did they explain how that technical score was determined. Whether it was from academic records or just the impressions of the interviewers.
Regardless, they concluded that the overriding problem was that most women dropped out after 2-3 rejections, whereas men continued interviewing and that skewed their numbers.
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If true (wow this post is hedged) that's not a problem in itself - it can be argued it's a SYMPTOM of a problem, upstream. But if you want the pools to have equal yields you might need to force equal interest, and that means even more conversations, w
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Actually, if you bother reading the article, you'll find the headline is misleading, and if you do a little stripping of outliers, the headline becomes incorrect.
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If you read the original study you'll see that the author expected women to do better when the interviewer thought they were male. But that didn't happen, they actually did worse. And men did better when the interviewer thought they were female.
What one might conclude is that women are given some leeway, but the same responses from a man are knocked down.
So the author fell back to a different study which shows women in general do worse than men, and concludes that it must be because of discrimination even t
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This pretty much explains it [youtube.com].
Re:Bullshit, was Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers.
I'll say that was perhaps the biggest change getting used to a mixed office - remembering that the women (in general) underestimated (or perhaps merely underplayed) their technical competence and the men (in general) overestimated theirs. (Not usually catastrophically, I like to think of it as "optimism" :-))
Well that and if you didn't make room in a conversation, you weren't going to get the women (who were often technically superior) contributing. Sadly it took weeks for me to realize that the women weren't willing to talk over the men to make their points... Restructuring the meetings from a technically oriented free-for-all solved the problem nicely.
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Seriously?
I've been at this technical thing for nearly 30 years and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what you are driving at. What about Asian women bothers you?
Personally, I don't care what gender you are (or think you want to be), what matters to me is how well you can do your job. I've worked with and for both men and women and I don't see any difference that correlates to gender, except for one and that has to do with HR's statistics when they count up how many "F" and "M" boxes get checke
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Where did you get that idea? Go into the office at 7:30am. It is all men and Chinese/Indian women. Go into the office at 7:30pm. Same thing. Chinese and Indian women get better pay and promoted because they bust their asses. I know one example is not a trend, but it seems typical in my experience. I can think of a Chinese girl from MIT. Straight out of school. Worked 12 hours a day. Second year, she was the youngest development manager in the company. And making really good money. She earned it
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Then why should we not count them?
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Someone doing gender studies might "know" the answer before beginning the study. They may need help making sure they get the "correct" result. It is important to selectively pick data points.
This should be simple. A) Do great/smart work. B) Be willing to work hard, when needed. Hit your deadlines. C) Work/communicate with the team. Do these things and you're an asset. You should be rewarded accordingly.
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If the voice masking wasn't well done, couldn't you end up with an uncanny valley sort of situation with respect to how the applicants sounded? I can imagine a scenario in which the voice sounds "wrong" at a gut level, and that makes some interviewers uncomfortable.
And, overall, what do you think the tech community would be most open to? A person that sounds like a woman, but comes off as a bit of a tomboy (on account of actually being a man), or a man that seems oddly feminine or "weak", "fuzzy" or whatever attributes you would assign to socially acceptable female behavior? And how did men that had their voice masked into female fare, compared to non-masked men?
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In most art, whether it is painting, music, wine; once you take away the show or the name, they cannot be objectively distinguished. For most other jobs, what matters is your technical skills. In Western culture women are babied and grow up thinking they 'can do anything' without much effort, the male will do their bidding to make it easy for them. They get promoted, especially in the tech field, through schools, jobs etc simply based on their gender, and that is not a recent diversity thing, for as long as