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Women Interviewing For Tech Jobs Actually Did Worse When Their Voices Were Masked As Men's (fusion.net)
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."
This isn't surprising. It's been my experience that men are more willing to consistently put in the long hours for certain types of tasks than women. Moreover, there is usually less overall team drama when a team is composed entirely of men compared to when the team has a larger portion of women.
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.
and are getting advanced out of political correctness. That's not good.
Did the interviewers know the interviewee was a woman, just that she had a deep sounding voice? That may not be discrimination against women in general, but rather a discrimination against women with deep-sounding voiced, which is something else altogether.
"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."
So is the implication here just that it's harder to find highly competent women in technical fields rather than men?
Probably sounded too weird or creepy...
Could it be with so much spotlight on gender gap in tech that companies are bending over backwards to keep competent women and only ones without a job are less than stellar?
Any study that tries to replicate this result needs to track if a woman is Indian or Chinese. If you really want to show bias in pay or hiring, you'll get the best results by not counting Indian and Chinese woman as women.
Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
But my preconceived notions! My social justice!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You lost me at "respected psychic".
"programming is like sex — one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
So right.
All humans are reptilian. At least the illuminati, the only ones that matter in the long run.
The study was supposed to prove that interviewers are biased agaisnt women and it did the exact opposite. It proved women are simply not as good as men for tech fields, voice modulation made no real difference in scores. As always, insecure people seeking unfairness and prejudice where there's clearly none to find excuses for their bad performance.
Pao recently announced that she's writing a book about Silicon Valley's "toxic culture". I imagine the results from this study wont be included in her data.
They don't "do" worse. It's that "women leave... roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.". It's like looking at unemployment figures without checking to see who gave up looking for a job.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Also the title here is particularly bad, but I guess it's part of the Science News Cycle
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I think that the Rust programming language project refutes what you're saying. If we look at its list of contributors, we can easily see based on their profile pictures that they're typically young white males. A small number may be male-to-female transsexuals. Yet despite having such a homogeneous, male-dominated contributor community, we see a huge amount of drama from this rather small community. It has gotten to the point where their code of conduct and their Moderation Team generate, in my experience, way more drama than they might ever hope to prevent! Just look at how these men overreact and downvote anyone at Reddit or HN or other sites who don't show 100% devotion to Rust. The drama the Rust community engages in is universal. It doesn't matter what the venue or discussion medium is, the moment they get involved there is instant drama. How do you explain this situation?
Look what feminism has done to society. It's ruined it.
My girlfriend thinks she "needs" a job, even though my income easily supports us both. It would be much beneficial if she just stayed home and helped me with work, relieving my stress by cooking, cleaning, and helping me prepare for work. That way things would be easier for me, allowing me to get a promotion and take care of her even better. But she has been raised by feminism to believe it's wrong to be "taken care of" by a man, so she has to work a job that contributes practically nothing, and then we both are too tired at the end of the day to clean, cook, etc., so we resort to eating out and living in a messy house.
Thanks feminism, thanks.
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 .
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Without the bias (tech hiring bias strongly favor females for obvious reasons), they get judged like everyone else.
IT, tech, programming, etc. are things men like more than women. This makes them better at it. (statistically) (not individualistically)
This is not a problem. Stop making it one.
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.
Really? He lost me at "SOOOOOO."
You must have monk-like patience.
Leonard Nimoy said of Turnabout Intruder,
"[Gene Roddenberry] was making a script in which his goal was to prove, quote, 'That women, although they claim equality, cannot really do things as well as, under certain circumstances, as a man - like the command function, for example. And it was a rather chauvinistic, clumsy handling of an interesting question. What he set out to prove was that this lady, given command of the ship, would blow it. That's really what the script was about. Just that simple. You see."
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.
Oh come on, have a sense of humour. The troll posts are the only thing worth reading here anymore.
Every company I've worked for the past 27 years since I graduated with a CS degree has given hiring preference to women. In fact, my current one has only interviewed women programmers as a policy for nearly the past 18 months.
Take a bad answer. If a guy said it you would say "that's a terrible answer. Go away. Next!" If a woman said it you would *think* that, then think "oh shit, I can't say that, I might get accused of sexism. Let's give her a second chance."
Disguising the woman's voice just removes the blinders.
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 though her own study indicated otherwise
Being a computer programmer is largely an anti-social activity. I can spend 8 hours or more in a row typing away at my code editor and building and testing every hour or so. I often work best when I am not interrupted by people. My wife thinks this is insanity. She can't imagine spending more than a couple hours in front of a computer at a time. Going the whole day without talking with someone is pure torture for her. I tend to think that most women share her views instead of mine.
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.
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
Mangina
Men and women are different! Biologically the strongest non-steroid enhanced male is much stronger and faster than the strongest non-steroid enhanced female. Women can carry and nurse babies and build up more body fat to do so, men can not. Women's brains are wired differently than men, with much more cross talk between the left and right hemispheres which allows them to multitask better but can also make single problem focus more difficult. Men's corpus callosum are damaged by testosterone in the womb, allowing them to use either the left or right side to focus more deeply on single problems, but much harder to use both at the same time or multitask. Are there outliers to these norms? Of course, but on average there are biological reasons for the differences and only the fool (liberal progressives and SJWs) ignore the norms to focus on a few outliers.
Typical case of bandwagon effect. When men dominate an area, it is more likely for women to quit early assuming that the area is not meant for them. And when men fail, they are less likely to quit early looking at the success of other men.
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?
It takes a lot more to mask the gender of a person than the pitch of the voice. A self-deprecating man is not tolerated or trusted. Only women are expected to practice self-deprecation which is therefore tolerable behaviour. Similarly, a self-assured man is already considered to a management position from the start, while a self-assured woman is a threat to an immature interviewer. The roles of domination and submission are only allowed to turn in the bedroom, a dungeon or a computer game by many societies.
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.
Out of about 30 students in my graduating CS class of 1990 about half were US citizens. Two of these were female. On career day they were fast tracked for hiring by local aerospace/defense companies and within a week were hired. They were both smart and good solid programmers, B+ level. Did their assignments, no programming for "fun" on their own. The A and A- males had a much more difficult and lengthy job finding process.
Basically the companies at career day were falling over themselves to get these women, and this was before the political crisis of not enough women in STEM.
A long time girlfriend and I met in graduate school, graduated MS CS in 2000. Again a good solid programmer, work experience doing embedded systems, but not a lot of reading or programming for fun or curiosity. We had this conversation, she thought she had a competitive advantage by being female. She was OK with me spending some time reading tech stuff and doing odd programming projects for fun and curiosity, she was curious enough to talk about it a little, let me bounce ideas, but when I mentioned this stuff also helps during job interviews she'd joke the "quota system" allows her to get by without such stuff. She had enough inner geek that when she had a school or job assignment she would dig into unfamiliar topics and not get bored or lost, and would continue doing so on her own time at home until she thought she "got it", but not enough inner geek for personal project. OK, that's probably a healthy perspective, but the point is that in **her** opinion her gender balanced out my slightly better tech skills and knowledge in the marketplace.
Again, this was before the political crisis over women in STEM. Women were regrettably "rare" but it wasn't a "crisis" at the time. At the time it was thought we need to stop discouraging girls from tech, we thought many would naturally lean that way without the discouragement. That sadly didn't work out so well.
Women are better for the work environment how exactly? I see no difference between men and women, except that women tend to work less. If you claim that a gender is better at IT, you need to check yourself because you are not managing well. The problem is you, not that you hire men or women.
Well, they are the only thing here anymore, so that's kinda by default.
- Chuq
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 generalities. This does not mean women are somehow intellectually inferior to men or otherwise unable to do the job. I've come across women in this field who are every bit as savvy as men, but I've come across very few women in total. As a percentage of their gender, I'd say there are far more women in the tech/engineering fields who know what they're doing than a percentage of males, probably because the women to do choose this field do it out of a genuine interest in the field and not some "if a guy can do it, I can do it better" impulse.
The tech industry, in my experience, is a very good example of a meritocracy. People who are good at what they do get promoted on ability with little or no thought to their gender, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or anything else (except age, and ageism is a problem in our field regardless of these factors). This constant cry for "diversity" and "equality" is a call to dumb down and water down this very meritocracy and it should be resisted at every possible turn.
We don't need more women, or more minorities, or more anything other than more well-qualified, competent technicians and engineers. If they happen to be women, or minorities, or [insert aggrieved group of choice here], great, but they have to be good at their jobs first.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Software companies are so hungry to hire minorities (except males over 40, they are openly shunned) that you don't have to be good to get in. These companies want to show diversity, and because so few diverse people apply, when one does... you hire them. And if they are not crazy, you promote them as soon as possible.
I worked for a company that hired almost all men... except for some reason all the women we hired were moved into team lead and dev manager positions. It is odd to see 95% of your dev team be male and the 5% female are all in team lead positions. It is also people of color as well. I was told by HR to go to my old Campus to recruit. I said GREAT! Then they told me they wanted me to only recruit at an all black frat. because they wanted to try to hire African Americans. It was crazy! Why target one group! Most in that frat were not even computer science majors! They didn't care! The only thing more scares than women in software are african americans in software.
I worked for a large software company in the Mid West... made a billion dollar acquisition a few years back. I wont name them, but there are few that fit that description.
Notably, SoylentNews did not screw this one up. Their summary accurately captured the tone and content of the whole article. The hell, Slashdot? Are you trying to make this unpleasant?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...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 management that can handle conflict, but there's an argument that conflict can actually drive progress faster than kumbayah consensus.
It's an interesting experiment. But experiments need to be corroborated by being duplicated with independent researchers. So, take it with a grain of salt.
I've read that it used to be, female musicians applying for jobs in symphony orchestras were usually rejected, until they started auditioning behind a screen so that the judges couldn't tell the sex. Once the audition was 'blind', the women fared as well as the men. The blind auditioning had an advantage over the case described here because there was no disguising of voices or worrying about choosing the right words to express oneself. Just pure musicianship and skill on the instrument.
So, with music, it would appear the sexes are 'equal'. It doesn't mean they are equal in other things. For a long time, no one knew how to tell a female brain in an anatomy class from a male one, but eventually distinctive differences were found. So it shouldn't be a surprise that men and women are different. But I'd say there's still a lot of room for debate on exactly what is different, and what is 'better'. In many cases, even if there's some statistical difference, there's probably enough overlap in skill that one should frequently give the person a chance, and try to be objective about evaluating whether or not they have chops to do the job they're applying for.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Ha! Don't judge men with women's pole. Men were not seeking validation whatsoever, what they're doing is mockery. They are mocking the feminazis who cry patriarchy at everything and anything and they're just laughing at their faces. That's all. Don't use the strawmen to pull yourself from the hole you dig yourself.
...to have the choice to give up and leave.
When you're desperate, and nobody is going to stick around to take care of you, giving up isn't an option.
Having options is privilege.
The obvious conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.
Study shows, when men enjoy the privilege women receive, they do even better. Study shows, when women are forced to compete while suffering from the same prejudice men suffer under, they do worse.
Conclusion: This is all mens fault. Men are bad, and anyone who denies being bad is particularly bad. Anyone who fails to disregard the evidence and claims male privilege doesn't exist is guilty of hate. Anyone who denies that female privilege exists, or claims that feminists are a privileged hate group is criminally insane.
Tune in tomorrow, guys, for more of the same shit and abuse. Don't forget to click our ads and support our site.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...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
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 I've been in the job market that has been the case, that was the case during the dotcom boom when I started working.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I find this interesting because I'm a transgender woman who looks great, but there is little one can do about one's voice, which for me is at the lower end of the female range. Anyway, I got hired as an R&D software engineer on my first interview with a Fortune 500 company. It helps that I have a lot of applications I've worked on and one of them is a first-line UI component of a major operating system (not Linux).
Companies want good developers. Their gender doesn't matter. If you have the skills and you've built the apps, and can show this, you'll get the job. With equal pay and opportunities for advancement.
I doubt the masking is perfect - thus the "Uncanny Valley" of subtle things not being quite right making people uneasy.
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 decades to the point where you can go to an IT conference and be in a room with over a hundred men and no women.
You should be a lot more honest about this. It's a liberty issue after all. If you have a daughter that shows interest and aptitude in programming surely you want her to be able to get somewhere in a real meritocracy instead of being increasingly locked out due to the "bro" culture or whatever juvenile shit is currently going on.
From the Fusion article (and I read the original study to confirm this quote doesn't misrepresent the original work):
'Lerner dug into her data and came up with her own guess for the cause of the surprising results: women were leaving the platform after having one or two bad interviews. In other words, women, feeling discouraged, seemed to be just giving up on interviewing altogether. “Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews,” she writes, “the disparity goes away entirely.”'
That result therefore confirms the existence of gender bias, though because there are fewer remaining data points, the results are less significant.
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.
So to mask the voice you're stuck with some kind of frequency or pitch shifting, both of which have artifacts. It's not going to sound like a man would sound naturally. So the interviewer didn't hire the creepy-sounding man.
Assuming a company will be most profitable hiring the the best person for a job and that education is made freely available to both sexes... Theoretically, over hundreds or (thousands?) of years the businesses who chose the best candidate will survive, and the companies who chose a worse candidate due to sexism will fail due. In other words, if this problem exists it should fix itself over time without any interference.
I always found something interesting about these feminism articles: Unless you hate yourself and your family being able to feed yourselves, why even give a damn about female representation in a field your are competing in? Why support competition for that platter of food and the ability to pay the bills?
The only women that matter in life are the mother, the family, the girlfriend, and the chosen female friends. Everyone else, especially these nameless random women that have no real relevance in your life for you have too limited energy to bother about too many women, especially the self-important mentally insane feminists who think you should treat them like you do your mother, are your god damn life enemies. It's either you or them.
Well i will never support this affirmative bollocks crap, or equality. When the platter and bills are in question, there is no equality, there is only winning or losing, and i will never willingly lose.
Don't let objectivity or evidence get in the way of your feelingness.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
God forbid we should put the work first or anything... it's not like we're personally responsible for the massive transformations in the human experience or anything. Lets focus on what's important... making everyone feel like a special snowflake.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
C'mon, +5 Troll!!! The ultimate expression of Uncomfortable Truth!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Showcase or exploit? That is the question.
When I go looking for a good book, I don't care if the name on the cover is Robert or Ursula or Andre. I recognize what I like and when I see more by an author I like, I buy more or it. Even if 9 out of 10 publishers refused to publish books written by women (or for that matter, small green creatures from Alpha Centauri), as long as the 10th one did, I'd buy it. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the gender/species of authors, because I'm dealing with the author's works, not the author him/her/it/other/self.
So you can either assume that TEN out of 10 software houses refuse to publish works by women or that the majority of women don't produce what I'd buy in software. And, having demonstrated already that I am perfectly capable of working around all but the most extreme supply-side constraints on what I can by, maybe, just MAYBE, the lack isn't in the agencies, but in the individuals.
And that correspondingly, that lack in this specific area might be counter-balanced by strengths in areas where men don't do as well. I lack many virtues myself, but that doesn't mean I have to feel I'm inferior. I have strengths that others lack.
Equality doesn't mean pounding square pegs into round holes. It means that every shaped peg should be allowed to find its own best fit. I'm against discrimination where it's discrimination, but let's be discriminating enough to know the difference.
I've walked away from plenty of job interviews because I thought interview was an idiot or asshole; so doing poorly in interviews isn't a bad thing.
Interviewers just don't like advancing people who are smarter than them, they also don't like people who aren't willing to deal with their shit, and they're frequently looking for not only someone who does technically well but is also willing to be their bitch.
I've done my time in sweatshops; and I'm happy to be out, for at least a little while. And I can tell when I'm interviewing for one.
Soylant news said wah
I work with a woman programmer who is a bloody machine. If you open up the issue system it is mostly her name on a group made up of all other guys. They are very very good, but holy crap she is a machine.
Exactly one person has told me how good she is. I am trying to figure out how to phrase it to her, but I am going to advise her to spend some more time being a blowhard and toot her own horn.
She basically needs to jump up on her desk every tenth commit and yell "Another 10, you snail sloth mofos!"
deep voice: "Oh mi God, ponies! he he he..."
They "masked" the women's voices by making them deeper, without doing anything to inflection or speech patterns.
I think it's pretty obvious that would make the women candidates sound like trans women.
So all this is saying is that there is an even bigger bias against trans women than there is against cis women.
Has the world gone entirely mad lately, or it is only me that identifies this article as terribly sexist...?
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.
In the last few years a lot of crap has been said about feminism. The irony is that the posters often end up espousing feminist ideas without realizing it.
The really frustrating thing is seeing just how ignorant people are about feminism. It's usually the exact opposite of what they think. This debate is a perfect example, and the summary is just flamebait.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
pics or gtfo
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
My wife wants to stay at home and bake and sew. That's not a problem but then she complains that her car is older than neighbors where both wife and husband work, and she saw a lovely necklace on QVC and why can't we get it.....
Why is it 'troubling'? Because it revealed that women actually came across worse than men, even when the interviewers believed they were men - and hence no 'sexist' bias could be present. Oh, the patriarchy! It's very simple: most women aren't interested in tech, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, and want men to work as their slaves, doing all the dangerous jobs, while women sit in offices and complain about not being paid the same as men...
All feminists lie.
Arguing about how the patriarchy favours men over women on the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme where over a million men died.
Sounds like you're using a different definition of feminism than the cancerous one that the new generation is using.
Notably, SoylentNews did not screw this one up.
Debatable. I've never read something as horrid or confusing. That isn't a summary it's copying out of context sentences and prefacing them with random adverbs. It was incredibly difficult to read and while it may be less biased they most definitely "screwed this one up".
Modern feminism reminds me of womens' astonishment during their first trip to a gay bar--where they stand in disbelief that that they can't rely on physical features and traditional culture to carry them along to success (free drinks, special treatment, quicker service, etc.). Where instead, they're judged by the social ability, personality, intelligenc
. . . why not read the ACTUAL BLOG POST at Interview.io ?
No spin, no agenda, just laying out the data that they found in the process of running their organization. . .
A lot of posters here don't read the article, but I can't imagine that you even comprehended the headline. Here's a Haiku summary:
Women were preferred
Based on this little study
Perhaps women quit?
Oh you poor guys don't know about women who can solder and program.
Imagine a chick who smells good, that can keep up with you for days straight.
They'll use TWO hands on ya! (lucky guys know exatly what I mean!)
YES, more Female techs are wanted oh my god yes.
Bullshit. I've worked with (and led) a lot of engineers over the past 2+ decades and many men & women. I have never needed to tiptoe around women in tech development groups. I've had drama with both women & men at about the same amount. Same for ability & effectiveness. The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers. This means if I have two engineers where everything else was equal except gender I think I'd tend to prefer working with the woman.
There are as many women as men on my mental short list of engineers that I've worked with and would call up if I were creating a dream team. Now, I have worked with 3-4x as many male engineers in my career so that also says something I think.
I'm wondering if maybe your experience says more about you and the way you treat women, than it says about the women you've worked with?
Pictures -- prove it. Every transgender I've ever seen looks.... off. Not "great." Even in still images. When they move and talk, that's the end of it. Then they don't just look "off", they look downright alien. Both sexes, btw, not just men-as-women.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm sure, somewhere, there are a few that look great, maybe even have the moves down so that they can overcome the natural tendencies of their skeletal and muscular structure. I'd be really interested to see that. Statistically, though, the claim is so unlikely as to be dubious, hence... pictures, please.
I think that I agree with this comment, I've worked at companies where when a woman applies they've either created a new position for them, or updated the requirements to match the resume. Upon getting into the face to face interviews. When asked pertinent, yet mildly challenging questions tailored to their experience, totally flubbed them.
Even when the job offer is extended turned it down because they were afraid to fail. I simply think that many (please note there are exceptions) women do not want to either be challenged or be the challenger. Even though they are qualified.
I think that many companies are aware/terrified of the gender gap and bend over backwards to try to get more women in IT, its just extremely difficult for whatever reason.
Regardless my tips for interviewing are
1. Don't lie on your resume
2. Don't be afraid to say "I don't know but I'm willing to learn it"
3. Don't let it be one sided. Remember interviews are conversations between people. Ask relevant questions as guided/indicated/hinted by the conversation.
the Mother of the Internet, although she hates that moniker. All she did was figure out a routing algorithm that was the basis of internetworking, trivial really.(/sarcasm)
Cryptizard says hosts don't work against the botnet in question here https://it.slashdot.org/commen... ? Sorry, but they do.You lose. You did it to yourself. Imagine that! The 'great computer scientist' (not) Cryptizard (who creates nothing of use) has to EAT HIS WORDS, lmao!
Just the opposite. It confirms that once the quality of the pool of applicants for both samples is normalized, there is no disparity (although admittedly, not strongly significant).
Study shows, when men enjoy the privilege women receive, they do even better. Study shows, when women are forced to compete while suffering from the same prejudice
The study doesn't SHOW that. The study is not inconsistent with that. You'll need more studies with larger sample sizes and other possible variables eliminated, before that sort of conclusion could be adequately supported, if true.
"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."
Actually there is study after study showing a disparity between women and men in terms of numbers and performance in the field. It is only the assumption that the cause is bias against women.
I can't imagine any field that if anything gives so much of an advantage to women and minorities from my experience. This is actually demonstrated by this study where providing male voices to the women resulted in much lower hiring rates.
God forbid we should put the work first or anything...
And God forbid that we actually look at the all the options for what makes a successful company or workplace.
Let me put it another way. You'd probably fail an interview for a successful company in China or Japan. Why? Because what constitutes the best employee has radically different qualities from what constitute your strengths here. Not only that, but if you were masked so that they thought you were Chinese or Japanese, your evaluation would be even lower, not because they privileged white people, but because they were judging you entirely on the basis of a cultural paradigm to which you did not belong.
Does that mean you would have nothing to offer a Chinese or Japanese company? Of course not. Your strengths are strengths. But it does mean that they would have to be flexible enough to understand that your strengths differ from the metrics they normally use. And companies that had that flexibility would gain from that.
I suspect the problem is rather more that you would be distinctly uncomfortable *really* putting work first and making the effort to allow the company to take advantage of a wide ranging, non-uniform set of strengths, many of which you'd barely recognize as relevant. Far easier to claim "this is the way that we've always done it - in fact this is the *only* way to do it" and persuade yourself that it's actually in the best interests of the company.
Straight white males are inherently evil.
You must agree with this, otherwise... ADOLF HITLER
I went back and re-read. You are correct. The original study was not super well-written, IMO. Too conversational. I think I would have done better with it had it been written in a more traditional research style, including data, etc...
So basically, the answer is to try to deal with whatever socialization factors are contributing to women quitting as a result of interview rejection.
I'm replying again to correct myself. Basically, the study found that women quite as a result of interview rejection at a much higher rate than men, skewing their numbers. Eliminating early attrition data indicates that women perform equally well at getting jobs from interviews so long as they stay in the game. There are probably socialization issues (which are a result of societal sexism) contributing (some studies are indicated) to women dropping out early. It is hard to know with the data provided, but it is possible that women are just as strong and valid as candidates as men if we can figure out how to address this gender difference in handling rejection.
It's not simply a matter of modulating the frequency to make a woman's voice sound like a man's or vice-versa. There are a lot more differences than that between men and women's speech. Women tend to change their pitch over a wider range than men, who tend to use a narrower range of pitches. They also tend to have breathier voices than men and way less resonance. So it could be that the altered voices just sounded weird or "off" to the interviewers.
The (*@#%&(%ing article says it: "Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, ..." STOP READING!!
"masking gender had no effect on interview performance" ... that all they can say.
But what's the point of either fact? Is it sexist that women act differently? Is a woman-dominated field functional because women are better than the disfunctional male? Or is it that all these facts have no utility, only a false demarcation?
So what sitcom did you see that on?
An objective review of this thread shows that you're the one being emotional here.
See subject: Plus others as I cut off their delivery mechanisms. Tell me hosts don't work here https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
Especially after I proved I block its delivery mechanisms making it ineffectual on THAT level alone (payload links in spam or phish mails).
Clue: I don't have to block TOR only the spam/phish payload links!
That's the IDEA behind hosts vs. malware of ALL kinds & I said it there: WHAT YOU CAN'T TOUCH CAN'T HARM YOU - get it?
* Yes - You lost RIGHT there & you KNOW it! Sure shut you up fast there, lol..
APK
P.S.=> LASTLY: You're a professional shrink now too? You're not so quit the libel, ok?? You have no professional formal diagnosis of my alleged mental condition according to YOU "Dr. Quack the wannabe 'SiDeWaLk-ShRiNk' of /.' under some delusion you are NOR do you have a degree or professional experience in psychiatric sciences... So backup those delusions of YOURS, talker, prove my subject line above wrong. 7 digit acct noobz like YOU? Can't... apk
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.
As a side-note (a very *side*-note):
It's also my experience in sports.
When I'm not stuck in front of a keyboard doing biomedical research, my hobby is outdoor sports, more precisely ski (Yay, European Alps !) and I regularily exercice this hobby of mine as a ski teacher. (Mind you: Not that seriously. It's just a hobby, not a profession to bring the dough)
As part our training as teachers we periodically need to give lessons to kids (the rest of the time, I teach ski at the university to adults).
And there's also a tendency that I've seen:
- young girls tend much more often to under-evaluate their performance, lack some self-confidence, etc.
(at this level of ski, mostly to teach them so they can have some fun, not train the future olympic team, girls aren't at a biological disadvantage.
although they might put a little bit less muscle mass for a given level of training than boys (=with higher steroid hormone level),
they tend to have a lower center of mass which helps a bit in sliding/disbalancing sports.)
So girls aren't necessarily performing worse than the boys, but lots of them do perceive it that way, due to lack of self confidence.
Except for a few individuals( who don't give a damn about pecking order or anything, and seem clearly aware of their own capabilities...
(and also seem completely unaffected by all the belittling jokes that kids throw at each other during sports).
Part of the way I organise my lessons involves therefore also helping my students (both kids and adults) to realise what they manage to accomplish.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Zip up kiddo, your insecurity is showing.
Want to bet this will not make it into the larger discussion? Truth that doesn't fit the narrative is usually shouted down or ignored.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You can anonymize voices but you can't anonymize language usage and other non-choral nuances that differ between men and women.
Come on folks, if you're going to pretend to be "objective" and "scientific" then you at least need to account for this.
What do I know, I'm just an AC on slashdot...
> 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?
Considering that it was created by geek-oriented males that is no surprise. It's like the japanese have when going about in their japanese culture. Ugh, so ignorant!
> you've already baked in a set of cultural assumptions about how things must be
Like the cultural assumption that geek men have a bias against women right?
> I realize that *my* favorite company culture is massively exclusionary of most of the planet
You should quit your company them to allow people of color to assume your place.
> many, many ways to be be just as effective a company that don't incorporate my culture at all.
Just those computer companies that have invented ways of dealing with technical problems by using techniques not based on anything white cis male have made. No transistors or vacuum tubes, no mouse and keyboard and all that POS junk they have forced us at gunpoint to use.
This is the first time I've ever heard "false confidence" described as a positive.
False confidence always leads to errors and small or large disasters sooner or later.
If men indeed have greater false confidence than women, the best way to reach gender equality is to instill less false confidence in men.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Gotcha, "no true feminist" and all that. The tide is turning, and the train is just fine. Just fine...
*Well trodden
You're english is broke.
You lost me at "respected psychic".
You were just fine with "women are REPTILES" then.
Anyone who... claims male privilege doesn't exist is guilty of hate
They may or may not be guilty of hate, but they are most certainly deluded.
womens' astonishment during their first trip to a gay bar--where they stand in disbelief that that they can't rely on physical features and traditional culture to carry them along to success ...
What are you talking about!? Hetero women who hang with their gay male friends at gay venues famously have a fabulous time ...
Gotcha, "no true feminist" and all that.
That runs both ways.
Men get away with it more easily because we're assumed to be selfish jerks.
Not really. It's just that it's understood that married men need more money because they are the primary breadwinner for a family. So when women ask for a raise, just so they can buy more clothes and makeup and stuff, they are being selfish jerks.