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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."
But my preconceived notions! My social justice!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FTFY. 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
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.