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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."
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!”
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.
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.
Heh ? I love cooking and cleaning. Give me an alpha wife in a heartbeat.
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
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.
The "troubling trend" was from before they started with the voice modulation. They tried out the modulation because they noticed the discrepancies. Since their platform was supposed to be anonymous, it's troubling to find out that details about the candidates such as their gender are not anonymous.
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.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
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?
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BS. I'm a female engineer and I frequently joke that female engineer is a different gender than just female. I'm an engineer and a geek first, most definitely, and I would say that's true of a great number of female engineers I know. I hate shopping, except for books or games, I hate gossiping and small talk. I'm an INTJ, if you're into Meyers Briggs. I have never been given any opportunity to negotiate on salary. I do my performance review and I get a little slip of paper with my raise.