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."

Comments

That's not what I read.

[fustakrakich]

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.

I know: reading TFA is doing it wrong

[As_I_Please]

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:

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.”

Lerner’s findings here do correlate to some things academic research has also shown. She pointed to one study that found that after giving a scientific reasoning test to male and female undergrads and asking them how they fared, women underrated their own performance.

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.

The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and funny

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Citation Needed

[HBI]

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.

Re: The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and f

[Samantha Wright]

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?