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Women Interviewing For Tech Jobs Actually Did Worse When Their Voices Were Masked As Men's (fusion.net)

Posted by msmash on from the no-comment dept.

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."

8 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Why is it troubling? by dadelbunts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why is it troubling? by hsthompson69 · · 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.

    2. Re:Why is it troubling? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    3. Re:Why is it troubling? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  2. Self esteem issue by Jonah+Hex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. And the numbers for two bad interviews aren't much better.

    Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren't great, I'm massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it's not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it's about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.

    Also the title here is particularly bad, but I guess it's part of the Science News Cycle

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    1. Re:Self esteem issue by sjukfan · · 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.

  3. Re:Women.... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Re: Women.... by Stormy+Dragon · · 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.