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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."
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.
The article goes on to point out that men who's voices were masked as women also had a tendency to do better than unmasked men. The big thing of note, however, was that women were more likely to drop out of the whole process after 2-3 bad interviews, whereas men would keep interviewing. It's not a matter of studying, or skill set, we need to give women the same levels of false confidence that men have in the face of constant rejection.
The funny thing is, if you go back 40-50 years, women dominated programming. Because it wasn't seen as a male career path, men didn't bother with it. People forget how many women were at the roots of early computer design and programming.
Now certain male brogrammers act like that history never existed and women have always been uninterested in tech, which is extremely self serving.
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?
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.
The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers.
I'll say that was perhaps the biggest change getting used to a mixed office - remembering that the women (in general) underestimated (or perhaps merely underplayed) their technical competence and the men (in general) overestimated theirs. (Not usually catastrophically, I like to think of it as "optimism" :-))
Well that and if you didn't make room in a conversation, you weren't going to get the women (who were often technically superior) contributing. Sadly it took weeks for me to realize that the women weren't willing to talk over the men to make their points... Restructuring the meetings from a technically oriented free-for-all solved the problem nicely.