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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."
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.
and are getting advanced out of political correctness. That's not good.
Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
But my preconceived notions! My social justice!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You lost me at "respected psychic".
So is the implication here just that it's harder to find highly competent women in technical fields rather than men?
I think that's the problem exactly -- companies want to hire good people, and while women are just as capable as men when it comes to tech jobs (my company has some *very* strong female senior developers), there just aren't as many female tech applicants of any level. Nearly all (95+%) of our developer job applicants are male so it's much harder to find a strong female applicant given that for every female application we review 20 male applications. We are completely gender agnostic when we hire, but that's true agnosticism, not giving preference to any applicant based on gender.
The only way to fix that problem in the present is to go back in time 20 or 30 years and get more females interested in tech early on. It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
We have a much better male to female ratio in our intern programs, so things are getting better, but even there we're seeing around 80% male applications.
So is the implication here just that it's harder to find highly competent women in technical fields rather than men?
DING DING DING! We have a winner!
Look I am all for equal pay for equal work and have no problems with working with women in the team or project.
I do have issue with someone being incompetent who is trying to do the job (be it a man or woman). And as you just stated, if the system really is anonymous skill assessment, then the people scoring the skill assessments don't know the gender, which simply means there are more highly skilled men that used the system than women, and that on average, the men that have used were more likely to get the job directly because they were higher skilled technically than the women.
I mean, this isn't really rocket science to realize that the more highly skilled person will be offered the job (when all other factors are eliminated by anonymizing the data). And thus if as they stated, that men have on average a higher technical score than the women on average, it isn't much of a leap to say that men would more likely be offered a job than women...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Pao recently announced that she's writing a book about Silicon Valley's "toxic culture". I imagine the results from this study wont be included in her data.
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!”
Also the title here is particularly bad, but I guess it's part of the Science News Cycle
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I think that the Rust programming language project refutes what you're saying. If we look at its list of contributors, we can easily see based on their profile pictures that they're typically young white males. A small number may be male-to-female transsexuals. Yet despite having such a homogeneous, male-dominated contributor community, we see a huge amount of drama from this rather small community. It has gotten to the point where their code of conduct and their Moderation Team generate, in my experience, way more drama than they might ever hope to prevent! Just look at how these men overreact and downvote anyone at Reddit or HN or other sites who don't show 100% devotion to Rust. The drama the Rust community engages in is universal. It doesn't matter what the venue or discussion medium is, the moment they get involved there is instant drama. How do you explain this situation?
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.
Do you mean that the data shows interviewers valuing knowledge over gender?
Sacrilege! Quick, someone write another piece about the gender gap and hiring practices in technology before anyone notices that interviewers value knowledge over gender .
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Actually, if you bother reading the article, you'll find the headline is misleading, and if you do a little stripping of outliers, the headline becomes incorrect.
Really? He lost me at "SOOOOOO."
You must have monk-like patience.
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.
Nowhere in the article did they explain how that technical score was determined. Whether it was from academic records or just the impressions of the interviewers.
Regardless, they concluded that the overriding problem was that most women dropped out after 2-3 rejections, whereas men continued interviewing and that skewed their numbers.
It shows nothing of the sort. It shows that there is something that interviewers prefer about men. It could be that they like the grammar or vocabulary that men use. It may be that they don't like terms women use. It may be that the women are weaker candidates. It may be that men portray themselves more strongly. There's not jack shot you can conclude beyond that having a woman's voice correlates to a higher score.
A skilled woman in tech is like seeing a magical or mythical creature.
So rare, that many say they don't exist-- but when you see one, it leaves you with a sense of awe.
Most of the time, such women are put off by that, and perceive the added attention as "lecherous drooling" (there is some of that; when confronted with the rare and wondrous, such attraction happens, and women are no exception. Teenage girls fawning over a heart throb are a poignant example. That does not make it *all* that way though.) Which then drives the narrative that men in tech are all pervs, and that more women would get involved if it weren't for that perviness. Then there is the narrative debunked here, concerning hiring biases.
There are reasons why skilled women in tech are seen as fantastical creatures. Those reasons have nearly nothing to do with sexism.
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.
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
It's not fair to blame tech companies like Google for a problem that started well before it was even in existence.
If companies like Google actually did everything necessary to even their own numbers, to make everyone happy, then the rest of the entire tech industry would end up being 100% male.
That, IMHO, is the real problem with picking on a few choice large tech companies for this issue.
Sure, they could do more than all the smaller shops to help the situation 15-20 years from now, but they can't really do anything to solve the problem in the short term.
Being a computer programmer is largely an anti-social activity. I can spend 8 hours or more in a row typing away at my code editor and building and testing every hour or so. I often work best when I am not interrupted by people. My wife thinks this is insanity. She can't imagine spending more than a couple hours in front of a computer at a time. Going the whole day without talking with someone is pure torture for her. I tend to think that most women share her views instead of mine.
Seriously?
I've been at this technical thing for nearly 30 years and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what you are driving at. What about Asian women bothers you?
Personally, I don't care what gender you are (or think you want to be), what matters to me is how well you can do your job. I've worked with and for both men and women and I don't see any difference that correlates to gender, except for one and that has to do with HR's statistics when they count up how many "F" and "M" boxes get checked (and stupid studies like this one..)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Statistically lower. There are talented women, I work with some, I defer where their expertise is more specialized than my own. But they're outnumbered, because apparently the reality is males have, as of writing, higher technical score per applicant capita.
If true (wow this post is hedged) that's not a problem in itself - it can be argued it's a SYMPTOM of a problem, upstream. But if you want the pools to have equal yields you might need to force equal interest, and that means even more conversations, which I can't even be assed to touch on in this post.
Where did you get that idea? Go into the office at 7:30am. It is all men and Chinese/Indian women. Go into the office at 7:30pm. Same thing. Chinese and Indian women get better pay and promoted because they bust their asses. I know one example is not a trend, but it seems typical in my experience. I can think of a Chinese girl from MIT. Straight out of school. Worked 12 hours a day. Second year, she was the youngest development manager in the company. And making really good money. She earned it 100%.
Perhaps working hard is a better way to get more money than complaining about being discriminated against.
Then why should we not count them?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Typical case of bandwagon effect. When men dominate an area, it is more likely for women to quit early assuming that the area is not meant for them. And when men fail, they are less likely to quit early looking at the success of other men.
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?
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.
Out of about 30 students in my graduating CS class of 1990 about half were US citizens. Two of these were female. On career day they were fast tracked for hiring by local aerospace/defense companies and within a week were hired. They were both smart and good solid programmers, B+ level. Did their assignments, no programming for "fun" on their own. The A and A- males had a much more difficult and lengthy job finding process.
Basically the companies at career day were falling over themselves to get these women, and this was before the political crisis of not enough women in STEM.
A long time girlfriend and I met in graduate school, graduated MS CS in 2000. Again a good solid programmer, work experience doing embedded systems, but not a lot of reading or programming for fun or curiosity. We had this conversation, she thought she had a competitive advantage by being female. She was OK with me spending some time reading tech stuff and doing odd programming projects for fun and curiosity, she was curious enough to talk about it a little, let me bounce ideas, but when I mentioned this stuff also helps during job interviews she'd joke the "quota system" allows her to get by without such stuff. She had enough inner geek that when she had a school or job assignment she would dig into unfamiliar topics and not get bored or lost, and would continue doing so on her own time at home until she thought she "got it", but not enough inner geek for personal project. OK, that's probably a healthy perspective, but the point is that in **her** opinion her gender balanced out my slightly better tech skills and knowledge in the marketplace.
Again, this was before the political crisis over women in STEM. Women were regrettably "rare" but it wasn't a "crisis" at the time. At the time it was thought we need to stop discouraging girls from tech, we thought many would naturally lean that way without the discouragement. That sadly didn't work out so well.
If the voice masking wasn't well done, couldn't you end up with an uncanny valley sort of situation with respect to how the applicants sounded? I can imagine a scenario in which the voice sounds "wrong" at a gut level, and that makes some interviewers uncomfortable.
And, overall, what do you think the tech community would be most open to? A person that sounds like a woman, but comes off as a bit of a tomboy (on account of actually being a man), or a man that seems oddly feminine or "weak", "fuzzy" or whatever attributes you would assign to socially acceptable female behavior? And how did men that had their voice masked into female fare, compared to non-masked men?
Women are better for the work environment how exactly? I see no difference between men and women, except that women tend to work less. If you claim that a gender is better at IT, you need to check yourself because you are not managing well. The problem is you, not that you hire men or women.
Well, they are the only thing here anymore, so that's kinda by default.
- Chuq
At what point do we simply accept what is blatantly obvious: there is, by and large, no "bias" against women in the tech sector. Women aren't under-represented because men are pigs and want to preserve some paternalistic male bastion. Women do poorly because women have historically shunned the tech and engineering fields. Most women don't like the field despite how much feminism tells us they do. As a result, they're usually less experienced and have less education in the field.
Note I'm speaking in generalities. This does not mean women are somehow intellectually inferior to men or otherwise unable to do the job. I've come across women in this field who are every bit as savvy as men, but I've come across very few women in total. As a percentage of their gender, I'd say there are far more women in the tech/engineering fields who know what they're doing than a percentage of males, probably because the women to do choose this field do it out of a genuine interest in the field and not some "if a guy can do it, I can do it better" impulse.
The tech industry, in my experience, is a very good example of a meritocracy. People who are good at what they do get promoted on ability with little or no thought to their gender, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or anything else (except age, and ageism is a problem in our field regardless of these factors). This constant cry for "diversity" and "equality" is a call to dumb down and water down this very meritocracy and it should be resisted at every possible turn.
We don't need more women, or more minorities, or more anything other than more well-qualified, competent technicians and engineers. If they happen to be women, or minorities, or [insert aggrieved group of choice here], great, but they have to be good at their jobs first.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...on what you consider "disfunction".
If you're looking to build a consensus driven organization, that cares about feelings, work life balance, and considers a functional team by their internal happiness, then by all means, women are often the ticket (though, there are cases of severe feminine dysfunction as well).
If you're looking to get product delivered, quality built in, and durability of your deliverables, then maybe going with second and third string techs is truly dysfunction. You'll need strong management that can handle conflict, but there's an argument that conflict can actually drive progress faster than kumbayah consensus.
It's an interesting experiment. But experiments need to be corroborated by being duplicated with independent researchers. So, take it with a grain of salt.
I've read that it used to be, female musicians applying for jobs in symphony orchestras were usually rejected, until they started auditioning behind a screen so that the judges couldn't tell the sex. Once the audition was 'blind', the women fared as well as the men. The blind auditioning had an advantage over the case described here because there was no disguising of voices or worrying about choosing the right words to express oneself. Just pure musicianship and skill on the instrument.
So, with music, it would appear the sexes are 'equal'. It doesn't mean they are equal in other things. For a long time, no one knew how to tell a female brain in an anatomy class from a male one, but eventually distinctive differences were found. So it shouldn't be a surprise that men and women are different. But I'd say there's still a lot of room for debate on exactly what is different, and what is 'better'. In many cases, even if there's some statistical difference, there's probably enough overlap in skill that one should frequently give the person a chance, and try to be objective about evaluating whether or not they have chops to do the job they're applying for.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Someone doing gender studies might "know" the answer before beginning the study. They may need help making sure they get the "correct" result. It is important to selectively pick data points.
This should be simple. A) Do great/smart work. B) Be willing to work hard, when needed. Hit your deadlines. C) Work/communicate with the team. Do these things and you're an asset. You should be rewarded accordingly.
Study shows, when men enjoy the privilege women receive, they do even better. Study shows, when women are forced to compete while suffering from the same prejudice men suffer under, they do worse.
Conclusion: This is all mens fault. Men are bad, and anyone who denies being bad is particularly bad. Anyone who fails to disregard the evidence and claims male privilege doesn't exist is guilty of hate. Anyone who denies that female privilege exists, or claims that feminists are a privileged hate group is criminally insane.
Tune in tomorrow, guys, for more of the same shit and abuse. Don't forget to click our ads and support our site.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...women are sheltered from competition.
Women don't have to be aggressive, competitive leaders to be valued in our society - they have inherent value simply by being women, and we would never admonish a little girl who didn't want to compete to "man up".
Men, on the other hand, must compete with each other and demonstrate, through action, that they have value.
While you might feel like calling a girl "bossy" can be damaging to a girl, boys get it even worse - "boys don't cry", "never hit girls", "man up".
If you're really going to get women used to competing, they need to be able to survive the converse - "girls don't cry", "never hit boys", "woman up". They're also going to have to survive, on their own, when anyone calls them "bossy" :)
tl;dr - if girls can't handle being called "bossy", they'll never be able to compete
In most art, whether it is painting, music, wine; once you take away the show or the name, they cannot be objectively distinguished. For most other jobs, what matters is your technical skills. In Western culture women are babied and grow up thinking they 'can do anything' without much effort, the male will do their bidding to make it easy for them. They get promoted, especially in the tech field, through schools, jobs etc simply based on their gender, and that is not a recent diversity thing, for as long as I've been in the job market that has been the case, that was the case during the dotcom boom when I started working.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I think the point was that the results from the people who stayed were gender neutral.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Change jobs. Seriously, your current employer has lost sight of all important things and is going down sooner or later.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I doubt the masking is perfect - thus the "Uncanny Valley" of subtle things not being quite right making people uneasy.
We accept it at the point when it is no longer "blatantly obvious" that the bias is happening.
I really don't get why you are pretending that such a thing is not happening. Are you insecure and worried about someone taking your job so wish to cut down on the competition? Well you shouldn't be since the number of women in tech has been diminishing dramatically in the last few decades to the point where you can go to an IT conference and be in a room with over a hundred men and no women.
You should be a lot more honest about this. It's a liberty issue after all. If you have a daughter that shows interest and aptitude in programming surely you want her to be able to get somewhere in a real meritocracy instead of being increasingly locked out due to the "bro" culture or whatever juvenile shit is currently going on.
From the Fusion article (and I read the original study to confirm this quote doesn't misrepresent the original work):
'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.”'
That result therefore confirms the existence of gender bias, though because there are fewer remaining data points, the results are less significant.
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.
So to mask the voice you're stuck with some kind of frequency or pitch shifting, both of which have artifacts. It's not going to sound like a man would sound naturally. So the interviewer didn't hire the creepy-sounding man.
Assuming a company will be most profitable hiring the the best person for a job and that education is made freely available to both sexes... Theoretically, over hundreds or (thousands?) of years the businesses who chose the best candidate will survive, and the companies who chose a worse candidate due to sexism will fail due. In other words, if this problem exists it should fix itself over time without any interference.
C'mon, +5 Troll!!! The ultimate expression of Uncomfortable Truth!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What makes you think the AC isn't a female?
Hell, I'd be riding the gravy train...
I work with a woman programmer who is a bloody machine. If you open up the issue system it is mostly her name on a group made up of all other guys. They are very very good, but holy crap she is a machine.
Exactly one person has told me how good she is. I am trying to figure out how to phrase it to her, but I am going to advise her to spend some more time being a blowhard and toot her own horn.
She basically needs to jump up on her desk every tenth commit and yell "Another 10, you snail sloth mofos!"
Has the world gone entirely mad lately, or it is only me that identifies this article as terribly sexist...?
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.
In the last few years a lot of crap has been said about feminism. The irony is that the posters often end up espousing feminist ideas without realizing it.
The really frustrating thing is seeing just how ignorant people are about feminism. It's usually the exact opposite of what they think. This debate is a perfect example, and the summary is just flamebait.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
pics or gtfo
Wanna buy a shirt?
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I don't think I've ever encountered a brogrammer and I've encountered very few geek stereotypes either and I've been in the industry for over 20 years. Most of my colleagues have been reasonably well adjusted adults who can work with people from all backgrounds and where the noisy important thing about said colleagues is that they can do the job. Silicon Valley might be full of wankers but there's a huge world outside that little bubble.
Arguing about how the patriarchy favours men over women on the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme where over a million men died.
Notably, SoylentNews did not screw this one up.
Debatable. I've never read something as horrid or confusing. That isn't a summary it's copying out of context sentences and prefacing them with random adverbs. It was incredibly difficult to read and while it may be less biased they most definitely "screwed this one up".
. . . why not read the ACTUAL BLOG POST at Interview.io ?
No spin, no agenda, just laying out the data that they found in the process of running their organization. . .
A lot of posters here don't read the article, but I can't imagine that you even comprehended the headline. Here's a Haiku summary:
Women were preferred
Based on this little study
Perhaps women quit?
Bullshit. I've worked with (and led) a lot of engineers over the past 2+ decades and many men & women. I have never needed to tiptoe around women in tech development groups. I've had drama with both women & men at about the same amount. Same for ability & effectiveness. The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers. This means if I have two engineers where everything else was equal except gender I think I'd tend to prefer working with the woman.
There are as many women as men on my mental short list of engineers that I've worked with and would call up if I were creating a dream team. Now, I have worked with 3-4x as many male engineers in my career so that also says something I think.
I'm wondering if maybe your experience says more about you and the way you treat women, than it says about the women you've worked with?
Just the opposite. It confirms that once the quality of the pool of applicants for both samples is normalized, there is no disparity (although admittedly, not strongly significant).
Study shows, when men enjoy the privilege women receive, they do even better. Study shows, when women are forced to compete while suffering from the same prejudice
The study doesn't SHOW that. The study is not inconsistent with that. You'll need more studies with larger sample sizes and other possible variables eliminated, before that sort of conclusion could be adequately supported, if true.
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.
"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."
Actually there is study after study showing a disparity between women and men in terms of numbers and performance in the field. It is only the assumption that the cause is bias against women.
I can't imagine any field that if anything gives so much of an advantage to women and minorities from my experience. This is actually demonstrated by this study where providing male voices to the women resulted in much lower hiring rates.
> I have never been given any opportunity to negotiate on salary.
I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding your wording, or if hiring & promoting works differently for people other than myself.
I've never been GIVEN any opportunity to negotiate on salary. When I've gotten raises, it has been because I went to my boss and said I need more money.
So, I'm wondering if you've tried going to your boss and asking for more money? Are you being as passive as it seems to me, or am I just misunderstanding what you said?
God forbid we should put the work first or anything...
And God forbid that we actually look at the all the options for what makes a successful company or workplace.
Let me put it another way. You'd probably fail an interview for a successful company in China or Japan. Why? Because what constitutes the best employee has radically different qualities from what constitute your strengths here. Not only that, but if you were masked so that they thought you were Chinese or Japanese, your evaluation would be even lower, not because they privileged white people, but because they were judging you entirely on the basis of a cultural paradigm to which you did not belong.
Does that mean you would have nothing to offer a Chinese or Japanese company? Of course not. Your strengths are strengths. But it does mean that they would have to be flexible enough to understand that your strengths differ from the metrics they normally use. And companies that had that flexibility would gain from that.
I suspect the problem is rather more that you would be distinctly uncomfortable *really* putting work first and making the effort to allow the company to take advantage of a wide ranging, non-uniform set of strengths, many of which you'd barely recognize as relevant. Far easier to claim "this is the way that we've always done it - in fact this is the *only* way to do it" and persuade yourself that it's actually in the best interests of the company.
Setting aside all the anecdotal evidence for and against the drama queen status of the ladies above for a moment. I do think there is something valid being presented in the salary negotiation.
" 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."
This is just one of the companies moves in the game. A negotiating tactic. There are still plenty of moves that advance salary in a meaningful way. Aside from a confrontation with your boss, you can go the path of being so ridiculously overachieving they have to advance you. I've even gotten companies to create new positions with job descriptions I wrote so they could promote me into them (after pretending to post it and consider everyone else who applied of course). Where there truly is no forward potential you jump ship. Without actually jumping position or ship you can go to your boss to confess how much you truly love your team and position but expenses are coming in and the hiring rates for similar positions at other companies are too appealing. In this way I got an across the board raise of 15-20% at one company despite having the usual annual 1-3% raise nonsense in place. The downside is that these don't happen overnight since it requires approvals so they can string you along for a bit with promises. Regardless you play humble and loyal while making strong strategic positions.
This isn't just a STEM thing, this is in all professions. I can't help but wonder how much of the alleged glass ceiling comes down to things like this. Most men aren't good at the game otherwise the rules would change but I suspect more men are and the average is higher because we built the game (and not to keep women out) and the right attitudes, advise, and approaches are passed from older males to younger males just as many other things are passed from older females to younger.
Aside from the fact management tends to advance and raise the salary of people they understand, relate to, and trust and for a male manager this is more likely to be a male and for a female manager more likely a female without any actual sexism required. Women are often seen in careers acting like men. Men have been trained since birth to give women advantages not disadvantages, to not treat them as men and therefore hold them to a lower bar in many areas. When the women begin acting like men instead of like women... they tend to be bad at it. More of a characterture. Bold at the wrong times and moments perhaps thinking "a man could get away with this" except they are wrong, a man would know based on specific circumstances right down to the tone in the room and the way the boss phrased something innocuous at the beginning of the meeting that getting his way would not involve a direct confrontation. The ladies making bold moves tend to miss all the subtle things that go along with that indicating respect and deference to the boss that get made while taking that bold action. Instead of paying attention to these things the ladies just complain they are seen as bitchy even though a male doing the same would be seen as an asshole and a man saying the same thing as those ladies say on a regular basis would be fired on the spot.
I went back and re-read. You are correct. The original study was not super well-written, IMO. Too conversational. I think I would have done better with it had it been written in a more traditional research style, including data, etc...
So basically, the answer is to try to deal with whatever socialization factors are contributing to women quitting as a result of interview rejection.
I'm replying again to correct myself. Basically, the study found that women quite as a result of interview rejection at a much higher rate than men, skewing their numbers. Eliminating early attrition data indicates that women perform equally well at getting jobs from interviews so long as they stay in the game. There are probably socialization issues (which are a result of societal sexism) contributing (some studies are indicated) to women dropping out early. It is hard to know with the data provided, but it is possible that women are just as strong and valid as candidates as men if we can figure out how to address this gender difference in handling rejection.
It's not simply a matter of modulating the frequency to make a woman's voice sound like a man's or vice-versa. There are a lot more differences than that between men and women's speech. Women tend to change their pitch over a wider range than men, who tend to use a narrower range of pitches. They also tend to have breathier voices than men and way less resonance. So it could be that the altered voices just sounded weird or "off" to the interviewers.
I really don't. You are the one that stalked me to another article and pretended to be someone else so that it looked like you had another person backing your argument. People that know they are right do that all the time yeah? LOL
That's been my experience too. I've worked with quite a few women programmers, but almost everyone of them was Indian or Chinese. It's not women in general that have a problem in the tech industry, it's just American women that have a problem in the tech industry.
Bullshit. I've never felt the need to tiptoe around anyone based on their gender.
Lots of malware now uses Tor hidden services for C&C, which can't be blocked with a simple hosts file.
That is "attempting to take you down"? Get a grip on reality man.
Dysfunction is rarely a long term gravy train.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So, I'm wondering if you've tried going to your boss and asking for more money?
I'd be very careful about offering that advice. There's an arm-load of studies showing that women are penalized far more heavily (by both men and women) for being perceived as selfish. And for many, many teams, demanding your due *is* construed as selfish. The team has limited resources, and by demanding more, you are prioritizing yourself over the team.
Far too often I've seen "She's a jerk." "Well, he's even more of a jerk." "Well, yes, but she should know better"
Men get away with it more easily because we're assumed to be selfish jerks. Women are expected to understand that difficulties that team faces and prioritize the team's needs over their own.
It's yet one more way that women *cannot* behave the same way as a man without paying a significant penalty. It's not just that they prefer to play by different rules, it's that they are also penalized when they don't.
"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."
Your comment, Kria, is a perfect demonstration of what many articles are talking about when they say men negotiate salaries better than women. Kria, you assume you need to be given an opportunity to negotiate your salary.
More men would see that same performance review as an opportunity to negotiate salary. A higher number of men than women would make a choice to challenge the performance review and slip of paper and say: "That isn't enough. Raise that number or I'm going to start looking."
You have had opportunities, but you haven't seen them:
1. When you were hired.
2. Each performance review.
3. Every working day (especially good days when you are receiving praise for work well done)
Also, more men than women would create an opportunity to negotiate salary either by getting an offer for a different company or just asking.
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.
As a side-note (a very *side*-note):
It's also my experience in sports.
When I'm not stuck in front of a keyboard doing biomedical research, my hobby is outdoor sports, more precisely ski (Yay, European Alps !) and I regularily exercice this hobby of mine as a ski teacher. (Mind you: Not that seriously. It's just a hobby, not a profession to bring the dough)
As part our training as teachers we periodically need to give lessons to kids (the rest of the time, I teach ski at the university to adults).
And there's also a tendency that I've seen:
- young girls tend much more often to under-evaluate their performance, lack some self-confidence, etc.
(at this level of ski, mostly to teach them so they can have some fun, not train the future olympic team, girls aren't at a biological disadvantage.
although they might put a little bit less muscle mass for a given level of training than boys (=with higher steroid hormone level),
they tend to have a lower center of mass which helps a bit in sliding/disbalancing sports.)
So girls aren't necessarily performing worse than the boys, but lots of them do perceive it that way, due to lack of self confidence.
Except for a few individuals( who don't give a damn about pecking order or anything, and seem clearly aware of their own capabilities...
(and also seem completely unaffected by all the belittling jokes that kids throw at each other during sports).
Part of the way I organise my lessons involves therefore also helping my students (both kids and adults) to realise what they manage to accomplish.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Want to bet this will not make it into the larger discussion? Truth that doesn't fit the narrative is usually shouted down or ignored.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is the first time I've ever heard "false confidence" described as a positive.
False confidence always leads to errors and small or large disasters sooner or later.
If men indeed have greater false confidence than women, the best way to reach gender equality is to instill less false confidence in men.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Gotcha, "no true feminist" and all that. The tide is turning, and the train is just fine. Just fine...