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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.
But my preconceived notions! My social justice!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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"
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
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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.
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.
Yes, clearly the fact she doesn't want to sit around all day cooking and cleaning for you is because feminism has "ruined" her, and not because cooking and cleaning suck and she'd rather spend her life on something that interests her rather than being an unpaid maid.
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.
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.
Heh ? I love cooking and cleaning. Give me an alpha wife in a heartbeat.
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 pay her ... if you think her spending most of her time doing homework is so valuable convert that value into cold hard cash. That would make the decision a whole lot easier for your girlfriend. She's not your wife, she can't claw the value and lost opportunity/experience back if you leave her (unless your state has common law marriage).
I'm closer to a nazi than a feminist, but I can still see that she's the one thinking clearly here.
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
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, 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.
Women in general are worse at tech jobs, and therefore, less women want to pursue tech jobs.
MYSTERY SOLVED!
Not so.... This is more about INTEREST than aptitude. Men and Women, in general, have different interests. I may sound sexist to some, but it's obvious to this parent that boys and girls don't just come with different plumbing but are wired differently as well. I've met some excellent programmers in my day, only a few have been women, not because women cannot do the job as well but because few WANTED to do the job in the first place.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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?
My husband is a house husband. I make the money, he takes care of the household. I love it. He'so not so keen on it. He's realized it's actually a LOT of work with very little reward.
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.
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?
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?
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...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.
...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
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.
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.
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.
Maybe if she was your wife rather than your girlfriend, the applicable laws regarding post-divorce asset division and alimony would me staying home seem less risky to her?
Most men behave different in the presence of women. You don't need a social psychology PHD to realize that.
STEM workforce is ~30% female, but when you go to technical fields like software development, only ~5% is female.
Most women don't like being the only one so if you want to raise the retention rates, you'd need 2 women for each programming team of 10. That's three quarter of the programming teams don't have any women.
And that doesn't take in consideration that big names need those women because of PR, so the rest of the industry there has even less chance of having women in a team.
The scarcity of women would be an issue if team productivity would be increased by their presence in teams increase productivity/success. There are multiple studies pointing in that direction but I have never seen studies specific to STEM jobs.
Maybe you should look around more. Lots of wealthy people retire from their jobs to do things like hobby farming or frequenting wilderness retreats. There's a guy who runs a pizza parlour down the street who retired from some kind of executive position. He scrubs the toilets there, and also the kitchen, and waits tables. I know another guy who retired from aerospace engineering to teach sailing. I've seen him scrub a marine head. And a deck.
So pay her ... if you think her spending most of her time doing homework is so valuable convert that value into cold hard cash. That would make the decision a whole lot easier for your girlfriend. She's not your wife, she can't claw the value and lost opportunity/experience back if you leave her (unless your state has common law marriage).
I'm closer to a nazi than a feminist, but I can still see that she's the one thinking clearly here.
So is he - if she's bringing in next to nothing then he should find someone who brings in what he wants her to earn. I once had a wife who earned less than it took for me to get her to work; the cost of the car payments, car insurance, fuel for 55km daily and her lunch money added up to less than her income. Had she simply sat at home and watched the maid work all day I would have been slightly better off.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
2-3 hours? Shit, must be a big house.
As for hobbies, I've had to give up doing some of the things I enjoy because there just isn't enough time.
The key difference is that it's a choice. They can pay someone else to do it if they want a day off or fancy taking a six month break. It's surprising what can be enjoyable when you do it by choice.
It works the other way too. A friend of mine wanted to become a pilot. At first he woke up every day and though "wow, I get to go flying today", but after six months it become "oh no, I have to go flying again today".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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. . . 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. . .
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?
I don't really understand this. I live alone and don't have kids. I have to work for a living AND take care of the house. I guess if your partner is a slob it might be a lot of work. Or if you have some kind of massive frankenhouse. Or if you have kids.
There, fixed that so you see why your situation is probably different.
But I do agree any stay at home spouse with no kids at home is just taking early retirement with a few chores to do each day.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I have an alpha wife. She makes bank. It rocks.
I am doing laundry right now.
Feminism has many definitions, and definitely has many varying practices, despite what the actual definition happens to be.
I see women being told they have a choice every day, but when they make a choice that does not suit some "feminists", they are derided for it. It seems that a woman only has one real choice, get a job or be considered a housewife enslaved to the Patriarchy. Having kids on top of that scores bonus points, especially if they are perfect kids in every way, but the woman has to keep her job through that, or she becomes a "barefoot and pregnant" slave worthy only of pity.
Yeah, there are people who believe feminism is simply a more equitable opportunity for women, but you cannot tell me that there is not a very strong undercurrent of bias towards how that "choice" is used.
In any case, we keep coming back to the pay gap between men and women. Clearly there is something there, but I keep seeing varying reasoning behind it. In the end, it is probably complex. Some of it is no doubt women not negotiating. And there are certainly attitudes involved that might make some men dislike working with and for women. I think some of those will go away over time, but I think that some will not. If a woman is disadvantaged in a male dominated workplace, a man will be disadvantaged in the opposite situation. And unless there are some very brutally logical and strongly enforced rules, I don't see a perfectly balanced "equality" situation ever coming about.