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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
...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
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.
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.
If only there was some middle way where people act like normal human beings instead of extreme sociology caricatures.
Here's another radical idea. Some people are born without intimate knowledge of CS, and have to be trained. It's a terrible handicap for them, but occasionally they overcome.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.