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."

Comments

Why is it troubling?

[dadelbunts]

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.

Re:Why is it troubling?

[hsthompson69]

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.

Re:Why is it troubling?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why is it troubling?

[Daemonik]

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.

Re:Why is it troubling?

[AmiMoJo]

It's troubling because we actually know what is happening here. This is just some weird start up company that apparently didn't bother to read any of the academic work in this area.

It's not the pitch of the speaker's voice. It's the way they speak. The choice of words, the level of confidence and self promotion. And as these people found in their experiment, when "feminine" speech patterns are associated with a male they are perceived as being even worse, because the subconscious "ideal man" doesn't speak that way. This is true regardless of the gender of the interviewer, it's institutional bias in society rather than individuals being sexist or anything like that.

Re:Why is it troubling?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's not what I read.

[fustakrakich]

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.

Self esteem issue

[Jonah Hex]

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

Re:Self esteem issue

[sjukfan]

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.

I know: reading TFA is doing it wrong

[As_I_Please]

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:

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.”

Lerner’s findings here do correlate to some things academic research has also shown. She pointed to one study that found that after giving a scientific reasoning test to male and female undergrads and asking them how they fared, women underrated their own performance.

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.

Re:Women....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

True

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

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?

Re: Women....

[Stormy Dragon]

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.

Re: The knee-jerk reactions are illuminating and f

[Samantha Wright]

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?