Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's
fusion.net
fusion.net
That alone gives the observation questionable merit.
I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.
It'd be like saying 'Men in pink jeans do worse in bars than women in camo dresses'.
No, the control group for that would be men who have, as you put it, "stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent", i.e. similarly qualified men who happen to naturally sound like this.
Would the supposed biases still be there if the voices were masked to sound like say, Darth Vader? Or maybe a Dalek from Doctor Who? Would there still be the same issues with speech patterns and what not if it sounded like the interviewee was speaking in robo speak?
from the original blog post:
> masking gender had no effect on interview performance
> 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. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant
But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment (contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa for when mens voices are masked as a womans.
And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of bias / prejudice.
I always felt it was the case. IT is such a man place that every one is happy when a woman come, even if she is a little bit less efficient compared to men. Myself included. So I am biased to favour women.
I read a statement that reflects this very well: "when a woman is treated different, it doesn't mean she is treated better".
We need to find ways to both give women more opportunity to build their chops and not merely be hired because they are women, while also finding ways to value what they do bring to the table that isn't what men bring to the table. Studies show that diverse companies are more profitable and successful. When I worked for a Fortune 500 company with a good track record for diversity, internally, I recall them saying "We hire everyone so we can more easily sell to everyone" or words to that effect. They believed strongly that not having representatives internally for various populations was guaranteed to undermine their ability to understand and communicate with those populations, as well as develop products that worked for them, etc.
So, while there is no easy path forward here, it should be done, and not for pie in the sky "ideals," but for pragmatic ones -- because it has a proven track record of success for the company when the company can get this detail right.
Potentially, yes.
I vaguely recall seeing something once about the dearth of male teachers in elementary education and the negative impact this has on male students. I have also heard (back when I was involved in the online gifted education community) that a lot of (female) school teachers end up in elementary education due to their lack of competence in math. When they can't hack the math, they got told "Oh, go teach kids!"
Men do not get this same message. I am a mathy woman. I tutored my ex husband in math when he took college classes. He had a serious career in the military where he ultimately retired as a high ranking NCO. No one ever suggested that his bad math abilities meant he should go teach kids.
Furthermore, when men do desire to go into education, everyone looks askance at them, like they are obviously pedophiles.
I ended up homeschooling my sons for many years. I had to put in a lot of effort to undo the damage to my oldest son's self esteem (and his relationship to math, which he hated by the time I pulled him out of school) from the awful baggage he got from public school regarding math. I firmly believe that women who are bad at math get their egos destroyed when they are blithely told "Oh, go teach little kids!" (implied: because you can't hack a real career) and they pass their math neurosis and incompetence on to many of the nation's kids and our entire nation is the worse off for it.
In terms of analysis - it might as well not have happened at all and is only worth mentioning if you had expected something significant to happen.
That's wrong. That's very wrong, and it reinforces the confusion already surrounding 'significance'.
p=0.05 means that there was a 5% chance of obtaining results at least as extreme as measured if the null hypothesis was true (i.e. there was no difference to observe). p=.06 is a 6% chance, and p=.04 is a 4% chance.
None of those are "as likely as not", which would be 50%, or p=0.5. Nor is p=.05 an inherently meaningful cutoff - it's an arbitrary threshold on a continuum of possibilities, and indeed 'significance' is often set at p=.01 instead. Overemphasis of a cutoff leads to p-hacking, and treating significance as binary promotes bad studies (p=.04 is not as meaningful as p=.00001).
This article is too credulous to an unproven result, but saying that all results >.05 are "as likely by chance" or not worth discussing is intensely wrong. The original blog post responded quite legitimately by indicating an unexpected-but-unproven result, and suggesting further study.
No, absolutely not. Mentioning that they did it, and could not come to a conclusion because there weren't enough participants, is far better and more information than pretending it never happened. It can indicate that we probably should investigate further and maybe do studies with enough participants.
I agree that it's bad practice to go "hey, p=.09, but it could be meaningful!" But it's at least as bad to say "we cannot provide any opinion about... such differences". That's simply false, you can provide data and confidence about the topic.
And the most important question that every statistical study should answer: What effect magnitudes were discarded by this research?
Claiming insignificant results and refusing to share them is telling your audience "well, we learned something, but we'll hide our findings from you because you are just too stupid to even imagine the kind of thing we learned here."
Yes, for some audiences that would be true, but it's something a researcher shouldn't even imagine telling somebody. It's basically incompatible with the kind of thoughts required from researchers.
That is absolutely part of it.
> “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.”
So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly, prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man, but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as female might then not be considered at all.
So what does this say? Nothing much I think.
It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine (e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that may work in favor of women during an interview.
On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.
And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if you are first confindent.
Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.
But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.
In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes, they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.
What is the job being interviewed for? What is the work environment like for that job? How will a different communication style help or hinder someone in that work environment?
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=text+analysis+gender&hl...
[2] https://www.uclassify.com/browse/uclassify/genderanalyzer_v5 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+ males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software engineering.
Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really want.
This isn't meant as 'whataboutery'; it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed... but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?
Seen by whom? I'd wager a sum of money that the average person is far more aware that teaching (primary school at least) is a female-prevalent field and that they do not see it as a problem.
Perhaps it's not even a solvable problem (assuming we agree that it actually is a problem)
> it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed...
Perhaps there's a wider issue of talent being missed because the signaling during employment process in the US is broken for a large chunk of the population? Not to mention certain things like class and wealth signaling.
The big question I find being overlooked by gender equality discussion, is why almost every profession has become gendered, and after all feminist movement in the last 50 years so, the trend of more gendered profession is continuing strong. For example, the teaching profession has since the 60's integrated female gender identity into the work culture, which pushes naturally away men from it. However, I rarely see any gender equality pointing out the problem of the teaching culture as a cause of low male participation. Tech industry has the similar "bro" culture, but that has been targeted by gender equality advocates for about as long as such culture has had a name.
Because you're not looking for the projects in those other areas, and so you don't find the projects, and so you think there's a focus on tech.
You follow tech news, you read HN, you see all these tech-related programmes.
It's a fairly simple cognitive bias.
I mean, if I gave you names, what would you do? ring them up and ask if they have a preference for hiring women? You can say that all of this sounds like a myth as many times as you like, you are not going to change the world this way.
If you name names, I can determine truth independently. If you don't feel comfortable doing so, that's okay too. I just won't know. And that's not the end of the world.
Also, it doesn't quite address the actual issue. It's a very superficial response.
They still need to deal with the retention problem.