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Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country

Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally.

None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do application blinding where possible, as far as I know. All of them however are very eager to promote movements like Girls Who Code because it's generally good PR and (I think) because it increases the available labor pool for them.

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Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.

At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).

> Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.

Edit: Looks interviewing.io did such a process, here are the results – https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices.

As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

>>My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?

For the last two years I have only seen ads with exclusively female engineers from Google, for example the "I look like an engineer" series.

I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.

I think over the past two years I've seen a sum total of one video about working at Google, and it featured a woman and a man. From what you're saying I can only assume I stumbled on a super rare video. Is that accurate?

I'll include a link to my paper where I use the method of autoethnography to show how Google has turned into a misandryst megacorporation.

Just kidding - I didn't write a paper about it, nor did I conduct a rigorous study. Most of the Google Ads I have seen came via various Google Twitter accounts, like https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle (Life at Google seems to be dedicated to hiring people for Google).

So my filter bubble might be to blame. I haven't seen the video you mentioned which features a man.

(Edit: I just scrolled through the first several dozen tweets from "Life At Google - I think there is definitely a bias to only show female engineers there.... However, it is of course only one Google Twitter account dedicated to hiring, I don't know how many others exist. Maybe it was created explicitly to target women and minorities, but then maybe they should somehow say so).

I'm still not sure why you had the impression that Google is not interested in hiring male coders anymore?

Have you looked at the life at google tweets?

Yes.

Interesting

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