Comment by fatbird | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatbird | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't have a pile of references at hand since this isn't my area of study, but here's what I was able to google up:

1. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf This study was primarily aimed at identifying the impact of race, but incidentally showed that resumes with females names received a lower number of callbacks, in addition to the race based effect.

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970474/ "Without provision of information about candidates other than their appearance, men are twice more likely to be hired for a mathematical task than women."

3. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract "Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant."

4. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol65/iss1/5... "the authors show that [anonymous application procedure] increased the chances of both women and individuals of non-Western origin of advancing to the interview stage."

5. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 Anonymization in orchestra additions (blind screening) led to women advancing out of preliminary rounds 50% more often.

#1: I don't see any support for your summary. It says instead "Interestingly, females in sales jobs appear to receive more callbacks than males; however, this (reverse) gender gap is statistically insignificant and economically much smaller than any of the racial gaps discussed above."

I can easily dig up studies showing opposite results:

"Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. " http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

"We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates: • Participants were 2.9% more likely to shortlist female candidates and 3.2% less likely to shortlist male applicants when they were identifiable, compared with when they were de-identified." https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-unc...

"Teaching accreditation exams reveal grading biases favor women in male-dominated disciplines in France" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6298/474

Those studies have tiny sample sizes, and aren't even in the tech industry.

I was making a counterpoint to the parent post. Note the links there, nothing much to do with tech. And you're completely wrong about sample sizes:

"Comparisons of oral non–gender-blind tests with written gender-blind tests for about 100,000 individuals "

"Over 2,100 public servants"

"validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty"

But consider http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

I would like to see a similar study done in IT, though I suspect the outcome will be similar.

I personally would like to have more women in tech, but it seems implausible that the current dearth is because of any systemic discrimination against women.

I wonder why people are claiming that this is a reason for the problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com