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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight: When women are hired less, it's because they're simply not interested. But when men are hired less, it's because they're being discriminated against?

I think my hypothesis is simpler:

- Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

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What makes you think women are hired less?

When Google (and other top tech companies) actively discriminate in favor of women, that causes the appearance of discrimination elsewhere in the industry, because the top tech companies have taken more of the best female programmers and those who weren't hired by Google et al are, on average, worse than the men who weren't hired by Google et al.

And when I spoke about interests, I was discussing why few women choose to study computer science.

Women are discriminated against in the industry as a whole

I would expect in 2019, that the industry as a whole discriminates in favor of women, but I'm just a layperson when it comes to that. Do you have citations?

- Google actively discriminates in favor of women

It's discrimination both times.

I agree.

It may be that it has changed very recently, but a few years ago there were quite a few studies that showed an anti-women bias in evaluating employees. For example, here's a quickly Googled cite that talks about a preference for resumes with male names over female: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/

This could even still be true at Google, though I don't have insight into whether or not it is. It seems at least plausible that Google has put systemic biases in place to balance out more diffuse bias among individual humans, but has done too thorough a job.

When orchestras started using blinds for auditions, the population of women hired shot up. Have there been attempts to do blind hiring? If so, what were the results?

Excellent question. There was an article a few years ago about an interviewing platform that tried using voice modulation to play with the gender of candidates:

"Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking 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. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data." http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

I'd had that study in my mental lexicon of "gender bias studies that aren't total bullshit" for a long time until recently. Seemed like a pretty black and white way to isolate gender discrimination. Turns out it - or rather the reporting on it - is also bullshit[1].

[1] https://medium.com/@jsmp/orchestrating-false-beliefs-about-g...

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