I had a demo from Aline on this last week after seeing it on Twitter and reaching out. It was a really interesting experience - it masks the voice pitch but leaves the person's characteristic of speaking (is there a word for that?) intact.
You can also access the recordings after-the-fact to hear how you did. I think this is valuable for candidates who want to improve their interviewing skills.
FWIW, I heard it both ways - my voice as female and her voice as male. The pitch shifting was very convincing both ways.
So it masks gender by making everyone sound "like a dude" according to the videos. That's not masking gender. Make everyone sound like a robot and the blog post title will be more accurate.
Yeah, I cringed when they said they thought of "giving all females a bane mask". How does that do anything? Anyone getting a person wearing a bane mask would automatically realize they were female.
The point of the experiment was for the interviewer to think the interviewer was a particular gender to see if they as it based on that impression. Making everyone sound like a robot does not accomplish that goal, so I don't see how it makes the title more accurate.
They didn't only change women's voices. They also changed some men to sound like women. And they made some voices sound processed without pitch changes.
Did you read the article? They changed both males and females, and had 2 control groups (one that was modulated without gender change, and 1 that was unmodulated).
The text of the article clarifies -- they made some women sound processed-male, some men sound processed-female, some sound processed without a gender shift, and some were unprocessed. So if you got a processed-sounding voice, you had no way to know the gender of the person you were talking to.
Amazing how the author believes they have proved that there is 'no systematic bias' with This One Simple Trick!
Edit: sorry for the tone, but I just find this whole article bait. The headline is bait. The writer acknowledges the limitations of their study (basically that it doesn't prove much) but then makes a whole bunch of extrapolations anyway, and makes those guesses the meat of the article rather than investigating why their methods didn't work or how they could be improved or what would be required to produce conclusive evidence.
> On the subject of sample size, we have no delusions that this is the be-all and end-all of pronouncements on the subject of gender and interview performance.
But let's ignore science to fit our pre-existing biases!
> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance
The main issue with gender and hiring is unconscious bias on the interviewer's end, which voice modulation does make sense as a tool to avoid bias. Per the grading criteria, they are judging on skill, problem solving, and communication. I'm not sure how voice modulation would affect the interviewee in those three criteria, which makes the results of the experiment not surprising.
Right, which highlights another problem: interview.io's interviewers are presumably trained to be more objective and stringent on the criteria. This may introduce a selection bias.
Untrained interviewers, like the ones at startups randomly pulled into interviews and also hiring for culture fit, may have a bias that is more conscious.
>interview.io's interviewers are presumably trained to be more objective and stringent on the criteria.
The common thought is that bias is an unconscious and unavoidable thing, hence the voice masking. If that's truly the case, all the training in the world doesn't help.
I would really have liked to see them check whether the gender-blinding actually worked. Even if someone's voice is modulated, they may have gendered behavior patterns that could influence someone's performance ratings. I wouldn't be surprised if I could guess the gender of a voice-modulated person pretty accurately from other cues.
To combat this, they could have asked the interviewer during the performance assessment whether they thought the applicant was definitely male/probably male/unsure/probably female/definitely female. Then you could use voice modulation as an instrument for perceived gender and get a better estimate of the true effect of perceived gender when controlling for actual gender.
Hope they do something like that for the next round of experiments!
This would be a fantastic additional thing to monitor for. It was my first thought after hearing the voice modulation clips-- even in a manly voice, someone saying, "Oh I totally sound like a dude" sounded quite feminine since most guys wouldn't say "totally."
Two things I noticed from the clip on the FastCompany article-- it's modulated, but I can hear A.) Vocal Fry B.) Statements that sound like they're ending with a question (the voice goes up at the end.). These are both more common speaking patterns with women. The question thing in particular is common with people who are not as confident.
I did. That section is primarily discussing analysing the pronouns used to find a gender of the target, or exploit word based genders in those languages (French in one instance) that support it.
Other examples were a selective study on Twitter, where the experimenters don't even know the true gender, or even humanity, of the user. The author of the section seems to disclaim the entire idea, somewhat (as it probably should be).
I was looking for something that could hold up to the claim that individuals of the same gender do, in fact, have common speech patterns. For example, "this pattern has only been observed with women", and, "this pattern has only been seen with men".
Just to be clear, men do vocal fry and uptalk(ending sentences with upward inflection/making it sound like a question) too. Just less often. And not all women use uptalk and vocal fry.
Vocal fry is more common in women:
"An examination of creaky voice occurring in natural conversations among relatively young educated American and Japanese speakers revealed that female speakers of American English residing in California employed creaky voice much more frequently than comparable American male and Japanese female speakers."
http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abst...
(Edit: I'd like to find better resources on this if available. These seem to be small studies.)
Unfortunately, quoting the relevant parts of a study (namely, methods and results) for the purpose of disseminating evidence is a weak fair use case at best.
That's why generally in a work you'll see "reproduced with permission" underneath figures and tables taken from other works.
The case for fair use is stronger if the work is criticism of the source material. It's a huge gray area, and some journals pursue claims relentlessly.
I did not downvote your above comments, but I can see why others might. Your argument, while perhaps not intended to, parallels a standard trolling technique of asking for evidence and then dismissing any information presented. You complain about one study not being broad enough, about others for being behind a paywall, and still others for being on twitter. Ultimately, the standard you ask for ("this pattern has only been observed with women", and, "this pattern has only been seen with men") is unreasonably restrictive, as if a pattern that was only 99% reliable in separating men from women would not be sufficient. It makes it appear (again, this may not be true, it's just the appearance) that you're not making a good-faith effort to evaluate information fairly, but are instead holding firm to a preconception and requiring extraordinary proof before being willing to reconsider. Your snarky "triggers ... preconceptions" response does not help this perception (and, FWIW, I did downvote this comment, because your "guess" is of negative value -- it only serves to upset your supporters and anger your detractors.)
EDIT: also FWIW, I would love to see good data about potential differences in vocal patterns in males and females, if for no other reason than that I could use it in my D&D campaign.
You seem to be confirming my guess (perceiving a "standard trolling technique" === "preconception"), but I am not looking for supporters or detractors, only justification for the original claim:
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
It is incorrect to ask for "only observed" data in this instance, but I also was clear to state that it was only an example of data that could be presented.
>parallels a standard trolling technique of asking for evidence and then dismissing any information presented.
If the response is not actual evidence, it should be dismissed. There is no guarantee that a response to a request for evidence is actually valid. That requires investigating the claimed evidence. In this case I investigated and found it severely lacking, as I noted above. Another user has linked to some further analysis of one of the claimed pieces of evidence (the 23-person Southern California study) that shows an apparent basic arithmetic error in the presentation of results. The NTY blog dead links that study and other places that have it require one to pay to see it.
>about one study not being broad enough
Yes, the study was 12 women and 11 men, aged 18-22, living in the same geographic location. There were severe differences in the experimental conditions between the groups being studied (women all interviewed by women; most, but not all, men interviewed by men). Everything I have read also indicates that this study found that both the men and women in the study often exhibited the pattern that was being watched for.
>and still others for being on twitter.
The problem is not about being on Twitter, but that the accounts being studied were neither 1) confirmed to be human, nor 2) confirmed to be the gender the experimenters assumed (and to which they compared their predictions/guesses! [in-built confirmation bias?]).
>that you're not making a good-faith effort to evaluate information fairly, but are instead holding firm to a preconception and requiring extraordinary proof before being willing to reconsider.
I can't evaluate what I can't see and I don't see how I have been unfair to anything that has been presented here. I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof. I'm only asking for evidence of the particular claim:
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
So, something like: randomly sampled recordings from public places with counts of the occurrence of the pattern and the gender of the person who spoke it.
>> "(perceiving a "standard trolling technique" === "preconception")"
You claimed preconception about the topic. Perceiving trolling is a preconception about your rhetorical technique. Don't overlook that important nuance.
>> [SNIP -- attempts to justify]
I don't care whether you are or aren't justified in rejecting the data (I have no dog in this fight.) I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded. This is more than just whether or not you accept the studies; it's in the phraseology you choose. Just as an example, you found the time to be snarky about downvotes, but not to express gratitude toward any of the people who have tried to provide you with data (even if the data is insufficient.)
> "I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof."
The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof. In a vacuum I would have ignored it. But in combination with the snark and dismissiveness, the sum total does fit a pattern that is common to people trolling on all sorts of topics.
Again: I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
I claimed preconception about a topic. I do not know which; I only assume that a downmodder had something in mind. I suppose it's possible they are completely random downmods from wandering bots.
> I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded.
You're not the first person to conflate me writing and giving attention to something as being "not genuinely interested". I honestly do not understand this perception, particularly when I am discussing details of things brought up deeper into a conversation. Why would I waste my time on such trivialities?
>The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof.
You'll note that line is not in this particular thread. It is however related and I agree that it was poor.
>I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
Thank you for writing out your perceptions, even though you only downvoted one of my posts. I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though. I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion: an absolute claim was made that seemed to lack observed evidence -- and despite many posts discussing it now, no real evidence has been shown.
> "... conflate me writing and giving attention to something as being "not genuinely interested". I honestly do not understand"
There is a classic trolling technique, which I have heard called a "snow job" but probably has other names, wherein someone tries to basically overwhelm a topic of discussion with minutia in order to get people to waste their time while not actually making any progress in the discussion.
Relatedly, a common technique among people who are dogmatic about a position is to build an impenetrable wall (built out of unreasonable standards of proof, and nitpicking criticism) and then spend a lot of time arguing about how their wall hasn't been penetrated. In essence it becomes a way of inflating the ego -- "we argued for hours and the other guy never even put a dent in my position! That's because I'm so smart!"
Again, not saying this is what you're actually doing, just noting that it's easy to get that perception from reading along.
> "I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though."
Perhaps they don't. But the first comment I made in this subthread has a score of +10 right now (an unusually high score for a meta-comment of this sort, particularly this deeply nested), which indicates that quite a few people share the perception.
> "I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion"
Whenever you speak or write, you create a perception. Whether intentional or unintentional, it affects your ability to have an on-topic discussion. My hope is that you'll be able to take what I've written here and learn how to reshape that perception, in order to more effectively communicate your interest in an on-topic discussion.
One final thought: the comment "no real evidence", likewise, contributes to the perception. What has been shown might be weak evidence, but it's not nothing. In a Bayesian sense, if you started with a neutral perception ("I do not know if there is a significant difference") what has been presented would be suggestive that a difference might exist, but not strong enough to show that a difference definitely exists. The proper response would be "this seems like an area where better data could be gathered" rather than "no real evidence has been shown".
That second study aside, which I cannot access the data to see how well the conclusion is supported, no other study that I have seen says that vocal fry is more common in women.
In men we generally don't even notice it. It's just the way men talk. Here are some videos of actors all with loads of vocal fry, but, except when presented as a list of "men with vocal fry," no one would ever think to pick up on it and mention it: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/
Vocal fry is more commonly noticed and criticized in women but I haven't gotten the impression that there's definitive evidence that women do it more than men since most of the studies have been pretty small or localized.
Mark Liberman has been covering this for years over at Language Log and there appears to be a great deal of ongoing debate within the academic community:
Thanks for this. I was having trouble finding anything discussing vocal fry in depth without having to pay. I see numerous articles on women doing it more, but so far they all seem to point to the same small studies.
How can a gendered speech "fashion" (which is what it seems like to me) be criticized? I think it's hot (as a guy)... probably because it's so sex-typed
It's usually mentioned in a negative context as something young women recently started doing and should stop.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 covers the claims that this is some new trend, many of which are couched in language which implies that kids these days are doing something wrong or degenerate.
> Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.
> What's striking in the dozens of emails about vocal fry that we've gotten here at our radio show is how vehement people are. These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention, so severe as to cause discomfort, can't stand the pain, distractingly disgusting, could not get over how annoyed I was, I am so appalled, detracts from the credibility of the journalist, degrades the value of the reportage, it's a choice, very unprofessional.
The part which underscores that there's a strong gender-based component to criticism is that Ira Glass, the male host of This American Life, is basically the king of vocal fry (along with other long-time radio personalities like Carl Kassel or Walter Cronkite) but nobody complains about his usage and on the rare occasions when any mention is made, it's not expressed in the same kind of negative language:
Well, now that I know about it and the name of it, I won't be able to un-hear it... which will probably make it "annoying," when previously it was just "young-womanish", sigh. ;)
I'm assuming that all of the complainers knew the name of it and of its existence to begin with. I wonder if there's a negative preferential reaction there.
Like many things, this is a taste, and the same taste can seem delicious to one person and disgusting to another. I know someone who can't stand chocolate...
You all should record the audio from the original modulated interviews, then play them in both male and female versions to sample sets of separate observer groups that rank the performance of the person being interviewed.
That way, you would be isolating the thing you are testing to just the voice, and you would be able to establish controls and a baseline for the exact same interview.
The way your test is described right now, there are still way too many factors that could explain the results. Your controls are far too loose.
I have read a lot of the comments here and your article and I find this fascinating.
On controls and such:
on reddit someone pointed out that more prosocial people may be more likely to sign up but I believe you controlled for this using random assignment so I think you are good there.
The biggest thing, and I believe it has already been mentioned, is trying not to bias the raters. The best way fmpov being to pre-record interviews and play them to several different people.
The above would prevent testing for attrition but I think one variable at the time is the way to go. You could test attrition later by having ratings go a certain way and then seeing how subjects respond when they know that they interviewer knows their gender vs when they dont etc.
If you have any interest in trying to get this published academically, and I want to make sure you understand I am a very lowly research assistant, I could talk to some of the professors at my university to see if there is any interest.
On a similar note, I'm wondering what will happen when somebody is perceived as gender non-conforming.
Will a woman using a modulated voice to sound male come off as a woman disguising her voice, or will she come off as an effeminate gay man? There's a lot of stigma to being perceived as the latter.
> Will a woman using a modulated voice to sound male come off as a woman disguising her voice, or will she come off as an effeminate gay man?
The sample sounded more like an Englishman to me, not effeminate per se. I've noticed a lot of Americans feel western european accents like Danish/French/English to be 'gay-ish' if they haven't heard them before. Not sure what is going on there.
Please make sure that the question is after they have already answered the other fields, and only one per interviewer. Priming is a major problem in this kind of testing, and if you are asking people to find fault in the perceived gender of a person, they then have a high chance the reverse a previous decision.
I'm not sure if voice modulation is the answer or not, but very cool to see you working on this problem and trying things out. It's a difficult space and most are springing for short-sighted bandage solutions. Best of luck, and keep sharing your findings!
I think it would be amazing if they could combine this voice-modulation technology with a facial motion capture technology (like in Avatar) to display artificial/shifting faces as well as voices. You could effectively create a computer screen-based version of the "scramble suit" used in A Scanner Darkly! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/mediaviewer/rm1872861440
I think a combined face+voice system would be even more useful in interviews (since a significant amount of human communication is expressed through facial cues). It would also add another dimension to your proposed voice-modulation gender-blinding experiment.
Wouldn't that just increase the problem that the person you are responding to brought up? If you capture their facial movements, it might be even easier to tell if they are a man or a woman, despite any scrambling you do.
Quite possibly! That's the extra dimension added to the experiment. :)
It would be even more fascinating if you could cluster facial expressions or motions as "more female" or "more male". And for bonus points, work out a way to "filter" or "smooth" the facial signal to reduce/remove these giveaway hints (or insert false hints).
Yes. If the goal is gender blindness, a more effective strategy is to block all video and voice communication. Even chat could be a giveaway. Go off of nothing but code against a test suite.
To provide a specific example, some women have severe vocal fry / creaky voice. Its a socially transmitted thing like valley girl speak from decades ago.
I can only imagine how weird that sounds autotuned in a deep bass artificial voice. Imagine the movie line "I'm Batman" with vocal fry.
(edited to note, I see three people simultaneously cited vocal fry as an obvious experimental error and one tried to derail with the standard citation needed technique, so its probably a pretty serious issue)
There should have been a control experiment where a person's likeability, intelligence and "hirability" are assessed when both women and men say the same things with and without modulation to make sure it is really neutral.
I actually don't think you should put the question on the interview feedback form. That invites bias into the question. "Oh, this candidate did well, must be a man." In fact, having interviewers consciously guess at the gender may even skew their perception of the interview performance post-hoc.
I would, however, be interested in a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
You can't prevent people from asking themselves if a modulated voice is a man or woman. If they are inclined to ask that question, then they are going to ask it no matter what you do.
Correct. What you can do, however, is prevent their answer to that question from being better than a coin flip. This is why we should run a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
This is a good point. There are often differences in how people of different genders (and nationalities, interest groups, classes, educational levels, etc) express themselves regardless of the format, and modulating their voice doesn't really hide that.
For example, I've run quite a few forums before, and I'm pretty confident I (and quite a lot of other forum admins/moderators) could reliably judge someone's gender through their manner of writing and the (non gender related) info in their profiles.
So if you wanted to really remove possible gender 'bias' from the occasion, you'd have to go much, much further. You'd have to give people a way to communicate which reduces their responses to preset answers, that's entirely conducted through text on a screen and make sure all personal information is filtered out as well.
There's always going to be a trade off here. On the one hand, I'm sure the system used in the Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon Scarescraper would completely eliminate any potential gender bias, but that's only because it limits chat to 'over here', 'good job', 'thank you very much', 'help' and 'hey'. On the other hand, an interview in person would give you a lot of information about how well they could do the job (and let you test it), but then you've got psychological biases to deal with.
Of course completely dehumanizing the interviewer & interviewee expressly prevents any degree of culture fit selection, which could be bad for all parties.
As much as culture fit has a really bad reputation in some places (because people seem to associate the term with 'only hires rich white kids with Harvard degrees'),you need a certain amount of it for a business to really stay cohesive and for the employees to want to work together.
I've seen companies where the hiring staff haven't bothered to think whether anyone would actually work well in that specific company and its environment, and the general result has been a heavily divided workforce with very limited communication.
Not just culture fit. I hire for a high-end (boutique) software consulting firm. We specialize in scale problems and engineering practice at a level few other firms can claim.
Communication is an absolute, 100% must for senior roles. If you can't competently and thoroughly talk about a technical issue, to non-technical people, and do it with a smile and while making eye contact, we're not going to hire you.
So in a sense, we're filtering out neuro-atypical people for senior roles. But they fit well in engineering roles.
Dehumanizing the interview process will literally make it impossible for us to gauge this skill.
If you're tracking the interviewer gender guess, that's a legal liability to the interviewer. I'd refuse to answer, or always put "unsure" even if I was 100% sure of the gender.
While not scientific, I heard a pre-recorded interview done with interview.io's gender masking where both sounded like men (in reality one was a man and one was a woman). I got the genders wrong when prompted to guess, so it was pretty damn convincing from my POV.
As we keep learning to our dismay, you can't solve social problems with technology. I've got to give them credit for trying, and for reporting the result, but I'm not at all surprised.
Why not just use text? There are many speech characteristics of gender that will never be found and masked by modulation.
Simple placements of words, parts of speech referring to the self, and other things are all much better clues to gender then voice frequency and pitch. For example, when speaking to some people who I know who are either naturally very high or low pitch, or are trans-gendered, there is a lot more information that can be contextually extracted from the content of their speech.
Really, just do text-based interviews. It will allow people to revise what they are thinking and really allow them to mask their gender.
Because your actual interview will not be text-based and if their goal is to simulate an actual interview scenario where you will be speaking out loud an expected to form coherent thoughts to questions on the fly this comes closer to doing so than text based.
And why shouldn't the actual interview be text-based? Yes, that would be a drastic change, and it would render on-site interviews pointless. But then again, it would eliminate a lot more biases, e.g.based on accent and disabilities.
Many jobs will use mostly written communication, then it doesn't matter much how you perform verbally, and a text-based interview would probably work well, or even better.
If you're expected to cooperate closely and communicate verbally with colleagues, you would want to know how the candidate handles that before hiring them.
You're basically putting up a straw-man and attacking it at this point. I never claimed the actual interviews should be verbal but the fact is they are and they are preparing you for what actual interviews are like not what ideal interviews are like.
Text doesn't solve the problems you described. I believe there could be non-content-related clues present in voice-chat that are absent in text-chat, but all of your examples were content-based clues.
i think it is pretty obvious there is no systematic bias against women it's more of reminiscent of an ancient culture of mistreating women...i think it is rare to find in a modern/western corporate world, group of folks who systematically and in organized way trying to oppress women
I always felt they should do something like this for politicians during a race. No names, age, gender, political leanings, etc. Just interviews and debate.
Not sure exactly what you mean. But some kind of anonymous/pseudonymous debate or interview process would not be a good idea, even though it would have some nice benefits in theory. For example, it would be easy for a malicious candidate to profess views opposite to what he believes in order to be elected. Then he could pursue his actual policies after taking office.
Oh, wait, this happens now... :( But it would be even easier without true identity and non-verbal cues, etc. Words on a screen/page could be written by anyone.
Real identity is crucial, because what matters more than words is actions, and only with a real name, face, and history can past actions be examined to determine whether the person lives up to their rhetoric. If political history teaches us anything, it should teach us to pay less attention to what politicians say and more attention to what they have done.
So, as interesting as debates can be, maybe we need less of those and more examination of candidates' past. If we really want to know what a candidate believes and what he will do if elected, we should look at what he's done in the past.
> Maybe tying coding to sex is a bit tenuous, but, as they say, programming is like sex — one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
Gender blinding in orchestral auditions (which usually involves screening the performers from sight and thus is pretty-much foolproof) has been shown to improve the percentage of women who are hired.
See, for example, 'Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians', Claudia Goldin, Cecilia Rouse: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
That's interesting, I would have thought being able to see actual finger movements to analyze mechanics is a part of the evaluation process. Could be totally off base though I suppose.
Good mechanics are a given at that level of performance. If you can play like Yo-Yo Ma with bad mechanics, more power to you, an orchestra is not going to care.
If anything, I would imagine it's like the old story about drafting athletes. Given two equally successful point guards, you draft the one with crappy technique because he has more room to grow.
If you're hiring for some mid-level orchestra, bad mechanics on a sufficiently-skilled player might be enticing. And as you say, bad mechanics among top performers are basically nonexistent.
That'd be interesting, but once you reach an orchestra you're generally beyond technical training. Players are expected to know how to play; individual training is rare and focuses on style aspects more than technical things.
Sweet that some one is trying new things with ideas.
But Oh boy, Life does not revolve around tech interviews. Make peace with it. An old school psychologist would observe us and say that the people obsessed with tech interviews faced an emotional toll of rejection during early career and are trying to get over it.
Google, Facebook and other companies are like parents of the tech kids and the kids are seeking some kind of approval or validation from them via passing their technical interviews. You are not cool enough if you don't crack our interview.
Its possible we are doing something very wrong here.
Maybe un(der)employed programmers, who are naturally more concerned about interviewing, have extra free time and are thus over-represented on hacker news.
yes, I believe you are completely correct. It also seems like a common way for the engineering community as a whole to gain insight into a company's culture. It seems to me that these two ideas go hand in hand in a encouraging our fetishization of the tech interview
So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned, but instead of looking into the future and discovering better ways of identifying talent, people keep inventing stuff that makes the torturing mechanism even more sophisticated so that the suffering can be prolonged.
I'd like to see the people behind this project apply their technical skills to something more useful to the industry and the society in general.
>> to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude
Any woman who's gone through that process will likely want to get another career, that where people are treated with more respect. And I suppose many men are having the exact same thoughts.
The more you mock your talent pool, the more actively that talent is running in the opposite direction, just to get out of this mess.
So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned
We don't really know that at all. Technical interviews are an invaluable tool in finding people who can write software and be collaborative co-workers.
A lot of software developers on the receiving end don't like them. Part of that is because a good technical interview pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to show that you can think through problems. Not all developers appreciate being taken out of their comfort zone.
The other part of the problem is that some technical interviews are conducted clumsily. "Code FizzBuzz, go!" As with the rest of the interview, skill of the interviewer matters.
What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.
YMMV, but I've always worked in service-oriented development organizations for startups or companies that behaved like startups on the development side. Pressure comes with the territory and I'd rather know how potential colleagues behave with a small amount of interview pressure before being stuck with a veritable basket case in a real-world high-pressure situation.
I had a guy freak out walking through a simple algorithm in java at the white board in an interview. Maybe he was the best developer ever if he were put in a quiet dark room and never made eye contact with anyone. Given that we had other candidates who could actually interact calmly and intelligently in an interview/collaborative situation, we weren't going to go with the guy that freaked out.
Why do people in tech think "proving you can do your job" is unique to tech? Tons of industrues has practical interviews. Do you really think a roofer shows up and says "I know what I am doing, just take me on my word" and gets a job?
Actually, yes. Having done roofing on residential properties, you stick an ad in the newspaper, show up with a truck, provide an estimate and wait for the phone call.
Nobody asks you to demonstrate that you can climb or hammer.
I'm curious. When a plumber shows up at your house, do you whiteboard him?
throwaway_xx9 I don't know why your post is dead, but your example is obviously silly. That is not applying for a job, that is contracting to an individual. You don't face a technical interview contracting to an individual in programming either. But if you apply for a job as a roofer with a construction company, you absolutely have a practical interview.
"...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..."
The author admits it's not statistically significant, but nonetheless it somewhat makes sense, if you take human nature into account.
If there's any bias in the technology field, it's probably that males are assumed "smarter", but women are still liked and desired.
So, if a female is not answering questions as sharply, but is masked as a male, the bias is to deduct extra points. If a male is answering Q's while masked as a female, the interviewer is pleased and awards extra points.
Just my theory, but it seems to fit. Again, though... a very small sampling.
I'd be more interested in quantifying productivity and seeing if there's a systematic discrepancy between productivity and gender. Either the market is accurately pricing talent or there's a delta to be exploited.
I think if a paper was released tomorrow that said "female programmers 30% undervalued as observed by double blind coding challenge" head hunters would fix that problem overnight.
I think that the problem with your theory is that it relies on the idea that success on a coding challenge translates directly to value as an employee.
I have managed many developers...... some of the ones that are the best coders are NOT the most productive nor the most valuable employees. There are a lot of skills that are needed besides ability to code.
While interesting, that's a very particular definition of "productive" - male lawyers billed more hours. That doesn't necessarily correspond to more actual work done.
Directly, perhaps. What if the women were doing non-billable work that enabled their colleagues to bill more combined total hours than they would have had she done billable work instead?
I'm challenging the parent's assumption that an individual's billable hours are an accurate representation of that person's contribution to a firm's top line, let alone bottom line.
If I were to start a company today, I'd definitely be tempted to only hire women, and pay my entire workforce 80 cents on the dollar, instead of 70 cents on the dollar.
I couldn't be sued for pay discrimination if ALL of my underpaid engineers are women, since there is no benchmark for a lawsuit to compare the discrimination too!
I jest, but it really does surprise me that more companies aren't trying to aggressively poach underpaid women from other companies.
If I were to start a company today, I'd definitely be tempted to only hire women, and pay my entire workforce 80 cents on the dollar, instead of 70 cents on the dollar.
Except that correcting for experience, the pay gap shrinks to about 94 cents on the dollar.
I'm with John Green here: Much of the strong negative feeling around the gender pay gap comes from women as a whole feeling "squeezed" because they still do an out-sized amount of the unpaid work in our society. This also contributes to the absolute numbers pay gap, because women need to ask for more flexibility to be able to accomplish that unpaid work.
I wish discussions around that issue were more nuanced and fact based. The answer is more complicated than the simplistic notion that one gender is being crappy to the other, in either direction.
This is deceptive because it's an opinion piece on Youtube.
The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
This is deceptive because it's an opinion piece on Youtube.
The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
Wow. Congrats on an incredible spin job! I'm saying there is a gender disparity, and that this is apparent in the sentiments of women! (Feeling "squeezed") Yet somehow you are spinning it as if I'm saying the opposite! I also assert that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar -- right there in black and white in my gp comment. Are you somehow suggesting you are disagreeing with me by restating it in your comment?
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
Please re-read my comment. I am asserting that a) 70% or 80% is not factual. b) The factual number is more like 94%. c) The issue extends beyond that 94% number, involving the actual demands on women's time through societal expectations around essential but unpaid work done by women -- Women are effectively working more for less renumeration, but the issue is more nuanced than just one number can relate.
But he brought that up in the video with the "unexplained pay gap" that still remains when you control for known discrepancy causing variables.
I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy. There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20% so it's really just an argument over whether or not the speaker believes that remaining pay gap is the result of hiring or wage discrimination.
I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy.
I would say that the numbers very strongly show there is a 6% pay gap. If we assume the job market is efficient, then either there is some bias against women or women slightly under-perform men or women are worse at negotiating salaries or they are receiving some renumeration in the form of greater flexibility.
There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20%
Yet. I don't find it intellectually satisfying to say something doesn't exist just because we don't have a theory that covers it well. The disparity is smaller, but it does exist. I also observe how hectic the schedules of professional women with children appear to be. I'm not sure we completely understand what's going on there, but I don't think the sentiments of women around this issue are entirely disconnected from objective reality. From what I can see, women are "squeezed" in terms of the resource of time.
Housekeeping tends to be something only the woman cares about, though. Do I deserve sympathy for all the unpaid work I put in managing our fantasy football team?
I don't think that's true in the general case, maybe in your experience. Someone needs to cook, clean, do laundry, do dishes, take care of babies, etc, and this tends to fall more heavily on women (don't have studies offhand, but this has been researched).
Not to mention that taking care of babies, in some senses, has to be done by women, as men can't breastfeed. (I'm of course only talking about breastfeeding, but it is a significant amount of work that only a woman can do, unless you prefer to feed your baby from bottles, but this has been proven to be less healthy and therefore less preferred for the baby).
I keep on encountering social situations where men are relaxing/socializing and women are running around preparing food. I'm not so sure the gender roles automatically come with an equitable distribution of work, now that technology has eliminated much of the need for the heavier forms of manual labor.
Also, in terms of fixing things, that's supposed to be something you do once, and it stays fixed. Much of traditional "women's work" is recurring.
I know that's what is being passed around (by Hillary Clinton for instance), that there is this huge bias against woman and that they earn 70% of what men do.
But it doesn't work like that, woman doing the same job with the same experience as men have a pay gap difference as low as 1.6%.
So, good luck finding someone willing to work for 20% less than what the industry is paying.
It's because we all know the 70c number is a lie when you actually compare experience, education, job role, and more stuff like that. I mean, don't try to bring it up with an SJW, but we all know the flaws of the study. the 70/77c number only compares all men to all women -- this includes part-time workers, moms who work easier jobs for more time flexibility (with accompanying pay decrease/stagnation), etc. Given the societal norm of women staying at home with kids, and being the ones to sacrifice for family life, this shouldn't be surprising.
If we want to fix that number, we need to give Dads more leeway, more flexibility, and importantly, no gruff, about taking care of their families. This will likely result in a net productivity drop of men as a whole across all industries. But it'll probably fix the perceived pay gap.
If women were universally paid 20-30% less than men for the exact same job, and possess exactly the same qualifications, quality of work, time put in, education, experience, etc., there would literally be swaths of companies only hiring women. It's a no-brainer decision. The fact that we don't see these companies is proof that the gap is a myth.
Is anybody studying the reasons behind the huge gender disparity in roofing, welding or kindergarten teaching? I think there is a tremendous gender bias in those and other fields that is going unstudied, because nobody cares or because those fields aren't as cool or important.
Someone I know worked as a welder at a very high level of experience and skill. She reported constant sexist comments, abuse and obstruction from male coworkers, particularly those whose work she was sent to inspect and/or repair.
I have an aunt who's a civil engineer. When she started her business, she didn't use her first name--only her first initial--for all her professional communications. She didn't want people who didn't know her to know she was a woman.
That's a particularly interesting one, because it's not susceptible to the usual charges of "no one cares because it's low pay/status". If you look to radiology rather than surgery, the gender imbalance is enormous.
Suddenly we're looking at gender skew in two highly technical, prestigious, lucrative fields, and seeing that they prompt totally different types and amounts of discussion.
> men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology
This was largely debunked from a biological perspective [1]. Any psychological perceptions you may be referring to are largely cultural and subject to the biases that this product is trying to combat.
The study you linked doesn't absolutely say what you are trying to make it say (that there aren't fundamental differences in psychology between men and women). It seems to say that male and female brains and cognitive abilities aren't as dimorphic as their genitalia, but instead there is a continuum and overlaps for many distinct cognitive traits.
In other words: (almost) all men have normally formed penises, (almost) all women have normally formed vaginas. Mixed situations are rare. Brains are another matter, genders mix and overlap. That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.
>That doesn't mean that there are NO genders though.
The study isn't saying that there are no genders - specifically it is saying:
Our results demonstrate that regardless of the cause of observed sex/gender differences in brain and behavior (nature or nurture), human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain.
"most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males"
Nothing in this view says it's not possible that, for example, an interest or a skill for engineering, while rare in both genders, might be n times more common in men than in women.
Or perhaps many children are raised to conform to particular gender roles that affects their social development, and possibly, just possibly, this might also affect their job opportunities not just by self-selection, but by biases in the interviewer/hiring manager. It seems like a very complicated issue that doesn't have a simplistic answer.
I worry about this mentioning occupations' "prestige." That seems to be incompatible with our goals of universal equality. We shouldn't discount gender bias because of privilege.
I didn't mean to address whether prestige is necessary to consider an occupation.
Rather, I was drawing parallels between software and radiology careers, and observing that one is considered a major, public issue while the other is basically an internal discussion within medicine.
Similarly, educators talk a great deal about gender imbalances in teaching (K-8 is female-dominated, physics and economics skew, biology female, and so on).
What I think is interesting is that there are a handful of fields - primarily technology and corporate leadership - where the gender imbalance is a national topic. I'm sure it's largely down to the visibility of those fields, but there are a lot of people discussing sexism in tech whose backgrounds are neither research nor technology. That seems much less true for something like radiology.
It also seems to muddy the waters a great deal. With inside-baseball discussions like medicine, I assume(?) things like roughly when the gender imbalances form are common knowledge. In tech, we seem to be constantly rehashing those matters (see: corporate diversity reports constantly stressing "our applicant pool is lower-diversity than our staff, so please stop reducing this issue to discriminatory hiring").
1) I have seen quite a few things about the smaller numbers of men moving into traditionally female fields (nursing being a big example). That may fit with your point about cool/important jobs.
2) But regarding importance, I do think it matters a lot when the field is as socially prominent and well paid as tech jobs.
3) When you suggest that construction work might have a lot of sexism, you don't get a lot of pushback--it's just not a contested topic in the same way. Hence less discussion.
Ehhh. There's only about 360k welders in the U.S. and 3.6 million software engineers. That's an order of magnitude in difference in impact.
Additionally, a software engineer probably makes more than a roofer, welder, and kindergarten teacher combined.
Part of the reason for studying software engineering is because it's part of a larger trend of women not being as prevalent in high-paying careers. That's also why the number of women CEOs and other leadership positions gets so much attention.
So, while I understand your point (there are any number of careers that have huge gender gaps that no one is looking at), software engineering is specifically scrutinized due to the number of current jobs, the average salary, and the expected growth of the profession over time. No other field has the kind of potential impact on the employee that software engineering does.
3.6 million software engineers? That seems really high - do you have a source?
WolframAlpha reports that in May 2016 there were 144.6 million workers in the USA and 87.2 male workers. That'd mean that 2.5% of all workers are software engineers. If you figure that 75% of software engineers are male (some quick searching suggests this is a conservative number), then >3% of all employed males are software engineers. My instinct is that's high, but if you have a source I'll happily become informed.
I think it's more because those are either dangerous, or not well paid, not because they're not cool or important. Generally, more dangerous work gets some kind of hazard pay premium. You'll see the same kind of thing with work that requires lots of travel, like truck drivers. A lot of my family does work out on oil rigs where they stay for a couple weeks at a time - they get hazard and travel pay, so it ends up being quite well paid.
There's no downside to the field on the dimensions of pay and danger. Software engineering/development is safe and well paid, thus there is an unqualified incentive to get one's favored group into the field, and if there is a perception that there is a systemic internal bias against them, to attempt to alleviate that bias.
I think the best gender-bias comparison to programming is nursing. High demand, decent pay, similar amount of education required, but ~10% of nurses are men (compared to ~21% of programmers who are female)[1].
Honestly the modulated voice sounds like a gay man, or a transgender, or someone who is physically male but is trying hard to speak like a female. It's probably not the pitch itself but the manner of speaking.
This is interesting because it starts to peel another layer of the problem. Yes there are still cues that can give away gender, but this seems another step closer to making the interview process a science. The next logical question from here is "why are women more likely to quit after 1-2 bad interviews".
I don't think you understood the article. The conclusion is that there is no problem. This bias against woman in IT interviews people keep talking about, doesn't actually exist according to the study.
This misunderstanding is kind of the core breakdown in these conversations. People don't agree on what the problem is. Is the issue about equal pay, or about equal pay for equal work? In hiring terms, is it about equal hiring or equal hiring for equal ability?
If we don't have equal pay for equal work (and equivalent skill, etc), I think we can agree that's unfair and a problem. But if we do have equal pay for equal work, but still don't have equal pay, then I'd say we may still have a problem. Why aren't women making the same work decisions as men? If social pressure is keeping women from doing equal work, that's bad. If social pressure is forcing men to make shittier sacrifices for pay, that's bad. In the article linked, women churn more. That's probably bad.
If there's inequality without unequal pay or unequal hiring, then the problem isn't the fault of the firms, but it's still a problem.
368 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadSo, shall you start firing executives at VC firms, or shall I?
The employer should be able to decide whether or not that detriment is enough to justify not hiring this person.
You can also access the recordings after-the-fact to hear how you did. I think this is valuable for candidates who want to improve their interviewing skills.
FWIW, I heard it both ways - my voice as female and her voice as male. The pitch shifting was very convincing both ways.
I think you're talking about prosody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)
This is by far one of the best ways to do it.
Edit: sorry for the tone, but I just find this whole article bait. The headline is bait. The writer acknowledges the limitations of their study (basically that it doesn't prove much) but then makes a whole bunch of extrapolations anyway, and makes those guesses the meat of the article rather than investigating why their methods didn't work or how they could be improved or what would be required to produce conclusive evidence.
> On the subject of sample size, we have no delusions that this is the be-all and end-all of pronouncements on the subject of gender and interview performance.
But let's ignore science to fit our pre-existing biases!
The main issue with gender and hiring is unconscious bias on the interviewer's end, which voice modulation does make sense as a tool to avoid bias. Per the grading criteria, they are judging on skill, problem solving, and communication. I'm not sure how voice modulation would affect the interviewee in those three criteria, which makes the results of the experiment not surprising.
Untrained interviewers, like the ones at startups randomly pulled into interviews and also hiring for culture fit, may have a bias that is more conscious.
The common thought is that bias is an unconscious and unavoidable thing, hence the voice masking. If that's truly the case, all the training in the world doesn't help.
To combat this, they could have asked the interviewer during the performance assessment whether they thought the applicant was definitely male/probably male/unsure/probably female/definitely female. Then you could use voice modulation as an instrument for perceived gender and get a better estimate of the true effect of perceived gender when controlling for actual gender.
Hope they do something like that for the next round of experiments!
Two things I noticed from the clip on the FastCompany article-- it's modulated, but I can hear A.) Vocal Fry B.) Statements that sound like they're ending with a question (the voice goes up at the end.). These are both more common speaking patterns with women. The question thing in particular is common with people who are not as confident.
Edit: Lots of opinions here. Still no data.
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/best-practices-for-eth...
Read under "Inferring Gender from Content".
Other examples were a selective study on Twitter, where the experimenters don't even know the true gender, or even humanity, of the user. The author of the section seems to disclaim the entire idea, somewhat (as it probably should be).
I was looking for something that could hold up to the claim that individuals of the same gender do, in fact, have common speech patterns. For example, "this pattern has only been observed with women", and, "this pattern has only been seen with men".
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
Uptalk is more common in women: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/overturning-the-myt...
Vocal fry is more common in women: "An examination of creaky voice occurring in natural conversations among relatively young educated American and Japanese speakers revealed that female speakers of American English residing in California employed creaky voice much more frequently than comparable American male and Japanese female speakers." http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abst...
(Edit: I'd like to find better resources on this if available. These seem to be small studies.)
The only study the post links to is paywalled and the link to a conference paper is dead.
Your second link is also paywalled.
[It's not your fault, just the current reality.]
That's why generally in a work you'll see "reproduced with permission" underneath figures and tables taken from other works.
The case for fair use is stronger if the work is criticism of the source material. It's a huge gray area, and some journals pursue claims relentlessly.
Edit: Or, perhaps, they are rate-limited by HN and can only use the triangles?
EDIT: also FWIW, I would love to see good data about potential differences in vocal patterns in males and females, if for no other reason than that I could use it in my D&D campaign.
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
It is incorrect to ask for "only observed" data in this instance, but I also was clear to state that it was only an example of data that could be presented.
>parallels a standard trolling technique of asking for evidence and then dismissing any information presented.
If the response is not actual evidence, it should be dismissed. There is no guarantee that a response to a request for evidence is actually valid. That requires investigating the claimed evidence. In this case I investigated and found it severely lacking, as I noted above. Another user has linked to some further analysis of one of the claimed pieces of evidence (the 23-person Southern California study) that shows an apparent basic arithmetic error in the presentation of results. The NTY blog dead links that study and other places that have it require one to pay to see it.
>about one study not being broad enough
Yes, the study was 12 women and 11 men, aged 18-22, living in the same geographic location. There were severe differences in the experimental conditions between the groups being studied (women all interviewed by women; most, but not all, men interviewed by men). Everything I have read also indicates that this study found that both the men and women in the study often exhibited the pattern that was being watched for.
>and still others for being on twitter.
The problem is not about being on Twitter, but that the accounts being studied were neither 1) confirmed to be human, nor 2) confirmed to be the gender the experimenters assumed (and to which they compared their predictions/guesses! [in-built confirmation bias?]).
>that you're not making a good-faith effort to evaluate information fairly, but are instead holding firm to a preconception and requiring extraordinary proof before being willing to reconsider.
I can't evaluate what I can't see and I don't see how I have been unfair to anything that has been presented here. I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof. I'm only asking for evidence of the particular claim:
>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.
So, something like: randomly sampled recordings from public places with counts of the occurrence of the pattern and the gender of the person who spoke it.
You claimed preconception about the topic. Perceiving trolling is a preconception about your rhetorical technique. Don't overlook that important nuance.
>> [SNIP -- attempts to justify]
I don't care whether you are or aren't justified in rejecting the data (I have no dog in this fight.) I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded. This is more than just whether or not you accept the studies; it's in the phraseology you choose. Just as an example, you found the time to be snarky about downvotes, but not to express gratitude toward any of the people who have tried to provide you with data (even if the data is insufficient.)
> "I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof."
The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof. In a vacuum I would have ignored it. But in combination with the snark and dismissiveness, the sum total does fit a pattern that is common to people trolling on all sorts of topics.
Again: I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
> I'm simply noting that you seem to give off the impression that you're not genuinely interested, or open to being persuaded.
You're not the first person to conflate me writing and giving attention to something as being "not genuinely interested". I honestly do not understand this perception, particularly when I am discussing details of things brought up deeper into a conversation. Why would I waste my time on such trivialities?
>The line I quoted ("this pattern has only been observed with women") was an unreasonable, extraordinary standard of proof.
You'll note that line is not in this particular thread. It is however related and I agree that it was poor.
>I'm just trying to help you understand what about your behavior might be causing people to perceive you as worthy of downvotes. I'm trying to give you insight as to how, if you are interested in genuine dialog, you can make that clear to others. Because your posts thus far create a very different perception than that.
Thank you for writing out your perceptions, even though you only downvoted one of my posts. I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though. I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion: an absolute claim was made that seemed to lack observed evidence -- and despite many posts discussing it now, no real evidence has been shown.
There is a classic trolling technique, which I have heard called a "snow job" but probably has other names, wherein someone tries to basically overwhelm a topic of discussion with minutia in order to get people to waste their time while not actually making any progress in the discussion.
Relatedly, a common technique among people who are dogmatic about a position is to build an impenetrable wall (built out of unreasonable standards of proof, and nitpicking criticism) and then spend a lot of time arguing about how their wall hasn't been penetrated. In essence it becomes a way of inflating the ego -- "we argued for hours and the other guy never even put a dent in my position! That's because I'm so smart!"
Again, not saying this is what you're actually doing, just noting that it's easy to get that perception from reading along.
> "I don't think the perceptions you describe as others perhaps having accurately characterize me, though."
Perhaps they don't. But the first comment I made in this subthread has a score of +10 right now (an unusually high score for a meta-comment of this sort, particularly this deeply nested), which indicates that quite a few people share the perception.
> "I am not attempting to create a particular perception; I'm only trying to have an on-topic discussion"
Whenever you speak or write, you create a perception. Whether intentional or unintentional, it affects your ability to have an on-topic discussion. My hope is that you'll be able to take what I've written here and learn how to reshape that perception, in order to more effectively communicate your interest in an on-topic discussion.
One final thought: the comment "no real evidence", likewise, contributes to the perception. What has been shown might be weak evidence, but it's not nothing. In a Bayesian sense, if you started with a neutral perception ("I do not know if there is a significant difference") what has been presented would be suggestive that a difference might exist, but not strong enough to show that a difference definitely exists. The proper response would be "this seems like an area where better data could be gathered" rather than "no real evidence has been shown".
In men we generally don't even notice it. It's just the way men talk. Here are some videos of actors all with loads of vocal fry, but, except when presented as a list of "men with vocal fry," no one would ever think to pick up on it and mention it: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/
Mark Liberman has been covering this for years over at Language Log and there appears to be a great deal of ongoing debate within the academic community:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=%22vocal+fr...
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20155 discusses male usage and briefly mentions the study from your second link.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13020 has some graphs of what exactly this means sound-wise and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 discusses the history.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626 covers the claims that this is some new trend, many of which are couched in language which implies that kids these days are doing something wrong or degenerate.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12774 discusses media coverage a couple of years ago claiming that women's careers (or vocal cords) would be damaged by using vocal fry.
This American Life did an entire episode (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i... – http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17489 has discussion) about the volume and vehemence of the complaints they receive about female cast members' use of vocal fry:
> Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.
> What's striking in the dozens of emails about vocal fry that we've gotten here at our radio show is how vehement people are. These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention, so severe as to cause discomfort, can't stand the pain, distractingly disgusting, could not get over how annoyed I was, I am so appalled, detracts from the credibility of the journalist, degrades the value of the reportage, it's a choice, very unprofessional.
The part which underscores that there's a strong gender-based component to criticism is that Ira Glass, the male host of This American Life, is basically the king of vocal fry (along with other long-time radio personalities like Carl Kassel or Walter Cronkite) but nobody complains about his usage and on the rare occasions when any mention is made, it's not expressed in the same kind of negative language:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17496
I'm assuming that all of the complainers knew the name of it and of its existence to begin with. I wonder if there's a negative preferential reaction there.
Like many things, this is a taste, and the same taste can seem delicious to one person and disgusting to another. I know someone who can't stand chocolate...
Ira Glass (This American Life) has vocal fry and they discuss the gender bias here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...
That way, you would be isolating the thing you are testing to just the voice, and you would be able to establish controls and a baseline for the exact same interview.
The way your test is described right now, there are still way too many factors that could explain the results. Your controls are far too loose.
The biggest thing, and I believe it has already been mentioned, is trying not to bias the raters. The best way fmpov being to pre-record interviews and play them to several different people.
The above would prevent testing for attrition but I think one variable at the time is the way to go. You could test attrition later by having ratings go a certain way and then seeing how subjects respond when they know that they interviewer knows their gender vs when they dont etc.
If you have any interest in trying to get this published academically, and I want to make sure you understand I am a very lowly research assistant, I could talk to some of the professors at my university to see if there is any interest.
Will a woman using a modulated voice to sound male come off as a woman disguising her voice, or will she come off as an effeminate gay man? There's a lot of stigma to being perceived as the latter.
The sample sounded more like an Englishman to me, not effeminate per se. I've noticed a lot of Americans feel western european accents like Danish/French/English to be 'gay-ish' if they haven't heard them before. Not sure what is going on there.
I think a combined face+voice system would be even more useful in interviews (since a significant amount of human communication is expressed through facial cues). It would also add another dimension to your proposed voice-modulation gender-blinding experiment.
It would be even more fascinating if you could cluster facial expressions or motions as "more female" or "more male". And for bonus points, work out a way to "filter" or "smooth" the facial signal to reduce/remove these giveaway hints (or insert false hints).
I feel like this is kinda like choosing who to draft in the NBA solely on free throw percentage.
I can only imagine how weird that sounds autotuned in a deep bass artificial voice. Imagine the movie line "I'm Batman" with vocal fry.
(edited to note, I see three people simultaneously cited vocal fry as an obvious experimental error and one tried to derail with the standard citation needed technique, so its probably a pretty serious issue)
Listen to these interviews. All the well-known actors in them are speaking with tons of vocal fry -- much more than "Valley Girl" women ever would.
Except we never even notice it in men, except when it's presented in a "list of examples of male vocal fry."
http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/
I would, however, be interested in a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
For example, I've run quite a few forums before, and I'm pretty confident I (and quite a lot of other forum admins/moderators) could reliably judge someone's gender through their manner of writing and the (non gender related) info in their profiles.
So if you wanted to really remove possible gender 'bias' from the occasion, you'd have to go much, much further. You'd have to give people a way to communicate which reduces their responses to preset answers, that's entirely conducted through text on a screen and make sure all personal information is filtered out as well.
There's always going to be a trade off here. On the one hand, I'm sure the system used in the Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon Scarescraper would completely eliminate any potential gender bias, but that's only because it limits chat to 'over here', 'good job', 'thank you very much', 'help' and 'hey'. On the other hand, an interview in person would give you a lot of information about how well they could do the job (and let you test it), but then you've got psychological biases to deal with.
It's a tough one really.
As much as culture fit has a really bad reputation in some places (because people seem to associate the term with 'only hires rich white kids with Harvard degrees'),you need a certain amount of it for a business to really stay cohesive and for the employees to want to work together.
I've seen companies where the hiring staff haven't bothered to think whether anyone would actually work well in that specific company and its environment, and the general result has been a heavily divided workforce with very limited communication.
Communication is an absolute, 100% must for senior roles. If you can't competently and thoroughly talk about a technical issue, to non-technical people, and do it with a smile and while making eye contact, we're not going to hire you.
So in a sense, we're filtering out neuro-atypical people for senior roles. But they fit well in engineering roles.
Dehumanizing the interview process will literally make it impossible for us to gauge this skill.
Simple placements of words, parts of speech referring to the self, and other things are all much better clues to gender then voice frequency and pitch. For example, when speaking to some people who I know who are either naturally very high or low pitch, or are trans-gendered, there is a lot more information that can be contextually extracted from the content of their speech.
Really, just do text-based interviews. It will allow people to revise what they are thinking and really allow them to mask their gender.
If you're expected to cooperate closely and communicate verbally with colleagues, you would want to know how the candidate handles that before hiring them.
Maybe highlight words that contribute to the score.
You get so much from speech cues, filler words, etc. To try to completely eliminate that and still make rational hiring decisions is a fool's errand.
Oh, wait, this happens now... :( But it would be even easier without true identity and non-verbal cues, etc. Words on a screen/page could be written by anyone.
Real identity is crucial, because what matters more than words is actions, and only with a real name, face, and history can past actions be examined to determine whether the person lives up to their rhetoric. If political history teaches us anything, it should teach us to pay less attention to what politicians say and more attention to what they have done.
So, as interesting as debates can be, maybe we need less of those and more examination of candidates' past. If we really want to know what a candidate believes and what he will do if elected, we should look at what he's done in the past.
Hilarious! But I wonder if it is true.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/04/22/475339930/episo...
Sounds like bullshit to me.
See, for example, 'Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians', Claudia Goldin, Cecilia Rouse: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
If you're hiring for some mid-level orchestra, bad mechanics on a sufficiently-skilled player might be enticing. And as you say, bad mechanics among top performers are basically nonexistent.
Perhaps a better example would be a teacher identifying the most promising school/college-age musicians?
But Oh boy, Life does not revolve around tech interviews. Make peace with it. An old school psychologist would observe us and say that the people obsessed with tech interviews faced an emotional toll of rejection during early career and are trying to get over it.
Google, Facebook and other companies are like parents of the tech kids and the kids are seeking some kind of approval or validation from them via passing their technical interviews. You are not cool enough if you don't crack our interview.
Its possible we are doing something very wrong here.
I'd like to see the people behind this project apply their technical skills to something more useful to the industry and the society in general.
>> to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude
Any woman who's gone through that process will likely want to get another career, that where people are treated with more respect. And I suppose many men are having the exact same thoughts.
The more you mock your talent pool, the more actively that talent is running in the opposite direction, just to get out of this mess.
We don't really know that at all. Technical interviews are an invaluable tool in finding people who can write software and be collaborative co-workers.
A lot of software developers on the receiving end don't like them. Part of that is because a good technical interview pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to show that you can think through problems. Not all developers appreciate being taken out of their comfort zone.
The other part of the problem is that some technical interviews are conducted clumsily. "Code FizzBuzz, go!" As with the rest of the interview, skill of the interviewer matters.
I had a guy freak out walking through a simple algorithm in java at the white board in an interview. Maybe he was the best developer ever if he were put in a quiet dark room and never made eye contact with anyone. Given that we had other candidates who could actually interact calmly and intelligently in an interview/collaborative situation, we weren't going to go with the guy that freaked out.
Nobody asks you to demonstrate that you can climb or hammer.
I'm curious. When a plumber shows up at your house, do you whiteboard him?
The author admits it's not statistically significant, but nonetheless it somewhat makes sense, if you take human nature into account.
If there's any bias in the technology field, it's probably that males are assumed "smarter", but women are still liked and desired.
So, if a female is not answering questions as sharply, but is masked as a male, the bias is to deduct extra points. If a male is answering Q's while masked as a female, the interviewer is pleased and awards extra points.
Just my theory, but it seems to fit. Again, though... a very small sampling.
I think if a paper was released tomorrow that said "female programmers 30% undervalued as observed by double blind coding challenge" head hunters would fix that problem overnight.
I have managed many developers...... some of the ones that are the best coders are NOT the most productive nor the most valuable employees. There are a lot of skills that are needed besides ability to code.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2008....
https://www.upf.edu/rs/_pdf/jornadesGenere/GenderGaps_Ferrer...
I don't know why we keep trying. This is what peer reviews are for.
I couldn't be sued for pay discrimination if ALL of my underpaid engineers are women, since there is no benchmark for a lawsuit to compare the discrimination too!
I jest, but it really does surprise me that more companies aren't trying to aggressively poach underpaid women from other companies.
Except that correcting for experience, the pay gap shrinks to about 94 cents on the dollar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI
I'm with John Green here: Much of the strong negative feeling around the gender pay gap comes from women as a whole feeling "squeezed" because they still do an out-sized amount of the unpaid work in our society. This also contributes to the absolute numbers pay gap, because women need to ask for more flexibility to be able to accomplish that unpaid work.
I wish discussions around that issue were more nuanced and fact based. The answer is more complicated than the simplistic notion that one gender is being crappy to the other, in either direction.
The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
[1] https://www.shrm.org/Advocacy/Issues/CivilRights/Documents/G...
The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
Wow. Congrats on an incredible spin job! I'm saying there is a gender disparity, and that this is apparent in the sentiments of women! (Feeling "squeezed") Yet somehow you are spinning it as if I'm saying the opposite! I also assert that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar -- right there in black and white in my gp comment. Are you somehow suggesting you are disagreeing with me by restating it in your comment?
It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".
Please re-read my comment. I am asserting that a) 70% or 80% is not factual. b) The factual number is more like 94%. c) The issue extends beyond that 94% number, involving the actual demands on women's time through societal expectations around essential but unpaid work done by women -- Women are effectively working more for less renumeration, but the issue is more nuanced than just one number can relate.
I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy. There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20% so it's really just an argument over whether or not the speaker believes that remaining pay gap is the result of hiring or wage discrimination.
I would say that the numbers very strongly show there is a 6% pay gap. If we assume the job market is efficient, then either there is some bias against women or women slightly under-perform men or women are worse at negotiating salaries or they are receiving some renumeration in the form of greater flexibility.
There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20%
Yet. I don't find it intellectually satisfying to say something doesn't exist just because we don't have a theory that covers it well. The disparity is smaller, but it does exist. I also observe how hectic the schedules of professional women with children appear to be. I'm not sure we completely understand what's going on there, but I don't think the sentiments of women around this issue are entirely disconnected from objective reality. From what I can see, women are "squeezed" in terms of the resource of time.
Not to mention that taking care of babies, in some senses, has to be done by women, as men can't breastfeed. (I'm of course only talking about breastfeeding, but it is a significant amount of work that only a woman can do, unless you prefer to feed your baby from bottles, but this has been proven to be less healthy and therefore less preferred for the baby).
Also, in terms of fixing things, that's supposed to be something you do once, and it stays fixed. Much of traditional "women's work" is recurring.
But it doesn't work like that, woman doing the same job with the same experience as men have a pay gap difference as low as 1.6%.
So, good luck finding someone willing to work for 20% less than what the industry is paying.
If we want to fix that number, we need to give Dads more leeway, more flexibility, and importantly, no gruff, about taking care of their families. This will likely result in a net productivity drop of men as a whole across all industries. But it'll probably fix the perceived pay gap.
If women were universally paid 20-30% less than men for the exact same job, and possess exactly the same qualifications, quality of work, time put in, education, experience, etc., there would literally be swaths of companies only hiring women. It's a no-brainer decision. The fact that we don't see these companies is proof that the gap is a myth.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/medical-specialtie...
Suddenly we're looking at gender skew in two highly technical, prestigious, lucrative fields, and seeing that they prompt totally different types and amounts of discussion.
This was largely debunked from a biological perspective [1]. Any psychological perceptions you may be referring to are largely cultural and subject to the biases that this product is trying to combat.
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468.full
The study isn't saying that there are no genders - specifically it is saying:
Our results demonstrate that regardless of the cause of observed sex/gender differences in brain and behavior (nature or nurture), human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain.
Nothing in this view says it's not possible that, for example, an interest or a skill for engineering, while rare in both genders, might be n times more common in men than in women.
Here's some directly-relevant literature, which points to a systematic preference for occupations in men vs women: [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
aphextron didn't elaborate on the source of the psychological differences. I was pointing out that it wasn't biological and most likely cultural.
BTW it's not even debunked from the biological perspective. It's debunked from a brain anatomy perspective.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE
Rather, I was drawing parallels between software and radiology careers, and observing that one is considered a major, public issue while the other is basically an internal discussion within medicine.
What I think is interesting is that there are a handful of fields - primarily technology and corporate leadership - where the gender imbalance is a national topic. I'm sure it's largely down to the visibility of those fields, but there are a lot of people discussing sexism in tech whose backgrounds are neither research nor technology. That seems much less true for something like radiology.
It also seems to muddy the waters a great deal. With inside-baseball discussions like medicine, I assume(?) things like roughly when the gender imbalances form are common knowledge. In tech, we seem to be constantly rehashing those matters (see: corporate diversity reports constantly stressing "our applicant pool is lower-diversity than our staff, so please stop reducing this issue to discriminatory hiring").
Source: my wife just finished her medical residency.
Around HN?
1) I have seen quite a few things about the smaller numbers of men moving into traditionally female fields (nursing being a big example). That may fit with your point about cool/important jobs.
2) But regarding importance, I do think it matters a lot when the field is as socially prominent and well paid as tech jobs.
3) When you suggest that construction work might have a lot of sexism, you don't get a lot of pushback--it's just not a contested topic in the same way. Hence less discussion.
Yes, in at least the latter case (or, at least the more general case of primary/secondary teaching.)
Here's a few for welding (and these have already been posted to HN).
http://www.witc.edu/pgmpages/welding/women.htm
http://www.womeninwelding.com/
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/careers/hey-women-want-hot-c...
Generally these are easy to find. You just put "women in " and the industry into any search engine.
Additionally, a software engineer probably makes more than a roofer, welder, and kindergarten teacher combined.
Part of the reason for studying software engineering is because it's part of a larger trend of women not being as prevalent in high-paying careers. That's also why the number of women CEOs and other leadership positions gets so much attention.
So, while I understand your point (there are any number of careers that have huge gender gaps that no one is looking at), software engineering is specifically scrutinized due to the number of current jobs, the average salary, and the expected growth of the profession over time. No other field has the kind of potential impact on the employee that software engineering does.
WolframAlpha reports that in May 2016 there were 144.6 million workers in the USA and 87.2 male workers. That'd mean that 2.5% of all workers are software engineers. If you figure that 75% of software engineers are male (some quick searching suggests this is a conservative number), then >3% of all employed males are software engineers. My instinct is that's high, but if you have a source I'll happily become informed.
But if you add a bunch of similar fields that probably have software engineers you could probably get close to 3M: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000
There's no downside to the field on the dimensions of pay and danger. Software engineering/development is safe and well paid, thus there is an unqualified incentive to get one's favored group into the field, and if there is a perception that there is a systemic internal bias against them, to attempt to alleviate that bias.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
Would go for Laurie Anderson's Voice of Authority anytime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajQNIAY78k&feature=youtu.be...
Used to great extent here: The Cultural Ambassador - Live https://open.spotify.com/track/3uM0L8r6lJGaU54v9RjwJK
If we don't have equal pay for equal work (and equivalent skill, etc), I think we can agree that's unfair and a problem. But if we do have equal pay for equal work, but still don't have equal pay, then I'd say we may still have a problem. Why aren't women making the same work decisions as men? If social pressure is keeping women from doing equal work, that's bad. If social pressure is forcing men to make shittier sacrifices for pay, that's bad. In the article linked, women churn more. That's probably bad.
If there's inequality without unequal pay or unequal hiring, then the problem isn't the fault of the firms, but it's still a problem.