> masking gender had no effect on interview performance
> it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant
That's the whole point - the proper conclusion is "the numbers are meaningless, the experiments we did cannot provide any opinion about the existence, magnitude and direction of such differences", and any conclusions you might draw from seeing some specific numbers would make you less informed than you are right now.
That's not true at all. "Less than significant" is not "the numbers are meaningless", it's "the arbitrary threshold p=.05 was not met". p=.049 is not magic, p=.051 is not worthless. They have far more in common than either does with p=.011, and claiming that giving out specific numbers would make things worse is absurd.
I agree that it's bad practice to go "hey, p=.09, but it could be meaningful!" But it's at least as bad to say "we cannot provide any opinion about... such differences". That's simply false, you can provide data and confidence about the topic.
To what extent were the numbers meaningless? And how big was the unproven but probably effect so somebody else can try to verify it? Or even not try, discarding it as irrelevant because it was too small?
And the most important question that every statistical study should answer: What effect magnitudes were discarded by this research?
Claiming insignificant results and refusing to share them is telling your audience "well, we learned something, but we'll hide our findings from you because you are just too stupid to even imagine the kind of thing we learned here."
Yes, for some audiences that would be true, but it's something a researcher shouldn't even imagine telling somebody. It's basically incompatible with the kind of thoughts required from researchers.
Not statistically significant means that it is exceedinly likely that the difference was simply due to randomness in the subject selection, and that no difference in fact exists. At this point you're just reviewing the researchers' methodology.
Not statistically significant already says you cant say much about the observation.
But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment (contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa for when mens voices are masked as a womans.
And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of bias / prejudice.
> what if woman already get preferential treatment
I always felt it was the case. IT is such a man place that every one is happy when a woman come, even if she is a little bit less efficient compared to men. Myself included. So I am biased to favour women.
Agreed. If you think about the 2 extremes... it's not ideal to work in an office with 100% men or 100% women... for very different reasons (which I won't list here).
Our society was sold the idea that diversity would be beneficial for productivity. When and why did we stop valuing the end and instead value the means?
Was our society also sold the idea that dozens of frivolous layers of middle management and bureaucracy would be beneficial for productivity as well? I'm not buying the idea that diversity is the problem here.
Not really. Think about this: how many of these jobs end up being under qualified jobs? in some places, hiring a certain percent of women grants you some benefits from the government. Also, do you think their opinions, work, etc. will be appreciated as the one of a male coworker that got his job without special treatment?
Think about this: A job is a job. If you're applying for a job, you want it, or at least you want the option to take it. It's true AA hires have to go the extra mile to prove their competence, but having a forum to do it is a huge advantage. So is getting paid.
It is extremely complicated. The problem is rooted in the fact that there are, actually, differences between men and women. When I see arguments that there are Zero differences, it makes me crazy. There are many differences. However, there are also many differences from any given individual to any other given individual, even if they are the same gender.
We need to find ways to both give women more opportunity to build their chops and not merely be hired because they are women, while also finding ways to value what they do bring to the table that isn't what men bring to the table. Studies show that diverse companies are more profitable and successful. When I worked for a Fortune 500 company with a good track record for diversity, internally, I recall them saying "We hire everyone so we can more easily sell to everyone" or words to that effect. They believed strongly that not having representatives internally for various populations was guaranteed to undermine their ability to understand and communicate with those populations, as well as develop products that worked for them, etc.
So, while there is no easy path forward here, it should be done, and not for pie in the sky "ideals," but for pragmatic ones -- because it has a proven track record of success for the company when the company can get this detail right.
Well said. This is why I'm frustrated to only hear about diversity in the tech field. Why not education? Wouldn't our kids benefit from diverse role models?
Wouldn't our kids benefit from diverse role models?
Potentially, yes.
I vaguely recall seeing something once about the dearth of male teachers in elementary education and the negative impact this has on male students. I have also heard (back when I was involved in the online gifted education community) that a lot of (female) school teachers end up in elementary education due to their lack of competence in math. When they can't hack the math, they got told "Oh, go teach kids!"
Men do not get this same message. I am a mathy woman. I tutored my ex husband in math when he took college classes. He had a serious career in the military where he ultimately retired as a high ranking NCO. No one ever suggested that his bad math abilities meant he should go teach kids.
Furthermore, when men do desire to go into education, everyone looks askance at them, like they are obviously pedophiles.
I ended up homeschooling my sons for many years. I had to put in a lot of effort to undo the damage to my oldest son's self esteem (and his relationship to math, which he hated by the time I pulled him out of school) from the awful baggage he got from public school regarding math. I firmly believe that women who are bad at math get their egos destroyed when they are blithely told "Oh, go teach little kids!" (implied: because you can't hack a real career) and they pass their math neurosis and incompetence on to many of the nation's kids and our entire nation is the worse off for it.
'Not statistically significant' means you can and should say nothing about it — it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you should leave it that: it happened by chance.
In terms of analysis - it might as well not have happened at all and is only worth mentioning if you had expected something significant to happen.
> it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you should leave it that: it happened by chance.
That's wrong. That's very wrong, and it reinforces the confusion already surrounding 'significance'.
p=0.05 means that there was a 5% chance of obtaining results at least as extreme as measured if the null hypothesis was true (i.e. there was no difference to observe). p=.06 is a 6% chance, and p=.04 is a 4% chance.
None of those are "as likely as not", which would be 50%, or p=0.5. Nor is p=.05 an inherently meaningful cutoff - it's an arbitrary threshold on a continuum of possibilities, and indeed 'significance' is often set at p=.01 instead. Overemphasis of a cutoff leads to p-hacking, and treating significance as binary promotes bad studies (p=.04 is not as meaningful as p=.00001).
This article is too credulous to an unproven result, but saying that all results >.05 are "as likely by chance" or not worth discussing is intensely wrong. The original blog post responded quite legitimately by indicating an unexpected-but-unproven result, and suggesting further study.
> 'Not statistically significant' means you can and should say nothing about it
No, absolutely not. Mentioning that they did it, and could not come to a conclusion because there weren't enough participants, is far better and more information than pretending it never happened. It can indicate that we probably should investigate further and maybe do studies with enough participants.
> “Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews,” she writes, “the disparity goes away entirely.”
And even those trends went away when you controlled for people leaving the site after having less interviews implying that if there was a trend it was due to practice.
Did they give the actual data so we could see if it was statistically significant or not? Lots of blog posts proclaim things to be or not be statistically significant but have no basis for their proclamation and don't know statistics at all.
I can imagine that we do not just perceive someone's gender by the sound of their voice, but the way in which they present their opinions and what they say in general.
So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly, prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man, but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as female might then not be considered at all.
I think that's a lot of it; There are definitely masculine and feminine communication styles, and I think that like a lot of other things, feminine communication styles are devalued. The people doing it in most cases probably aren't aware of it, but I'm sure it does happen.
It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine (e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that may work in favor of women during an interview.
On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.
We may want to consider context when sorting "good" and "bad" communication styles.
What is the job being interviewed for? What is the work environment like for that job? How will a different communication style help or hinder someone in that work environment?
Formally there has been some study that you could look through [1] and there are some simple examples that you can play around with [2], but personally a lot of it just feels anecdotal. There are certainly some general societal and socialization factors in play (women have to carefully balance just the right level of assertiveness or else be perceived as either incompetent or a bitch- in some environments there's no middle ground at all). As a women who's been in software development for a decade I can definitely tell when I code switch between talking to technical people and not, but from a first person perspective it's probably too hard to separate out meaningful and widely applicable things from my own quirks and personal experiences.
The thing is that communication style is not a mere decoration: it's an important skill for an engineer.
And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if you are first confindent.
Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.
But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.
The original story talks about women being more easily discouraged than men -- this is in line with other new stories I have seen in the same genre. If all that is true, then one might suspect that men talk more confidently while women talk more diffidently.
In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes, they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.
Exactly. If you've ever masked a friends voice as the opposite gender, it doesn't really matter. You can tell by their speaking style that they are your friend.
It spent many hours on the front page. In fact I think we might have marked it as extra substantive, since Aline Lerner is one of very few writers to consistently have new and interesting things to say about these well-worn topics.
As well it should, because it's a poor-quality media follow-up report (sometimes known as copycats, or less kindly as blogspam) on a high-quality original article that appeared here and was thoroughly discussed yesterday.
The reason why there are so few women in tech (particularly in computer science) is because software engineering is still culturally seen like a "Man's job" and fewer women enrol for IT or Computer Science degrees at university.
Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+ males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software engineering.
Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really want.
Wow bro you're so right. The reason is 100% culture. Nature has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's all nurture. Omg. You're so enlightened.
The fact that men evolved for millions of years tackling incredibly hard logistics problems (hunting animals, warring against other tribes and nations) while women evolved during that time in social roles that revolved around bearing and caring for children has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that men gravitate more towards solving logistics problems than women. Absolutely not related. Nope. Not at all. It's all CULTURE! Nature had nothing to with it, it's all NURTURE!
/s
You're blaming it all on culture but only a sith deals in absolutes. The real answer is a combination of nature and nurture. Your black and white thinking reveals your cluelessness.
Watch this documentary if you actually want to learn the empirical truth about nature, nurture, gender, etc:
Until then, have fun remaining in your hypnotized trance state of thinking in absolutist black-and-white terms and blaming culture for everything you don't like.
We've banned this account for breaking the HN guidelines. If you want to comment here, you need to do so civilly and substantively, and avoid flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say.
On the contrary, my sister was directly told by a career advisor at school that she should go and study computer science/software engineering, because even if she doesn't like it, some company will have to hire her because she is a woman. I think she was considering it, but after that meeting she decided completely against it, deciding that she would hate to be given a job purely because of her gender.
Arguing she was misinformed is different that arguing she made a decision you don't agree with. What did the guidance counselor say that was incorrect? Her decision to choose a different career where she wouldn't have to worry about being considered a token is one of the tragedies of the politically correct insistence on diversity.
Do you think any company has a written policy of "only hire women"? Of course not - that would get them in legal trouble. But I guarantee that I know companies where if there is an opening for a technical position, if there is 10 male applicants and one female applicant, the woman will get the position regardless of her skill, because they company is trying to hire more women no matter what.
Ok, are you saying that there are no companies that every hire women/minorities to fulfil a quota and appear more diverse? Even though companies like Amazon openly boast that they have certain % of black/asian/latino employees which is apparently meant to show how diverse they are?
I mean, if I gave you names, what would you do? ring them up and ask if they have a preference for hiring women? You can say that all of this sounds like a myth as many times as you like, you are not going to change the world this way.
I'm sure there are some sleazeball companies that do but I don't believe this sort of unspoken policy has any significant prevalence.
If you name names, I can determine truth independently. If you don't feel comfortable doing so, that's okay too. I just won't know. And that's not the end of the world.
Why do you think they'd have to be sleazeballs to do this? Everyone is screaming at them that the industry has a "woman problem" and that it's their fault for not hiring enough of women. It is more a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease.
I'm curious. Why is the lack of women in software development seen as a more urgent issue than the lack of men in school teaching or nursing, or the lack of women in blue collar work eg garbage collecting?
This isn't meant as 'whataboutery'; it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed... but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?
> Why is the lack of women in software development seen as a more urgent issue than the lack of men in school teaching or nursing, or the lack of women in garbage collection?
Seen by whom? I'd wager a sum of money that the average person is far more aware that teaching (primary school at least) is a female-prevalent field and that they do not see it as a problem.
Perhaps it's not even a solvable problem (assuming we agree that it actually is a problem)
> it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed...
Perhaps there's a wider issue of talent being missed because the signaling during employment process in the US is broken for a large chunk of the population? Not to mention certain things like class and wealth signaling.
But why isn't it seen as a problem? Isn't that kind of shitty that most people don't see it as a problem that teaching young children is a field "for women"? I think there is insight into the general problem of diversity in all kinds of fields (and not just the small slice of tech jobs) if we look for answers to the questions I just asked.
And since there are studies showing that diversity has a positive impact(in tech), why aren't we asking if diverse influences are good for our kids? Maybe male role models would be good for kids?
Last time I saw statistics (based on Sweden, so some difference might exists), only about 10% of men and 10% of women work in a profession with gender equal ratios. Sweden also has about the same 80% of women and men as employed, so it might not be that surprising that the number is so identical between the genders.
The big question I find being overlooked by gender equality discussion, is why almost every profession has become gendered, and after all feminist movement in the last 50 years so, the trend of more gendered profession is continuing strong. For example, the teaching profession has since the 60's integrated female gender identity into the work culture, which pushes naturally away men from it. However, I rarely see any gender equality pointing out the problem of the teaching culture as a cause of low male participation. Tech industry has the similar "bro" culture, but that has been targeted by gender equality advocates for about as long as such culture has had a name.
My personal observation is that tech has money, and money is power. I would bet my salary that if programmers didn't make a lot of money, there wouldn't be the spotlight on diversity in tech that there is now. Teachers unfortunately do not get paid hardly anything. In the States at least, it is a low-paying job (except in California). Which is awful. But anyway, my perspective is that tech has a combative equality/diversity climate because there is money in tech. This is also why you can meet students in CS programs who do not like to write code. Their parents have put pressure on them to go into CS because of the legendary salary potential, or they themselves think they can pull off being a programmer without writing code, or something. I believe the reason we don't see a raucous discussion about gender equality in psychology or teaching is because those industries are not seen as having high salaries or as being powerful (even though psychologists have very high salaries, and teachers are probably the most powerful people in any society). People attach a kind of mythology to tech, but not to teaching. And so if your identity is built around fighting for diversity, tech seems like a ripe target for diversification, even if -- who knows -- it ends up being much like psychology, where it simply does not capture the interest of one gender as much as the other. But nothing is black and white, of course. For example, enough men find psychology sufficiently interesting that 5% of psychologists are men. And so the question of "Why don't women pursue careers in tech?" may be just that easy: "Because a much higher percentage of men find it interesting than do women" instead of "Because there is a conspiracy (or subconscious desire) to keep women from pursuing high-earning career paths". And just a side note: I married a Swede and spend time in Sweden, and both Sweden and the US seem to have approximately similar efforts to diversify industries based on gender.
There may be some bias, but that doesn't explain all of it. For example psychology is now almost exclusively a woman-dominated field (literally upwards of 95% of psychologists are women). A few people have asked the question about why this is the case, but there is no spotlight on psychology like there is on tech. I challenge you to find anyone calling for diversity in psychology.
I'm not sure about this. I read general purpose news(the us section of csmonitor everyday, and google news almost everyday). I see stories about the lack of tech diversity in regular news, but I haven't seen anything about nursing or teaching.
It is changing. At UIUC undergrad enrollment is officially[1] 1 female per 4 males in Computer Science. I have been told that this year's incoming freshman are 1:1 and they achieved it while raising the average test scores. It will take some time before official numbers become public.
They still need to deal with the retention problem.
"Doing what they really want" includes deciding on the type of work environment you want to have. Relationships matter - I know my own happiness with the jobs I have had has hinged more on the people working there and less on the task at hand.
I have a feeling that speech styles matter. A style that comes from a male socialization, sounds confident rather than self deprecating, and assertive rather than conciliatory.
Have you heard a woman's voice in this "masked" state? It still sounds extremely feminine because of the manner of speaking. It's very odd. You can even hear it in this short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s
That alone gives the observation questionable merit.
I was going to ask this. It's quite difficult to make male/female voices sound like either with just audio filters/modulation, so I immediately wondered how convincing the effect could really be.
I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.
Besides the speaking patterns you mentioned, women's voices and men's voices resonate in different areas of the vocal tract which you can also hear. Women's voices tend to resonate near the nose and mouth while men's tend to resonate in the chest.
This makes me wonder why they tried to make the voices sound gender neutral/other gendered rather than say, somewhat non human like.
Would the supposed biases still be there if the voices were masked to sound like say, Darth Vader? Or maybe a Dalek from Doctor Who? Would there still be the same issues with speech patterns and what not if it sounded like the interviewee was speaking in robo speak?
I think the easiest solution would be to just conduct the interview via text only. You could even apply filters to transform some common grammatical structures or word choices with gender cues into a more neutral form.
> which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.
No, the control group for that would be men who have, as you put it, "stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent", i.e. similarly qualified men who happen to naturally sound like this.
This is interesting and all...but wouldn't it have been easier all around to just modulate the voices of both genders into a single, gender-neutral tone, or even better yet, perform the interviews solely through text? Something about the way the whole thing was implemented just feels...gimmicky to me.
If these results are being interpreting correctly, it could be that there are just many more talented men being churned out of schools, and the problem is the pipeline to the interview. This is consistent with my experiences hiring software developers at a Fortune 500 where there is already tremendous preference to hire women to overcome the typical ratio, but very few applicants to choose from.
tl;dr study shows, in a statistically insignificant way, that interviewing is biased in favor of women. author manages to find a way to fit contradictory results to her preexisting view that women are being treated unfairly.
Why does this keep getting removed from the front page?
It's funny to see people justifying this in stupid ways. We all know why women do worse than men. Because they are not as good in technical fields as men. We all know this. Why are people in such denial?
Let's say that only 1% of programmers are women. We're supposed to believe that this is some grave injustice, that many great programmers are not hired because they are women and more still just don't even think about becoming programmers just because they are women. I could easily name 100 great programmers, Torvalds, Stallman, Carmack etc. I challenge anyone to name one, just ONE female programmer that is on that level. How could it possible be that out of the thousands of great programmers out there, not one woman has made it to that level?
Simple: they are NOT AS GOOD AT PROGRAMMING. Has anyone here ever worked with a woman? You end up redoing all of their work for them. In conversations with them it is abundantly clear that they do not understand what is going on. Their brains are just not wired to work that way. This goes for 95%+ of men too, by the way. But it's more like 99.99% of women.
96 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadfrom the original blog post:
> masking gender had no effect on interview performance
> it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant
I agree that it's bad practice to go "hey, p=.09, but it could be meaningful!" But it's at least as bad to say "we cannot provide any opinion about... such differences". That's simply false, you can provide data and confidence about the topic.
And the most important question that every statistical study should answer: What effect magnitudes were discarded by this research?
Claiming insignificant results and refusing to share them is telling your audience "well, we learned something, but we'll hide our findings from you because you are just too stupid to even imagine the kind of thing we learned here."
Yes, for some audiences that would be true, but it's something a researcher shouldn't even imagine telling somebody. It's basically incompatible with the kind of thoughts required from researchers.
That is absolutely part of it.
But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment (contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa for when mens voices are masked as a womans.
And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of bias / prejudice.
I always felt it was the case. IT is such a man place that every one is happy when a woman come, even if she is a little bit less efficient compared to men. Myself included. So I am biased to favour women.
I read a statement that reflects this very well: "when a woman is treated different, it doesn't mean she is treated better".
We need to find ways to both give women more opportunity to build their chops and not merely be hired because they are women, while also finding ways to value what they do bring to the table that isn't what men bring to the table. Studies show that diverse companies are more profitable and successful. When I worked for a Fortune 500 company with a good track record for diversity, internally, I recall them saying "We hire everyone so we can more easily sell to everyone" or words to that effect. They believed strongly that not having representatives internally for various populations was guaranteed to undermine their ability to understand and communicate with those populations, as well as develop products that worked for them, etc.
So, while there is no easy path forward here, it should be done, and not for pie in the sky "ideals," but for pragmatic ones -- because it has a proven track record of success for the company when the company can get this detail right.
Potentially, yes.
I vaguely recall seeing something once about the dearth of male teachers in elementary education and the negative impact this has on male students. I have also heard (back when I was involved in the online gifted education community) that a lot of (female) school teachers end up in elementary education due to their lack of competence in math. When they can't hack the math, they got told "Oh, go teach kids!"
Men do not get this same message. I am a mathy woman. I tutored my ex husband in math when he took college classes. He had a serious career in the military where he ultimately retired as a high ranking NCO. No one ever suggested that his bad math abilities meant he should go teach kids.
Furthermore, when men do desire to go into education, everyone looks askance at them, like they are obviously pedophiles.
I ended up homeschooling my sons for many years. I had to put in a lot of effort to undo the damage to my oldest son's self esteem (and his relationship to math, which he hated by the time I pulled him out of school) from the awful baggage he got from public school regarding math. I firmly believe that women who are bad at math get their egos destroyed when they are blithely told "Oh, go teach little kids!" (implied: because you can't hack a real career) and they pass their math neurosis and incompetence on to many of the nation's kids and our entire nation is the worse off for it.
In terms of analysis - it might as well not have happened at all and is only worth mentioning if you had expected something significant to happen.
That's wrong. That's very wrong, and it reinforces the confusion already surrounding 'significance'.
p=0.05 means that there was a 5% chance of obtaining results at least as extreme as measured if the null hypothesis was true (i.e. there was no difference to observe). p=.06 is a 6% chance, and p=.04 is a 4% chance.
None of those are "as likely as not", which would be 50%, or p=0.5. Nor is p=.05 an inherently meaningful cutoff - it's an arbitrary threshold on a continuum of possibilities, and indeed 'significance' is often set at p=.01 instead. Overemphasis of a cutoff leads to p-hacking, and treating significance as binary promotes bad studies (p=.04 is not as meaningful as p=.00001).
This article is too credulous to an unproven result, but saying that all results >.05 are "as likely by chance" or not worth discussing is intensely wrong. The original blog post responded quite legitimately by indicating an unexpected-but-unproven result, and suggesting further study.
No, absolutely not. Mentioning that they did it, and could not come to a conclusion because there weren't enough participants, is far better and more information than pretending it never happened. It can indicate that we probably should investigate further and maybe do studies with enough participants.
> “Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews,” she writes, “the disparity goes away entirely.”
So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly, prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man, but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as female might then not be considered at all.
So what does this say? Nothing much I think.
It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine (e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that may work in favor of women during an interview.
On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.
What is the job being interviewed for? What is the work environment like for that job? How will a different communication style help or hinder someone in that work environment?
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=text+analysis+gender&hl...
[2] https://www.uclassify.com/browse/uclassify/genderanalyzer_v5 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if you are first confindent.
Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.
But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.
In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes, they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673
Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+ males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software engineering.
Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really want.
The fact that men evolved for millions of years tackling incredibly hard logistics problems (hunting animals, warring against other tribes and nations) while women evolved during that time in social roles that revolved around bearing and caring for children has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that men gravitate more towards solving logistics problems than women. Absolutely not related. Nope. Not at all. It's all CULTURE! Nature had nothing to with it, it's all NURTURE!
/s
You're blaming it all on culture but only a sith deals in absolutes. The real answer is a combination of nature and nurture. Your black and white thinking reveals your cluelessness.
Watch this documentary if you actually want to learn the empirical truth about nature, nurture, gender, etc:
http://vimeo.com/19889788
Until then, have fun remaining in your hypnotized trance state of thinking in absolutist black-and-white terms and blaming culture for everything you don't like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
The Vimeo link I provided is something "genuinely new", I've certainly never seen it here before.
However, I understand that my ad hominems broke HN guidelines.
Carry on.
Trump 2016.
;)
I mean, if I gave you names, what would you do? ring them up and ask if they have a preference for hiring women? You can say that all of this sounds like a myth as many times as you like, you are not going to change the world this way.
If you name names, I can determine truth independently. If you don't feel comfortable doing so, that's okay too. I just won't know. And that's not the end of the world.
Also, it doesn't quite address the actual issue. It's a very superficial response.
This isn't meant as 'whataboutery'; it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed... but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?
Seen by whom? I'd wager a sum of money that the average person is far more aware that teaching (primary school at least) is a female-prevalent field and that they do not see it as a problem.
Perhaps it's not even a solvable problem (assuming we agree that it actually is a problem)
> it's clear that talented women programmers are being missed...
Perhaps there's a wider issue of talent being missed because the signaling during employment process in the US is broken for a large chunk of the population? Not to mention certain things like class and wealth signaling.
The big question I find being overlooked by gender equality discussion, is why almost every profession has become gendered, and after all feminist movement in the last 50 years so, the trend of more gendered profession is continuing strong. For example, the teaching profession has since the 60's integrated female gender identity into the work culture, which pushes naturally away men from it. However, I rarely see any gender equality pointing out the problem of the teaching culture as a cause of low male participation. Tech industry has the similar "bro" culture, but that has been targeted by gender equality advocates for about as long as such culture has had a name.
Because you're not looking for the projects in those other areas, and so you don't find the projects, and so you think there's a focus on tech.
You follow tech news, you read HN, you see all these tech-related programmes.
It's a fairly simple cognitive bias.
They still need to deal with the retention problem.
1. http://www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/#race
That alone gives the observation questionable merit.
I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.
It'd be like saying 'Men in pink jeans do worse in bars than women in camo dresses'.
Would the supposed biases still be there if the voices were masked to sound like say, Darth Vader? Or maybe a Dalek from Doctor Who? Would there still be the same issues with speech patterns and what not if it sounded like the interviewee was speaking in robo speak?
No, the control group for that would be men who have, as you put it, "stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent", i.e. similarly qualified men who happen to naturally sound like this.
It's funny to see people justifying this in stupid ways. We all know why women do worse than men. Because they are not as good in technical fields as men. We all know this. Why are people in such denial?
Let's say that only 1% of programmers are women. We're supposed to believe that this is some grave injustice, that many great programmers are not hired because they are women and more still just don't even think about becoming programmers just because they are women. I could easily name 100 great programmers, Torvalds, Stallman, Carmack etc. I challenge anyone to name one, just ONE female programmer that is on that level. How could it possible be that out of the thousands of great programmers out there, not one woman has made it to that level?
Simple: they are NOT AS GOOD AT PROGRAMMING. Has anyone here ever worked with a woman? You end up redoing all of their work for them. In conversations with them it is abundantly clear that they do not understand what is going on. Their brains are just not wired to work that way. This goes for 95%+ of men too, by the way. But it's more like 99.99% of women.