We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

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).

Hiring is a complex process that is extremely subjective accross role, organization and sub-sector of the tech industry. To the extent this result is correct within the population of interviewing.io; it is in fact quite positive on many levels, if unfortunate on others. Specifically-- again accepting the methodology used here, interviewers are unbiased in their reviewing.

If we consider simply this subset however, I suspect there are several factors which contributed to this result:

* As indicated by others, it was unclear if this actually successfully modulated voice AND that other factors of influence did not leak gender to the interviewer.

* interviewing.io may simply attract men who are better than women.

* The current climate provides a lot of resources and support for women entering tech. Many organizations have made a large push to hire women and thus the top and mid tier women (who are significantly less numerous than male counterparts) are hired into organizations and thus not applying here.

* places where candidates learn about interviewing.io could differ based on gender. A contrived example being males learning about it on HN, while female counterparts learning about it through a short part-time coding bootcamp.

* there was an experience gap or significant skill gap between genders. This was alluded to above.

* women on interview.io are generally worse programmers or perform worse in technical interviews.

* not enough data for statistical significance.

This is a pretty interesting result and could actually be a positive thing for interview.io. It is possible they are objectively evaluating candidates and it is simply a marketing problem which they can adjust for.

There are also some non-trivial differences between men and women which likely matter even in this context. Amy Cuddy does an amazing TED talk (and a longer one as well) about poses and cues and their effects on perception.

If the idea of this investigation was to make a larger observation about the industry, it would be interesting if they could correct for experience & skill level possibly by something completely objective like HackerRank for example. If seperated into 3 skill bands, it would be interesting to compare the actual interview results accross similarly skilled populations. To correct for bias it may be useful to tell interviewers the candidates will be anonymized modulating both voices to try and have both genders voices sound alike as a single neutral voice, ideally while still allowing for pitch and intonation.

Be interested to see a follow up as the site receives more candidates and exposure and grows their organization, ect.

Less and less true as most companies move towards a more agile development cycle

Are you sure that a single data point like this would overthrow the "Intuition" of recruiters? If I understand [1] correct, thats fairly unlikely.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2008....

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.