We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#91

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

qq66 wrote: post #45

Kevin_S wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#92

Post by Jemmeh » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #40

Jemmeh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What evidence do you have that some speaking patterns are more common with women? Can you link to some data? Edit: Lots of opinions here. Still no data.

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.

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.)

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#93

Post by russelluresti » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

grb423 wrote: post #55

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 .

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#94

Post by VOYD » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

benkuhn wrote: post #15

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 assessme…

"Like, Totally!"

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#95

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #90

smokeyj wrote: post #49

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.

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…

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.

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#96

Post by apl » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #91

qq66 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#97

Post by balls187 » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

> it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.

This conclusion (imo) should have been bolded. I disagree that getting women to "dust themselves off" is an easier fix than if there were inherent bias against women in interviewing.

My theory is that this is tied to (In the US) men being more tolerant of taking risks, which leads to being more tolerant of failure, which leads to being able to more easily "dust oneself off."

I'd imagine if you looked at women in this study who played competitive sports, they would be less likely to leave the platform.

Risk-aversion might also contribute to women being less likely to ask for a promotion, raise, or negotiate salary.

I disagree that "dusting yourself off" as being an easy fix similarly for why I think "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" is not an effective way to elevate people out of poverty. There are more cultural biases to overcome than a simple behavior change.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#98

Post by mwcampbell » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #29

gravypod wrote: post #18

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 i…

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#99

Post by xiaoma » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #58

jboy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

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.

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.

Re: We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

#100

Post by Jemmeh » Wed, Jun 29, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

>"Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance."

I've seen quite a few studies pointing out this "confidence gap" now. They have shown women to be less confident, and it shows in their actions and speaking patterns. I still hear these speaking patterns even in the voice modulated versions-- statements sounding like questions with the upward inflection at the end. Vocal fry. Lots of "uhm, well, erm" flustered speak. So it doesn't surprise me that even with a modulated voice these women still sound unsure of themselves and thus they still didn't interview as well.

As women there are some actions we can take. It's good to be aware of these speaking patterns and try to break them--but ultimately there are so many of these patterns that show that the only real solution is to try to internalize confidence. It's easier said than done. And we can't ignore the fact that there are reasons outside of ourselves for why women are not as confident as men. It's not just an internal issue. While we can take some actions for ourselves, we should still be looking at the external reasons that caused the issue in the first place. Why are large amounts of women less confident compared to men? Let's tackle those issues, too.

When women try to be confident, it can get frowned upon. A man being assertive is a leader, a woman is bossy. Women are quicker to hit walls for just how confident they're allowed to be before they get the "bossy/bitchy" label thrown at them. The below article makes good counterpoints for the confidence-gap, and provides sources to some studies regarding women and confidence. And I've seen women call each other bitchy/bossy, too. This is something that society as a whole needs to work on.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/23/female...