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We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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

#101

Post by jbmorgado »

hharnisch wrote: post #62

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.

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

#102

Post by jbmorgado »

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…

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.

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

#103

Post by misterrobot »

xiaoma wrote: post #99
cortesoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but then I'd have to stop putting ASCII art of my genitals in my comments. Ugh.

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

#104

Post by dmansen »

DanBC wrote: post #86
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 .

Yes they are. You don't read about them because I guess you don't spend any time on the welding equivalent of HN. 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 en…

Perfect.

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

#106

Post by MustardTiger »

AndreyErmakov wrote: post #41

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…

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?

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

#107

Post by aphextron »

Bartweiss wrote: post #88
rcpt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surgery has a large gap to but I rarely hear it brought up in these discussions. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/medical-specialtie...

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.

It's almost as if men and women have some fundamental differences in psychology that affect their preferred choice of career.

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

#108

Post by jsprogrammer »

Jemmeh wrote: post #92
jsprogrammer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ameri…

The NYT blog post starts out discussing regional dialects, then presents a study of 23 Southern Californians aged 18-22...

The only study the post links to is paywalled and the link to a conference paper is dead.

Your second link is also paywalled.

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

#109

Post by rjbwork »

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 .

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.

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

#110

Post by _dark_matter_ »

rcpt wrote: post #76
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 .

Surgery has a large gap to but I rarely hear it brought up in these discussions. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post/medical-specialtie...

To be fair, my wife is in medical school, and gender imbalances in specialties is brought up all the time.
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