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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

#121

Post by zeveb »

balls187 wrote: post #97

> 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 i…

> 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."

There are some pretty obvious evolutionary psychology reasons for men to take more risks. Whether evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of just-so stories or not, that's another discussion.

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

#122

Post by SamBam »

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…

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/

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

aphextron wrote: post #107
Bartweiss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by SamBam »

VLM wrote: post #51
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…

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 t…

Men speak with vocal fry all the time.

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/

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

#126

Post by patmcc »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #83
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.

This was studied among lawyers. Female lawyers were significantly less productive. https://www.upf.edu/rs/_pdf/jornadesGenere/GenderGaps_Ferrer...

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.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

Jemmeh wrote: post #100

>"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…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by jotux »

Tarrosion wrote: post #113
russelluresti wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

BLS says 1.1M: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...

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

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

#129

Post by acdha »

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…

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:

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.

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

#130

Post by coherentpony »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #108
Jemmeh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're absolutely right, and I have no idea why you're being downvoted.
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