Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 369 posts

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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

jotux wrote: post #134
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 the best gender-bias comparison to programming is nursing. High demand, decent pay, similar amount of education required, but ~10% of nurses are men (compared to ~21% of programmers who are female)[1]. [1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by Jemmeh »

mpweiher wrote: post #169
Jemmeh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women in general have less confidence than men. (Study: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000078.pd... ) That is a gender-specific gap in confidence. That doesn't mean that there are no men with less-than-average confidence out there. Nor does it mean that there are no men who have a hard time because of said lack of confidence.

> Women in general have less confidence than men. Women are also generally slower than men (I was once faster than the fastest woman on earth, and I am not a particularly fast man). Not winning 100m races against men is not a sign of gender discrimination, it is a sign that men are faster. So if men are better at being confident, and being confident is important, then that's just that. Women can try to learn to be mo…

That's exactly what my post said. It says women can work on internalizing confidence, but we should also try to figure out why large amounts of women have less confidence compared to men, and work on that too.

Discrimination comes into play when women are frowned upon for being confident. For example when asking for a raise. A man can be seen as a go-getter. But for women, that assertiveness can be seen as bitching or whining. One of the studies from the article covers this. Here is directly linked: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf

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

#173

Post by onetwotree »

So I don't think that hiding factors that (we think might) influence biased people is the right way to address bias.

Let's say a woman uses this voice modulator in an interview and gets a job that she wouldn't have otherwise. Now she's going to work in the same shitty, sexist environment that would have denied her the job had they known she was a woman. What problem have we actually solved here?

I think that the problem isn't so much that women can't get jobs in tech as that they don't want to work in an industry that is (correctly or not) perceived as being a sexist sausagefest.

We have to change attitudes and culture to address bias, not simply put on blindfolds.

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

#174

Post by weisser »

jachee wrote: post #37
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…

In the example clips, to me, her vocal fry was a gender tell, even after modulation.

Vocal fry isn't gender specific.

Ira Glass (This American Life) has vocal fry and they discuss the gender bias here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...

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

#175

Post by omginternets »

xienze wrote: post #147

I honestly feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time. Let's pretend someone invents the perfect "gender bias-free" system: no names, no faces, voices are flawlessly transcribed on-the-fly so you can't pick up on speech patterns. What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? I think exercises like this may end up giving people answers they don't want to hear. So, stop wasting time w…

I'm always surprised by the strong underlying assumption that removing interviewer/managerial bias will result in a gender ratio of 50%. There's research to suggest that this assumption is flawed: [0]

Moreover, the idea that anatomy and physiology don't condition preferences or behaviors flies in the face of everything we know about human biology and (embodied) cognition. Let's recognize gender/feminist theory for what they are: a sociological theories, not scientific ones.

Equality, in the sense of gender or racial equality, does not mean we're all the same de naturae. It means we should be treated the same de jure.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...

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

#176

Post by mpweiher »

Jemmeh wrote: post #172
mpweiher wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Women in general have less confidence than men. Women are also generally slower than men (I was once faster than the fastest woman on earth, and I am not a particularly fast man). Not winning 100m races against men is not a sign of gender discrimination, it is a sign that men are faster. So if men are better at being confident, and being confident is important, then that's just that. Women can try to learn to be mo…

That's exactly what my post said. It says women can work on internalizing confidence, but we should also try to figure out why large amounts of women have less confidence compared to men, and work on that too. Discrimination comes into play when women are frowned upon for being confident. For example when asking for a raise. A man can be seen as a go-getter. But for women, that assertiveness can be seen as bitching o…

Should "we" also try to figure out why large amounts of women have less speed compared to men, and work on that, too?

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

#177

Post by onetwotree »

koolba wrote: post #124

Interviwer: "Hi, my name is Roger. I'll be interviewing you today." Interviewee (modulated voice): "Hi Roger. Nice to meet you. My name is Alice." Hmmm ... Speech hints aside, this may not work 100%.

Yeah, also any linguist can tell you that women use language differently than men. Even in written communication you can usually, consciously or not, tell unless someone is very deliberately trying to appear to be the other gender.

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

#178

Post by arprocter »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #165
bionsuba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but who cares? I'm not making a normative statement here, I'm simply stating the fact that no one will come after you if you do this. Companies and colleges say all the time that they're looking for a specific ratio of races and genders and nothing happens to them.

I would very much like to see an example of a major company publishing its desired specific ratios of races and genders.

Not a ratio per say, but there was this[0] recent controversy

[0]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/bbc-criticised-by...

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

#179

Post by tempestn »

xienze wrote: post #147

I honestly feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time. Let's pretend someone invents the perfect "gender bias-free" system: no names, no faces, voices are flawlessly transcribed on-the-fly so you can't pick up on speech patterns. What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? I think exercises like this may end up giving people answers they don't want to hear. So, stop wasting time w…

That's exactly what happened in this particular case! (Perhaps not an answer they didn't want to hear, but certainly a different answer than was expected.) And it seems like it led to an interesting new theory worth exploring, and if that pans out, potentially a great area for improvement.

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

#180

Post by rmc »

xienze wrote: post #147

I honestly feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time. Let's pretend someone invents the perfect "gender bias-free" system: no names, no faces, voices are flawlessly transcribed on-the-fly so you can't pick up on speech patterns. What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? I think exercises like this may end up giving people answers they don't want to hear. So, stop wasting time w…

> What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women?

It's possible, but also the converse is possible. Shall we find out?

Post reply on HN