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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

#191

Post by Spivak »

bduerst wrote: post #132
stcredzero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is deceptive because it's an opinion piece on Youtube. The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1]. It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed". [1] h…

But he brought that up in the video with the "unexplained pay gap" that still remains when you control for known discrepancy causing variables.

I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy. There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20% so it's really just an argument over whether or not the speaker believes that remaining pay gap is the result of hiring or wage discrimination.

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

#192

Post by NetTechM »

bionsuba wrote: post #160
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but isn't "let's just hire only women for a while to balance out the numbers" going to violate a whole bunch of employment regulations?

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 think you are talking about affirmative action, not so much a specific guide to hiring process. The law states that x ratio of specific minorities have to be hired/enrolled per year as a catch up mechanism that is largely outdated in 2016.

As far as University enrollment, women have led the numbers for years so that isn't really at the heart of it. More so the subjects they choose as a major/minor being the issue.

Marketing STEM majors to minorities and women has been a priority for a short amount of time, so we will see how it pans out in the next decade.

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

#193

Post by sushisource »

bionsuba wrote: post #160
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but isn't "let's just hire only women for a while to balance out the numbers" going to violate a whole bunch of employment regulations?

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.

Well, not entirely true:

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/01/479795967/asian-american-group...

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

#194

Post by Jemmeh »

mpweiher wrote: post #176
Jemmeh wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorry, I went back and edited my comment but you had already posted.

The reason we need to figure out the confidence gender gap issue is because it leads to less opportunities for women. Anyone who is less confident is going to have less opportunities. But for various reasons, women tend to have a lot less confidence than men. Yes, that's something that is partially internal to each person. But the fact that large groups of women tend to be less confident than large groups of men means there are external factors for this too.

And it's hard to say, "Okay ladies, well just be more confident then" because when we do become confident, it's frowned upon. That's one of those external issues. No matter how much confidence I could build up within myself, if other people only view it as "bossy", that's an external factor.

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

#195

Post by crusso »

AndreyErmakov wrote: post #64
crusso wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned We don't really know that at all. Technical interviews are an invaluable tool in finding people who can write software and be collaborative co-workers. A lot of software developers on the receiving end don't like them. Part of that is because a good technical interview pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you t…

What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.

YMMV, but I've always worked in service-oriented development organizations for startups or companies that behaved like startups on the development side. Pressure comes with the territory and I'd rather know how potential colleagues behave with a small amount of interview pressure before being stuck with a veritable basket case in a real-world high-pressure situation.

I had a guy freak out walking through a simple algorithm in java at the white board in an interview. Maybe he was the best developer ever if he were put in a quiet dark room and never made eye contact with anyone. Given that we had other candidates who could actually interact calmly and intelligently in an interview/collaborative situation, we weren't going to go with the guy that freaked out.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

new_hackers wrote: post #190
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…

dude, what decade are you from? I'm totally stoked about this totally tubular voice modulation. It's like totally wicked dude! Totally!

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

bionsuba wrote: post #160
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but isn't "let's just hire only women for a while to balance out the numbers" going to violate a whole bunch of employment regulations?

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.

> Companies and colleges say all the time that they're looking for a specific ratio of races and genders and nothing happens to them.

That's because that's not illegal.

Hiring only X (gender/race/etc.) to achieve the ratio you want, OTOH, is among the many means to realize such targets that are illegal.

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

#198

Post by Tyr42 »

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…

There is evidence to the contrary, where they have run this experiment in the real world. This is for Orchestras.

As late as 1970, the top five orchestras in the U.S. had fewer than 5% women. It wasn’t until 1980 that any of these top orchestras had 10% female musicians. But by 1997, they were up to 25% and today some of them are well into the 30s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made.

Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And, indeed, the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.

So there is another field like CS where this approach actually helped a significant amount.

http://curt-rice.com/2013/10/01/what-the-worlds-best-orchest...

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

#199

Post by pharrington »

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…

The thing that particularly strikes me is that as far as I understand, any specialized group will have disproportionate representation of non specialized groups from the general population. Sufficiently small samples from a larger group will not represent the larger group unless the samples are deliberately chosen for a given property. However, let's be honest: your company is not hiring the absolute, top 0.1% best programmers and totally doesn't need to (and you don't know how to find that SS tier programmer anyway), so deliberately biasing a small group towards gender/race/whatever balanced representation isn't going to hurt your competitiveness. But if the goal is to solve misogyny or other problems within a particular microculture, it's not clear to me that proportional representation will actually change that microculture instead of just ending up with weird shit like #leanin.

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

#200

Post by sliverstorm »

CM30 wrote: post #116
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…

This is a good point. There are often differences in how people of different genders (and nationalities, interest groups, classes, educational levels, etc) express themselves regardless of the format, and modulating their voice doesn't really hide that. For example, I've run quite a few forums before, and I'm pretty confident I (and quite a lot of other forum admins/moderators) could reliably judge someone's gender t…

Of course completely dehumanizing the interviewer & interviewee expressly prevents any degree of culture fit selection, which could be bad for all parties.
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