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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

#301
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% of CS degrees are awarded to women, but they get only 10% of entry-level software jobs. Please stop blaming the pipeline for the difference. Interested, qualified women are being pushed away from the field by bias and attrition, and that's a problem we should be trying to solve.

"pushed away" is so negative. How about "pulled away"? Maybe it isn't politically correct to desire being a stay-at-home mom, but it happens rather often. Sometimes this is an unexpected turn of events, with changing life priorities. Sometimes it is the goal right from the start. I met a woman in college who literally said she was getting her MRS degree. That is, she went to college to meet a suitable husband and bec…

> I met a woman in college who literally said she was getting her MRS degree.

Was she taking computer science?

If we're going to talk anecdotes here, every computer science major I've ever met has done it either for the sunny career prospects or because they were genuinely interested in the subject matter - and usually both. I do not buy your premise that students are graduating from computer science in order to not have a career in it.

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

#302
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I cringed when they said they thought of "giving all females a bane mask". How does that do anything? Anyone getting a person wearing a bane mask would automatically realize they were female.

Not if everyone wears the same "mask" regardless of gender.

They said "giving all females", not "giving everyone".

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some companies who believe an equal workplace should be 50% of each gender then you're right, but that doesn't make the system pointless. The idea of a "gender bias-free" hiring process isn't necessarily to make workplaces more equal or to promote diversity. The point is simply to remove a bias - to eliminate something that pushes you to hire someone who isn't the best candidate. Having a bias drives you to make…

But let's say our "gender-bias free" method leads a manager to hire 7 men and 3 women. This leads the manager to draw the conclusion that "My next hire is more likely to be a male than a female". The manager wants to acquire a good candidate pool as quickly as possible, so now he changes his mental search heuristic to favor male applicants, if he can discern their gender. Haven't we just reinforced his bias further,…

if even you can tell that this is faulty reasoning then surely your hypothetical manager can as well

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

#304

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…

Lol, if we switch the tech industry to text-only interviews, get ready for the full-day programming problems to come back. You get so much from speech cues, filler words, etc. To try to completely eliminate that and still make rational hiring decisions is a fool's errand.

I'd rather be interviewed with a problem then based on how I speak.

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

#305
post #31

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…

Text doesn't solve the problems you described. I believe there could be non-content-related clues present in voice-chat that are absent in text-chat, but all of your examples were content-based clues.

Put a Gender-O-Meter on it. Use some NLP to determine the perceived gender and show the users.

Maybe highlight words that contribute to the score.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep bringing this point up in the comments and you've been answered but I'm curious about something. You say elsewhere that while 20 percent (the actual number is around 18) of CS grads are women, only 10 percent of junior devs are in fact female. Others have mentioned that maybe the women went on to graduate school or are working some CS related job that doesn't fit the definition of "junior dev". The latter po…

Unemployment rates are double for women (vs. men) in computer/mathematical occupations as of last month, so "the unemployment line" is not a completely wild guess. [1] But that's not the point. A supply of women with both the qualifications and the interest exists. We ought to be seeing a representative sample of that supply, and we should do what we can to avert bias within our organizations. [1] http://www.bls.gov/…

Statistics for "Computer and mathematical occupations" covers such a wide variety of occupations as to be meaningless in the context of your own claims about "junior dev" positions. But for the sake of argument..

According to your source, the unemployment rate for women in Computer and mathematical occupations in May was 2.6 vs 1.8 percent for men. That's actually a 31 percent higher amount. Still high but not 50 as you claimed in your previous post. It also says the rate for May of 2015 was exactly the same for both genders at 1.5 percent. This issue has gotten a lot of press in the last 12 months so it is very unlikely that suddenly the numbers are disparate as a result of discrimination after they were the same a year ago.

And in other sectors on your chart like in Management, professional, and related occupations, the unemployment figures are the opposite. Women unemployment went from higher to lower than the men's rate. I mean, in Architecture and engineering occupations, the unemployment rate of men is literally 100 percent higher than women at 2.2 vs 1.1 percent. It just looks like natural statistical gyrations of numbers and not conclusive or even particularly indicative of anything.

And the point is, if you are saying that huge numbers of women are graduating with these degrees and then being shut out of the job market, you can't just stop there, you have to back that up. Even ignoring the fact that just because someone has a degree doesn't mean they're qualified, quoting the percent of females in entry level dev jobs doesn't say anything about where the other women went or what they are doing. I'm pointing out that if they're out there looking for these jobs then the unemployment statistics should reflect that and via your source, they don't. Other posters have suggested graduate school and other jobs not described as entry level dev and so far that explanation seems more plausible. Ask yourself, what are CS graduates qualified to do besides be junior devs and you may be surprised with how many answers there are.

I think where your confusion lies is in order for there to be discrimination, there has to actually be discrimination. Point out the discrimination, who's doing it, which companies, what policy allows this, and we can all rally and do something about it. But just throwing out cherry picked employment numbers and claiming bias is somehow self evident which is what your argument implies isn't good enough. It actually comes across as a kind of weird p-hacking[0]. Even worse is when you introduce a credibility problem by conflating different employment sectors and inflating your numbers like you have here.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find that 'argument' hard to buy? I find it trivially true from observation and all empirical data I can find (if you remove the absolute)

> Why do you find that 'argument' hard to buy? I find it insufficient to answer the question of whether sexism is the problem. Computer programming used to have a lot more women -- why did that change? If it was changing interest, what is the source of the gender imbalance in the change in interest? Certainly, the perception that there was gender bias in the field arose while the rate at which women were participatin…

>Computer programming used to have a lot more women

I have yet to see a valid study showing this. Instead, I've seen numerous studies that have not mentioned that a 'computer programmer' included employees whose job consisted of transferring punch cards and tapes. Obviously these jobs are no longer required.

The only statistics that show even a tiny bit of proof for your argument come from Soviet based nations that did have a higher percent of women in actual programming positions

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because without data, it's a circular argument. "Women aren't interested in programming, so none of them go into programming professionally. Why don't women go into programming professionally? Because they aren't interested." Separate out whether women are interested from whether women are being forced out for other reasons (harassment, gender imbalance in the field, etc).

There is literally nothing circular about that. You're just saying the same thing twice.

Yes, there is. Allow me to rephrase it using Boolean logic to elucidate:

IF women aren't interested in programming, THEN none of them go into programming professionally.

IF women don't go into programming professionally, THEN they aren't interested."

I have 2 better questions to ask:

1) If fewer women than "the ideal" are interested in STEM, then why is that?

2) Why do we think a perfect 50/50 ratio across all fields is "the ideal," when "nature" might not deem it so? (note: this is NOT an "argument to nature")

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply of women with related degrees from uni is too low. If only 20% of the candidates qualified on paper are women, then a perfectly blind hiring process would result in 20% women. Expecting something else implies some fundamental misunderstanding of math.

20% is (coincidentally) the percentage of CS degrees awarded to women. They get only 10% of entry-level software jobs. We don't get to blame supply until those numbers match.

If you actually read the article, it seems to indicate that the problem is that women do not handle "attrition events" (such as a job rejection) very well. In fact, they handle it many times worse than men do, apparently.

This alone might account for the difference in percentages there, assuming there's some hidden "adversity event" that caused the attrition.

Perhaps (speculating here), men handle rejection from jobs better because they handle rejection from the opposite sex better (due to years of honed experience) :O

It sounds sexist to say "grow a pair," but perhaps we need to teach women more confidence somehow.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're the one introducing a 50% number, I haven't seen anyone make that assertion. "Gender gap" is a fancy way of saying "not 50%". More to the point, assumptions are often unstated, as I'm sure you know. I agree with you insofar as the mechanisms you point out are likely contributers to this so-called gap. Rather, I'm highlighting that -- unpopular though this notion may be in certain circles -- part of this effe…

> "Gender gap" is a fancy way of saying "not 50%". No. Gender gap is underrepresentation relative to the qualified labor market. Right now the gender ratio in entry-level software engineering jobs does not represent the segment that would be interested in and qualified for them (CS grads). The 10% difference between grads and junior developers is on us to fix.

I was a Psych major, but ended up doing computer work. Did I contribute to a 10% discrepancy between Psych majors and Psych-related jobs?

What if some percent of those women simply went into a slightly different career?

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