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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe interviewing is over-important because of the frequency in which tech workers/engineers change jobs.

Maybe un(der)employed programmers, who are naturally more concerned about interviewing, have extra free time and are thus over-represented on hacker news.

Even when I'm not the candidate, I'm asked to conduct a hell of a lot of interviews at work, and it's a huge time sink when the signal/noise is poor.

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

#142
post #114
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 because you aren't as steeped in medical culture as you are in tech culture and don't hear about it. It is brought up all the time. Source: my wife just finished her medical residency.

> It is brought up all the time.

Around HN?

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

#143
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…

[deleted]

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

#144
post #129
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…

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.p…

Thanks for this. I was having trouble finding anything discussing vocal fry in depth without having to pay. I see numerous articles on women doing it more, but so far they all seem to point to the same small studies.

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

#145
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…

> "less confident"

This is not a gendered issue. Men who act less confident are at least as disadvantaged.

> "confidence / frowned upon"

Also not primarily a gendered issue. Men who are not perceived as having the status to be confident get pounced on as hard or harder. This appears to have a lot to do with physical size. Tall men are "leaders", small men have a "napoleon complex". etc.

Considering women are statistically shorter than men, I wonder if sex-discrimination is fully explained by height-discrimination. Or maybe even over-explained.

See also:

http://www.jonathanrauch.com/jrauch_articles/2004/08/short_g...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination

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

#146
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…

That's why the President spoke last week about how we should be raising boys to have less confidence.

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

#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 with stuff like this. If you're bothered by the fact that there's more men in your company than women just hire more women until you get your desired ratio. You've already made your minds up ("there's too many men here, clearly we're biased against women during the hiring process") and I doubt anything will make you think differently, so just go ahead and fix the imbalance.

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

#148
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 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?

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

#149
Are there actually studies that show that the interview process rather than the pipeline is the issue? At my previous job we ended up making an offer to every female candidate who made it to the phone screen. This wasn't because we preferred them because of their gender but because they were really good. Many men never even made it past the phone screen. We still ended up with a majority of men on the team.

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

#150
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…

"When women try to be confident, it can get frowned upon. A man being assertive is a leader, a woman is bossy. Women are quicker to hit walls for just how confident they're allowed to be before they get the "bossy/bitchy" label thrown at them." Confidence has nothing to being 'aggressive' or 'bitchy' or even necessarily 'assertive'. Confidence usually means a lack of fear or anxiety when dealing with tough situations…

Let's say someone is confident enough to ask for a raise-- that can be seen as assertive. 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

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