We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews

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.

You seem to be confirming my guess (perceiving a "standard trolling technique" === "preconception"), but I am not looking for supporters or detractors, only justification for the original claim:

>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.

It is incorrect to ask for "only observed" data in this instance, but I also was clear to state that it was only an example of data that could be presented.

>parallels a standard trolling technique of asking for evidence and then dismissing any information presented.

If the response is not actual evidence, it should be dismissed. There is no guarantee that a response to a request for evidence is actually valid. That requires investigating the claimed evidence. In this case I investigated and found it severely lacking, as I noted above. Another user has linked to some further analysis of one of the claimed pieces of evidence (the 23-person Southern California study) that shows an apparent basic arithmetic error in the presentation of results. The NTY blog dead links that study and other places that have it require one to pay to see it.

>about one study not being broad enough

Yes, the study was 12 women and 11 men, aged 18-22, living in the same geographic location. There were severe differences in the experimental conditions between the groups being studied (women all interviewed by women; most, but not all, men interviewed by men). Everything I have read also indicates that this study found that both the men and women in the study often exhibited the pattern that was being watched for.

>and still others for being on twitter.

The problem is not about being on Twitter, but that the accounts being studied were neither 1) confirmed to be human, nor 2) confirmed to be the gender the experimenters assumed (and to which they compared their predictions/guesses! [in-built confirmation bias?]).

>that you're not making a good-faith effort to evaluate information fairly, but are instead holding firm to a preconception and requiring extraordinary proof before being willing to reconsider.

I can't evaluate what I can't see and I don't see how I have been unfair to anything that has been presented here. I don't think I am asking for extraordinary proof. I'm only asking for evidence of the particular claim:

>These are both more common speaking patterns with women.

So, something like: randomly sampled recordings from public places with counts of the occurrence of the pattern and the gender of the person who spoke it.

I am with you 100%. We keep trying to invent ways to skew the hiring towards women. Let's just stop trying to candy-coat it. You want gender ratios, so just hire based on gender ratios and deal with the fallout.

This narrative that women are somehow grossly discriminated against in tech doesn't hold water anywhere I see. Every tech company is desperate to hire more women engineers to increase their diversity quotient. The trouble is that most applicants, by a 95%-to-5% margin, are men. It only makes sense that 95% of the hires are men. If we want more women engineering talent in the office, we simply need more women applicants. Focusing on the interview stage is the wrong part of the pipeline to start at.

You're the one introducing a 50% number, I haven't seen anyone make that assertion.

There are structural problems that make the available talent pool unequal per-capita anyway (women being socially pressured out of software engineering, resulting in a lack of role models, etc. I'm sure there are plenty of other factors).

Part of changing the dynamic will take decades because _currently_ a smaller percentage of all women in the world are software engineers vs men. No one wants to hire incompetent women engineers just to fulfill a quota and all the people I've talked to about this seem to recognize and understand it. Mostly what seems to piss people off (and rightly so) is when people try to claim there isn't any bias, there isn't any problem, and everything is just fine as-is.

If all else were equal, what total percentage of women would want to be software engineers and would be good at it? I have no idea, but it does seem clear that we are far away from that number. As long as we can all agree that the structural problems should be addressed then I think we also understand that it isn't going to be 50/50 overnight and it might never be 50/50. But 90/10 is clearly unbalanced in a way that is not correlated with women's aptitude or ability to write software.

I think we should be a welcoming community and make reasonable efforts to make anyone who wants to join it feel comfortable. I don't understand the constant desire to rules-lawyer or dismiss such a simple and straightforward idea: don't be an asshole, be considerate of others, encourage those who are interested to learn.

In the end I have to think it is partially driven by fear and self-doubt, like maybe if we let black people or more women into the club it will all be over. Global demand for software engineering talent outstrips the supply and software is eating the world. My talents have never been in higher demand. My life is not diminished by nursing mother facilities, unisex bathrooms, coding events in black neighborhoods, attempts to reduce bias in interviews, et al.

This is ridiculous. At some point we need to face up to the reality that most women in the US are just not interested in working in technology. There is no evil conspiracy to keep women out of tech. Maybe high school guidance counselors and parents don't encourage women to go into tech. Maybe there is someone to blame, but it's not the tech industry's fault.