13 ms·

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 p

• killface 10y ago
  If you're tracking the interviewer gender guess, that's a legal liability to the interviewer. I'd refuse to answer, or always put "unsure" even if I was 100% sure of the gender.
• Jemmeh 10y ago
  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 a question (the voice goes up at the end.). These are both more common speaking patterns with women. The question thing in particular is common with people who are not as confident.
  • jsprogrammer 10y ago
    What evidence do you have that some speaking patterns are more common with women? Can you link to some data? Edit: Lots of opinions here. Still no data.
    • MasterScrat 10y ago
      I don't know about cues in spoken English, but you can find relevant articles about written text from this page: https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/best-practices-for-ethical-gender-research-at-very-large-scales https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/best-practices-for-eth... Read under "Inferring Gender from Content".
      • jsprogrammer 10y ago
        I did. That section is primarily discussing analysing the pronouns used to find a gender of the target, or exploit word based genders in those languages (French in one instance) that support it. Other examples were a selective study on Twitter, where the experimenters don't even know the true gender, or even humanity, of the user. The author of the section seems to disclaim the entire idea, somewhat (as it probably should be). I was looking for something that could hold up to the claim that individuals of the same gender do, in fact, have common speech patterns. For example, "this pattern has only been observed with women", and, "this pattern has only been seen with men".
    • windust 10y ago
      not quite patterns, but preferences :) https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
    • Jemmeh 10y ago
      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-myth-of-valley-girl-speak/ 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 American and Japanese speakers revealed that female speakers of American English residing in California employed creaky voice much more frequently than comparable American male and Japanese female speakers." http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abstract http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abst... (Edit: I'd like to find better resources on this if available. These seem to be small studies.)
  • new_hackers 10y ago
    dude, what decade are you from? I'm totally stoked about this totally tubular voice modulation. It's like totally wicked dude! Totally!
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • lifeformed 10y ago
    What if you just used a third party, like a translator? Someone listens to the voice and recaps it in his own words.
• jachee 10y ago
  In the example clips, to me, her vocal fry was a gender tell, even after modulation.
  • weisser 10y ago
    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/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps?act=2#play http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/i...
    • pmarreck 10y ago
      What if Ira Glass isn't a Kinsey Zero? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale
• leeny 10y ago
  Aline from interviewing.io here. Great idea!
  • t0mbstone 10y ago
    You all should record the audio from the original modulated interviews, then play them in both male and female versions to sample sets of separate observer groups that rank the performance of the person being interviewed. That way, you would be isolating the thing you are testing to just the voice, and you would be able to establish controls and a baseline for the exact same interview. The way your test is described right now, there are still way too many factors that could explain the results. Your controls are far too loose.
    • leeny 10y ago
      You're absolutely right re controls. Re your suggestion, totally agree, and please stay tuned :)
      • drunkpsychmajor 10y ago
        I have read a lot of the comments here and your article and I find this fascinating. On controls and such: on reddit someone pointed out that more prosocial people may be more likely to sign up but I believe you controlled for this using random assignment so I think you are good there. The biggest thing, and I believe it has already been mentioned, is trying not to bias the raters. The best way fmpov being to pre-record interviews and play them to several different people. The above would prevent testing for attrition but I think one variable at the time is the way to go. You could test attrition later by having ratings go a certain way and then seeing how subjects respond when they know that they interviewer knows their gender vs when they dont etc. If you have any interest in trying to get this published academically, and I want to make sure you understand I am a very lowly research assistant, I could talk to some of the professors at my university to see if there is any interest.
  • amyjess 10y ago
    On a similar note, I'm wondering what will happen when somebody is perceived as gender non-conforming. Will a woman using a modulated voice to sound male come off as a woman disguising her voice, or will she come off as an effeminate gay man? There's a lot of stigma to being perceived as the latter.
• jboy 10y ago
  I think it would be amazing if they could combine this voice-modulation technology with a facial motion capture technology (like in Avatar) to display artificial/shifting faces as well as voices. You could effectively create a computer screen-based version of the "scramble suit" used in A Scanner Darkly! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/mediaviewer/rm1872861440 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/mediaviewer/rm1872861440 I think a combined face+voice system would be even more useful in interviews (since a significant amount of human communication is expressed through facial cues). It would also add another dimension to your proposed voice-modulation gender-blinding experiment.
  • cortesoft 10y ago
    Wouldn't that just increase the problem that the person you are responding to brought up? If you capture their facial movements, it might be even easier to tell if they are a man or a woman, despite any scrambling you do.
    • jboy 10y ago
      Quite possibly! That's the extra dimension added to the experiment. :) It would be even more fascinating if you could cluster facial expressions or motions as "more female" or "more male". And for bonus points, work out a way to "filter" or "smooth" the facial signal to reduce/remove these giveaway hints (or insert false hints).
    • xiaoma 10y ago
      Yes. If the goal is gender blindness, a more effective strategy is to block all video and voice communication. Even chat could be a giveaway. Go off of nothing but code against a test suite.
      • misterrobot 10y ago
        Yeah, but then I'd have to stop putting ASCII art of my genitals in my comments. Ugh.
      • cortesoft 10y ago
• VLM 10y ago
  To provide a specific example, some women have severe vocal fry / creaky voice. Its a socially transmitted thing like valley girl speak from decades ago. I can only imagine how weird that sounds autotuned in a deep bass artificial voice. Imagine the movie line "I'm Batman" with vocal fry. (edited to note, I see three people simultaneously cited vocal fry as an obvious experimental error and one tried to derail with the standard citation needed technique, so its probably a pretty serious issue)
  • SamBam 10y ago
    Men speak with vocal fry all the time. Listen to these interviews. All the well-known actors in them are speaking with tons of vocal fry -- much more than "Valley Girl" women ever would. Except we never even notice it in men, except when it's presented in a "list of examples of male vocal fry." http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/ http://the-toast.net/2015/07/22/examples-of-male-vocal-fry/
• joncp 10y ago
  In the clips the modulated female ended up sounding like an effeminate man, which raises a whole other set of questions about bias.
  • lqdc13 10y ago
    There should have been a control experiment where a person's likeability, intelligence and "hirability" are assessed when both women and men say the same things with and without modulation to make sure it is really neutral.
• CGamesPlay 10y ago
  I actually don't think you should put the question on the interview feedback form. That invites bias into the question. "Oh, this candidate did well, must be a man." In fact, having interviewers consciously guess at the gender may even skew their perception of the interview performance post-hoc. I would, however, be interested in a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
  • jdmichal 10y ago
    Ask after the normal survey is complete and submitted.
    • CGamesPlay 10y ago
      Only works once per interviewer.
      • jdmichal 10y ago
        You can't prevent people from asking themselves if a modulated voice is a man or woman. If they are inclined to ask that question, then they are going to ask it no matter what you do.
        • CGamesPlay 10y ago
          Correct. What you can do, however, is prevent their answer to that question from being better than a coin flip. This is why we should run a separate experiment to gauge the effectiveness of the voice modulation.
• VOYD 10y ago
  "Like, Totally!"
• CM30 10y ago
  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 through their manner of writing and the (non gender related) info in their profiles. So if you wanted to really remove possible gender 'bias' from the occasion, you'd have to go much, much further. You'd have to give people a way to communicate which reduces their responses to preset answers, that's entirely conducted through text on a screen and make sure all personal information is filtered out as well. There's always going to be a trade off here. On the one hand, I'm sure the system used in the Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon Scarescraper would completely eliminate any potential gender bias, but that's only because it limits chat to 'over here', 'good job', 'thank you very much', 'help' and 'hey'. On the other hand, an interview in person would give you a lot of information about how well they could do the job (and let you test it), but then you've got psychological biases to deal with. It's a tough one really.
  • sliverstorm 10y ago
    Of course completely dehumanizing the interviewer & interviewee expressly prevents any degree of culture fit selection, which could be bad for all parties.
    • CM30 10y ago
      And that's a good point too. As much as culture fit has a really bad reputation in some places (because people seem to associate the term with 'only hires rich white kids with Harvard degrees'),you need a certain amount of it for a business to really stay cohesive and for the employees to want to work together. I've seen companies where the hiring staff haven't bothered to think whether anyone would actually work well in that specific company and its environment, and the general result has been a heavily divided workforce with very limited communication.
    • killface 10y ago
      Not just culture fit. I hire for a high-end (boutique) software consulting firm. We specialize in scale problems and engineering practice at a level few other firms can claim. Communication is an absolute, 100% must for senior roles. If you can't competently and thoroughly talk about a technical issue, to non-technical people, and do it with a smile and while making eye contact, we're not going to hire you. So in a sense, we're filtering out neuro-atypical people for senior roles. But they fit well in engineering roles. Dehumanizing the interview process will literally make it impossible for us to gauge this skill.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ht85 10y ago
  :3
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  Translation: "Hope they keep doing this experiment until it matches my expectations!"
• azinman2 10y ago
  While not scientific, I heard a pre-recorded interview done with interview.io's gender masking where both sounded like men (in reality one was a man and one was a woman). I got the genders wrong when prompted to guess, so it was pretty damn convincing from my POV.