14 ms·

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

• CobrastanJorji 10y ago
  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?
  • killface 10y ago
    No. If you're a white male, that's bad. Anything else is diversity. They'll come up with some bullshit like "since women aren't the majority of hiring managers, this doesn't count as discrimination" or something. Like they have with racism (where black people in America literally can't be racist).
    • balls187 10y ago
      I'll just point out that white males are very well represented in Tech.
    • nikdaheratik 10y ago
      Of course, the corollary to what you're saying is: "If you're a white male and you get hired, that's on merit, everyone else is hired for diversity reasons."
  • bionsuba 10y ago
    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.
    • CobrastanJorji 10y ago
      I would very much like to see an example of a major company publishing its desired specific ratios of races and genders.
      • arprocter 10y ago
        Not a ratio per say, but there was this[0] recent controversy [0]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/bbc-criticised-by-mps-and-job-applicants-over-training-placement/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/bbc-criticised-by...
    • NetTechM 10y ago
      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states that x ratio of specific minorities have to be hired/enrolled per year as a catch up mechanism that is largely outdated in 2016.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.
      • killface 10y ago
        And that also means that at some point (ideally in the very near future), we're just going to have to be OK with the idea that not all women want to be STEM majors. This necessarily and explicitly means that the ratio will never be 50/50. We're all ok with the idea that men don't really want to be early childhood educators (Pre-k through grade 2). It's a big deal when a guy applies for those jobs, according to teachers I know. Then, of course, come the endless jokes about the pedophile trying to get a job with kids, how he is going to need a female escort when dealing with the kids, etc.
  • trobertson 10y ago
    If that's what you do, then yes. If you choose instead to only advertise your positions at women-focused conferences and programs, the legality changes. You haven't prevented men from applying and being accepted, you've instead changed the audience of your advertising, which will change who applies.
  • Sephr 10y ago
    Affirmative action is not only legal, it's required in academia if a university wants federal funding. I'm not sure if minority genderbased- affirmative action is required, but minority race is definitely a requirement.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Affirmative action is not only legal, it's required in academia if a university wants federal funding. Yes, but what many people stereotype "affirmative action" as being, or at least including -- notably, including the upthread suggestion characterized as "let's just hire only women for a while to balance out the numbers" -- is not only not required even in that context, it is quite illegal (and would be equally illegal if, say, "blacks" replaced "women" in the description.)
• exolymph 10y ago
  > 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. In fact, that will happen — still hiring more men than women — for lots of systemic reasons, but at least you'll have eliminated one vector of bias. Seems better to end up imbalanced in a more impartial way.
• onion2k 10y ago
  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 an irrational decision. If a hiring manager has a strong bias in favour of believing "men are better coders" then you could miss out on some great hires. Removing that bias can only make your process better.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • playerqq 10y ago
    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, now cemented by hard fact (and faulty reasoning)? edit: missed a word
    • wonnage 10y ago
      if even you can tell that this is faulty reasoning then surely your hypothetical manager can as well
  • killface 10y ago
    But implicit in that "gender bias-free" hiring is the assumption that current hiring is gender biased to the point of needing technical solutions that simply remove the human element. If you have a manager who thinks women can't code, and you institute a blind hiring process, you're just going to put that newly-hired woman under a manager who thinks women can't code? What then? It really feels like the end solution to this is going to be "(white) men are not allowed to be hiring managers because they can't be trusted to follow our agenda"
• omginternets 10y ago
  I'm always surprised by the strong underlying assumption that removing interviewer/managerial bias will result in a gender ratio of 50%. There's research to suggest that this assumption is flawed: [0] Moreover, the idea that anatomy and physiology don't condition preferences or behaviors flies in the face of everything we know about human biology and (embodied) cognition. Let's recognize gender/feminist theory for what they are: a sociological theories, not scientific ones. Equality, in the sense of gender or racial equality, does not mean we're all the same de naturae. It means we should be treated the same de jure. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
  • smadge 10y ago
    Why are you answering nature vs nurture with (I paraphrase) "100% nature and anyone who says otherwise is an irrational charlatan"? This debate is cliched at this point. From the study you linked to: "As suggested by previous literature and the present study, interests stabilize at an early age. Given the essential role of family and other environmental influences in the socialization process of children and their interest development, it may be important for parents, educators, and counselors to be involved early on, when interests seem more malleable." i.e. the study accepts the theory that environment, family and in general socialization, contribute to a child's interests. This is the exact opposite of what you claim in your comment "It is important to note that group differences do not speak for every individual within a group,and it is not the purpose of the present study to reify the stereo-types that men and women are interested in their “traditional”areas." The study is talking about d < 1 effect sizes. That means that there is a still a significant part of the group that is more interested in a subject than a significant part of the other group. Think of two mostly overlapping normal curves. "it is beyond the scope of the present study to provide a detailed exploration of the environmental, social, and biological factors that have contributed to the development of these sex differences" The study makes no claim as to the cause of these sex differences. They only point out that there is a difference and suggest "environmental, social, and biological factors" as the cause. Again, the opposite of what you claim.
• tempestn 10y ago
  That's exactly what happened in this particular case! (Perhaps not an answer they didn't want to hear, but certainly a different answer than was expected.) And it seems like it led to an interesting new theory worth exploring, and if that pans out, potentially a great area for improvement.
• rmc 10y ago
  > What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? It's possible, but also the converse is possible. Shall we find out?
• Tyr42 10y ago
  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-orchestras-can-teach-us-about-gender-discrimination/ http://curt-rice.com/2013/10/01/what-the-worlds-best-orchest...
  • hueving 10y ago
    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.
    • dmansen 10y ago
      You're not the first person to think about this.
      • acbabis 10y ago
        I'm pretty sure most of the points made in this thread have been made before. That doesn't mean everyone here has heard them.
    • artpepper 10y ago
      But something is driving women out of CS programs (unless you buy the argument that women just aren't interested in programming). Steps that make the profession as a whole less biased against women, might also help to encourage more women to major in CS.
• pharrington 10y ago
  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.
• amelius 10y ago
  > What if it works perfectly and you still end up hiring more men than women? I think the idea is that the company can then say: but we used a gender-mask, so you can't blame us. A form of plausible deniability.
• killface 10y ago
  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.
  • umanwizard 10y ago
    > You want gender ratios, so just hire based on gender ratios and deal with the fallout. That would be illegal, at least in the US.
    • cderwin 10y ago
      It also ought not be done, for its moral consequences are quite grave. While it's not an argument made above, I suspect the moral consequences of "candy-coat[ing] ... gender ratios" are equally grave, and the just solution is not to force a "fair" outcome but to instead work towards attaining a fair process. Adding artificial biases towards women does not solve a sexism problem -- at least not directly.
    • existencebox 10y ago
      So I realize this is delayed to your post and likely to be buried, but this brought such a fascinating thought that I couldn't not mention it. I'm going to assert something first; you may chose to disagree, but my statement requires this lemma: We are (as a society/science/etc) absolutely _shit_ at most things psychology. Next to "food science" it's the field I give some of the least credence to findings in unless they are so massively replicated and built in an unrealistically airtight way. The very nature of these fields, the number of convoluting variables and our inability to even observe outcomes accurately makes the process of study extremely difficult, and "p-hacking" (as another comment elsewhere referenced in a very appropriate noun choice) becomes very feasible and less detectable. (As a "data-engineer/scientist/whatever we're called these days" I see this effect daily; it's a common topic in my office that often the desire from management is not to find a result, but for us to find the result that says what they want, and that's in often FAR more measurable and empirical spaces) From this, my core question; if it is illegal to hire based on gender ratios, what about the process of adjusting your hiring practice, adjusting which findings you chose to perscribe to, such that you achieve the end ratio you desire? To illustrate this I'll give an absurd example to demonstrate "feasibility": Let's say I'm actively racist and don't want to hire white people. I start by putting my hiring centers around inner city low cost residences; I preferentially hire lower income candidates "as a social program", and I hire with a bias based on referrals of existing candidates. I argue that my motive is achieved through a layer of "legal" "massage-able" legitimate decisions. So the questions I'd leave with: First, when do these stop being "reasonable choices" in isolation and start becoming a discriminatory strategy Second, and regardless of my above, can you see why I might find the cut and dry statement of "hiring based on a desired gender ratios is illegal" VERY hypocritical in the current environment of EXTREMELY STRONG DESIRE to hire based on gender ratio, even if it's a "rectification"? (To this topic, I'm also curious tangentially in how affirmative action fit into this framework in the past, I understand the purpose and don't want to turn this into an argument of it's merits, but it seems like a prime example where the courts pulled off making discrimination legal, so the black and white statement of "IS ILLEGAL" seems like it's been dealt with in the past) Finally, do you see the parallels I'm trying to draw, or can you find a flaw in the correlation?
• argonaut 10y ago
  I wonder if you actually read the article. The author concludes that masking the gender of the voice has no effect on performance.
• theoh 10y ago
  So you think egalitarianism is a bad idea because your hunch is that existing prejudices are totally justified, and should not be challenged -- it's a waste of time!
  • pmarreck 10y ago
    I think the point is that you can't assume that in some ideal world where everyone is working harmoniously and fairly, that the ratio will definitely become 50/50. Why don't we have similar outrage over the fact that most teachers and nurses are women? Why is STEM and IT in particular receiving all this attention? There are already more women than men attending college, the consequences of that alone will push the needle beyond where it would "normally" be (whatever that is, an incalculable value currently)
    • hiram112 10y ago
      We know exactly why this is a problem right now. The labor market has been hot for a few years and the top 5% of software devs living in high cost of living cities are doing well, relative to other degrees. Any field that appears lucrative and is not represented by 50% woman becomes a target for 3rd wave feminists to pull the gender card. It's quite obvious to anyone paying attention - there is not a peep from this group when it's pointed out that there are all sorts of professions with variations in gender ratios. Not a word is mentioned when it's stated that the most dangerous and often least desirable jobs are nearly 100% men. No issue when the vast majority of job losses in 2008 were in industries typically worked by men. And when woman have the upper hand in professions, especially those funded publicly (teachers, bureaucrats, administers, etc.), it's not something to be discussed. It looks like women under 30 now actually make more than men in the exact same jobs. If and when the CS field is finally gutted enough by continuing offshoring, H1b body shops, and the next bubble collapse, and wages get pulled back down towards the median, it will be interesting to watch all concern for this 'issue' evaporate as the movement sets its sights on the next hot industry that doesn't have a woman majority. See the legal profession for a good example.
• tomjen3 10y ago
  If we assume it is important to hire great programmers, then I would want such a system to signal to everybody who don't fit the standard nerd type that they won't waste their time if they apply.