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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 t
by 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 agoThe 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 agoYou're not the first person to think about this.
- acbabis 10y agoI'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 agoBut 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.
- azinman2 10y agoIt's hard to break through a crowd where any feature is a near monopoly... when _all_ your colleagues are men then it's hard for a woman to feel completely comfortable and like they belong. Some will, many won't -- you can't definitively negate feeling of being an 'other.'
- Spooky23 10y agoIf most are like mine was, they are awful. High stakes testing, unrealistic workloads, research professors who don't grok humans and incredibly cliquey ethnic divisions exaggerated by lots of foreign students.
- mpweiher 10y agoWhy 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)
- mplewis 10y agoBecause 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).
- therealdrag0 10y agoWhy are there less male elementary school teachers? Are they being forced out due to gender prejudice or are they not interested?
- jules 10y agoThat's not what the people of this article found though: > men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.
- phasmantistes 10y agoYes, you're absolutely right. But that's also a terrible excuse: "Oh, the problem is before the candidates reach me, so there's no need for me to do anything to fix the problem myself." Everyone at all stages -- from folks who bully nerds in primary school, to toymakers who promote scientific fields as 'for boys', to college admissions offices, to CS professors, to CS classmates, to hiring processes -- can work together to remove bias everywhere. Just because you think the problem is someone else's fault doesn't mean you can't help solve it.
- hueving 10y agoThere is nothing you can do that isn't blatant sexism if you want your ratio of female employees to be higher than the candidate pool ratio.
- Tyr42 10y agoI agree, mostly. I do not condone lowering the bar for just one gender. But maybe it's possible to target some advertising for your opening to get a larger number of female applicants? If you're applicant pool is skewed towards male, perhaps there's something about how you advertise that biases it?
- phasmantistes 10y agoBecause this is a thing I feel strongly about, I'd just like to say: As long as you have more qualified candidates than you have seats to fill, you don't have to lower the bar to increase diversity.
- phasmantistes 10y agoThis is demonstrably not true. Suppose I have a pool of 100 candidates, 20% of whom are female. Suppose further that 10% of the pool (8 men, 2 women) meets my "bar", and are therefore people that I want to have in my company. But finally suppose that I only have budget for 2 people, not 10. By your logic, I should hire 2 men, because dividing that candidate pool in half leaves the women at "less than half of a person". Equivalently, I should leave it up to a coin flip, which has an expected value of E(two men). But why? Since we have already established that the candidates are in all other respects equal, why shouldn't I choose the candidates that I think will do my company the most good: bring in the most diverse perspectives, life experiences, and skill sets? Of course it is a simplified example. And maybe you think that expressing an interest in diversity in this fashion is "reverse sexism". But I think it is a clear win for my company, a clear win for women everywhere, and I don't care if it isn't a clear win for men -- we win often enough anyway.
- etjossem 10y ago20% 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.
- teamfrizz 10y agoI have some hiring power, and I went to uni as well, and both in a liberal state (NY). We see hundreds of applications. I can tell you that ~30% percent of my colleagues at uni were female. Exactly 0% of our applicants are female. I have no idea where these women are, but were not turning them down!
- pmarreck 10y agoIf 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.
- peyton 10y agoActually it may have something to do with biological differences in social stress response on top of conditioning. I personally find this fascinating--a biological basis carries with it a possibility of pharmacological treatment for those wanting it, and perhaps the design and validation of nonpharmacological approaches for those who don't or third parties seeking to reduce bias. IIRC, there are a couple experiments in rat models along the lines of: put a male or a female rat in the same cage as an aggressive, territorial rat. The male rats are back to normal within hours-days. The female rats take days-weeks. IIRC some sort of neuronal transcription factor or something is thought involved. Can track down a review if anyone's interested.
- nradov 10y agoAt Harvey Mudd College 54% of CS graduates were women. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2016/05/17/class-2016-milestone-women-physics/ https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2016/05/17/class-2016-mileston...
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoIt's a nice correlation, but are you sure there aren't important confounding variables? Primarily: the youngest person auditioning for a top orchestra in 1970 was a teenager in the late 50's, when the female role model was the stay-at-home mother. A person first auditioning ten years later was a teenager in the late '60s, when the female role model was going through a revolution.
- argonaut 10y agoThe original research accounted for the effect of the audition year. http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903.pdf