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Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's
- anotheryou 10y agoBullshit title. from the original blog post: > masking gender had no effect on interview performance > it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant
- Bromskloss 10y agoIn both the title and in the passages you quote, we would have been better served by being told _how big_ the difference was.
- mynewtb 10y ago> weren't statistically significant
- Bromskloss 10y agoNo, give me the numbers first and foremost, and let me draw my own conclusions.
- PeterisP 10y agoThat's the whole point - the proper conclusion is "the numbers are meaningless, the experiments we did cannot provide any opinion about the existence, magnitude and direction of such differences", and any conclusions you might draw from seeing some specific numbers would make you less informed than you are right now.
- Bartweiss 10y agoThat's not true at all. "Less than significant" is not "the numbers are meaningless", it's "the arbitrary threshold p=.05 was not met". p=.049 is not magic, p=.051 is not worthless. They have far more in common than either does with p=.011, and claiming that giving out specific numbers would make things worse is absurd. I agree that it's bad practice to go "hey, p=.09, but it could be meaningful!" But it's at least as bad to say "we cannot provide any opinion about... such differences". That's simply false, you can provide data and confidence about the topic.
- lmm 10y agoAn experiment not finding a statistically significant difference can mean something very different depending on what the power of the experiment was.
- marcosdumay 10y agoTo what extent were the numbers meaningless? And how big was the unproven but probably effect so somebody else can try to verify it? Or even not try, discarding it as irrelevant because it was too small? And the most important question that every statistical study should answer: What effect magnitudes were discarded by this research? Claiming insignificant results and refusing to share them is telling your audience "well, we learned something, but we'll hide our findings from you because you are just too stupid to even imagine the kind of thing we learned here." Yes, for some audiences that would be true, but it's something a researcher shouldn't even imagine telling somebody. It's basically incompatible with the kind of thoughts required from researchers.
- marvin 10y agoNot statistically significant means that it is exceedinly likely that the difference was simply due to randomness in the subject selection, and that no difference in fact exists. At this point you're just reviewing the researchers' methodology.
- Bromskloss 10y ago> At this point you're just reviewing the researchers' methodology. That is absolutely part of it.
- kabouseng 10y agoNot statistically significant already says you cant say much about the observation. But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment (contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa for when mens voices are masked as a womans. And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of bias / prejudice.
- gbersac 10y ago> what if woman already get preferential treatment I always felt it was the case. IT is such a man place that every one is happy when a woman come, even if she is a little bit less efficient compared to men. Myself included. So I am biased to favour women.
- namaemuta 10y agoJust a question for you: do you feel happy when a woman comes to work with you because of what she can contribute or because she is a woman? I read a statement that reflects this very well: "when a woman is treated different, it doesn't mean she is treated better".
- visarga 10y agoCould be just a preference for diversity. There are already tons of men in IT.
- xexers 10y agoAgreed. If you think about the 2 extremes... it's not ideal to work in an office with 100% men or 100% women... for very different reasons (which I won't list here).
- rthrewmr 10y agoOur society was sold the idea that diversity would be beneficial for productivity. When and why did we stop valuing the end and instead value the means?
- Timshel 10y agoEspecially since later on : > “Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews,” she writes, “the disparity goes away entirely.”
- cwmma 10y agoAnd even those trends went away when you controlled for people leaving the site after having less interviews implying that if there was a trend it was due to practice.
- MustardTiger 10y agoDid they give the actual data so we could see if it was statistically significant or not? Lots of blog posts proclaim things to be or not be statistically significant but have no basis for their proclamation and don't know statistics at all.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mosselman 10y agoI can imagine that we do not just perceive someone's gender by the sound of their voice, but the way in which they present their opinions and what they say in general. So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly, prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man, but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as female might then not be considered at all. So what does this say? Nothing much I think.
- bdg 10y agoThat's a lot of mental gymnastics piled onto guesses to post-hoc justify an opinion.
- rebeccaskinner 10y agoI think that's a lot of it; There are definitely masculine and feminine communication styles, and I think that like a lot of other things, feminine communication styles are devalued. The people doing it in most cases probably aren't aware of it, but I'm sure it does happen. It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine (e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that may work in favor of women during an interview. On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.
- digi_owl 10y agoWe may want to consider context when sorting "good" and "bad" communication styles. What is the job being interviewed for? What is the work environment like for that job? How will a different communication style help or hinder someone in that work environment?
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- alecco 10y agoThe previous submission got removed from HN home page...
- douche 10y agoThere was a huge amount of discussion of the actual post yesterday - but I dunno where it's gotten to. Somebody must have brigaded it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673
- raldi 10y agoIt might have triggered the HN flamewar detector, which automatically pushes things down the page.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dang 10y agoIt spent many hours on the front page. In fact I think we might have marked it as extra substantive, since Aline Lerner is one of very few writers to consistently have new and interesting things to say about these well-worn topics.
- dang 10y agoAs well it should, because it's a poor-quality media follow-up report (sometimes known as copycats, or less kindly as blogspam) on a high-quality original article that appeared here and was thoroughly discussed yesterday.
- jondubois 10y agoThe reason why there are so few women in tech (particularly in computer science) is because software engineering is still culturally seen like a "Man's job" and fewer women enrol for IT or Computer Science degrees at university. Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+ males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software engineering. Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really want.
- blackjettas 10y agoWow bro you're so right. The reason is 100% culture. Nature has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's all nurture. Omg. You're so enlightened. The fact that men evolved for millions of years tackling incredibly hard logistics problems (hunting animals, warring against other tribes and nations) while women evolved during that time in social roles that revolved around bearing and caring for children has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that men gravitate more towards solving logistics problems than women. Absolutely not related. Nope. Not at all. It's all CULTURE! Nature had nothing to with it, it's all NURTURE! /s You're blaming it all on culture but only a sith deals in absolutes. The real answer is a combination of nature and nurture. Your black and white thinking reveals your cluelessness. Watch this documentary if you actually want to learn the empirical truth about nature, nurture, gender, etc: http://vimeo.com/19889788 http://vimeo.com/19889788 Until then, have fun remaining in your hypnotized trance state of thinking in absolutist black-and-white terms and blaming culture for everything you don't like.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for breaking the HN guidelines. If you want to comment here, you need to do so civilly and substantively, and avoid flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- JulianMorrison 10y agoI have a feeling that speech styles matter. A style that comes from a male socialization, sounds confident rather than self deprecating, and assertive rather than conciliatory.
- mrrrgn 10y agoHave you heard a woman's voice in this "masked" state? It still sounds extremely feminine because of the manner of speaking. It's very odd. You can even hear it in this short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s That alone gives the observation questionable merit.
- paperpunk 10y agoI was going to ask this. It's quite difficult to make male/female voices sound like either with just audio filters/modulation, so I immediately wondered how convincing the effect could really be. I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.
- GilbertErik 10y agoExactly. Changing pitch or modulating doesn't change things like pacing and diction and word choice. It'd be like saying 'Men in pink jeans do worse in bars than women in camo dresses'.
- Avery3R 10y agoBesides the speaking patterns you mentioned, women's voices and men's voices resonate in different areas of the vocal tract which you can also hear. Women's voices tend to resonate near the nose and mouth while men's tend to resonate in the chest.
- CM30 10y agoThis makes me wonder why they tried to make the voices sound gender neutral/other gendered rather than say, somewhat non human like. Would the supposed biases still be there if the voices were masked to sound like say, Darth Vader? Or maybe a Dalek from Doctor Who? Would there still be the same issues with speech patterns and what not if it sounded like the interviewee was speaking in robo speak?
- Jordrok 10y agoThis is interesting and all...but wouldn't it have been easier all around to just modulate the voices of both genders into a single, gender-neutral tone, or even better yet, perform the interviews solely through text? Something about the way the whole thing was implemented just feels...gimmicky to me.
- swiftisthebest 10y agoThere is no gender neutral tone.
- mattnewton 10y agoIf these results are being interpreting correctly, it could be that there are just many more talented men being churned out of schools, and the problem is the pipeline to the interview. This is consistent with my experiences hiring software developers at a Fortune 500 where there is already tremendous preference to hire women to overcome the typical ratio, but very few applicants to choose from.
- maxcan 10y agotl;dr study shows, in a statistically insignificant way, that interviewing is biased in favor of women. author manages to find a way to fit contradictory results to her preexisting view that women are being treated unfairly.
- mystral 10y agoWhy does this keep getting removed from the front page? It's funny to see people justifying this in stupid ways. We all know why women do worse than men. Because they are not as good in technical fields as men. We all know this. Why are people in such denial? Let's say that only 1% of programmers are women. We're supposed to believe that this is some grave injustice, that many great programmers are not hired because they are women and more still just don't even think about becoming programmers just because they are women. I could easily name 100 great programmers, Torvalds, Stallman, Carmack etc. I challenge anyone to name one, just ONE female programmer that is on that level. How could it possible be that out of the thousands of great programmers out there, not one woman has made it to that level? Simple: they are NOT AS GOOD AT PROGRAMMING. Has anyone here ever worked with a woman? You end up redoing all of their work for them. In conversations with them it is abundantly clear that they do not understand what is going on. Their brains are just not wired to work that way. This goes for 95%+ of men too, by the way. But it's more like 99.99% of women.