21 ms·

We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews (2016)

244 points by dmitrygr 4y ago

impowski 4y ago
- poopnugget 4y ago
- erehweb 4y ago
  A few seconds Googling shows an example of women being barred from applying for garbage collecting jobs https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2015/11/eeoc-trashes-the-garbage-business--gender-discri__ https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2015/11/eeoc-t...
  - impowski 4y ago
    But isn’t it a discrimination towards men too when companies hire men for low paying and hard or dangerous jobs presumably that they’ll do it better? EEOC says “33 qualified women” but did they check how they would perform after a week, a month, a year. Just how they exactly understood that they are qualified? There is no answer to the root question “why?”. Why it’s a male only position? Did they hired before and had a bad experience? Is just easier for them so that males feel more comfortable connecting? There is no clear dialog about it maybe it’s in the lawsuit but not there. I see nothing bad in terms of “male only” or “female only” in terms of business. Because why they have to hide it? It’s honest and people don’t have to lose time applying for it because they are not meeting a requirement for that specific company. If I’m a “female only” company and hiring only females because I believe that they are better than men for me and my company then it’s fine but at the same time if I’m a “male only” company it’s they can put a lot of labels on you for that.
- llampx 4y ago
  Let's do one on systemic sexism in primary schools and Kindergartens as well, oh and nursing too.
- 0x445442 4y ago
  > Can we do a study on brick laying, plumbing, garbage collecting and other similar industries? Maybe we will find it there? I doubt you'd find anything statistically significant. The reality is different categories of people have different job and life preferences. Take nursing for example, it's an in demand, relatively high paying job and yet the Intelligentsia doesn't seem to mind women out numbering men 10 to 1 in that field. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nurses-across-50-states.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nur...
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Nursing is not relatively high paying. The opposite. When you look at the training required and the hours you have to put in, it's underpaid compared to male dominated professions that require similar training and hours. Researchers analyzed 50 years of U.S. Census data and found that pay drops when professions move from predominantly male to female – in short, if women do a job, it’s likely to be low-paid, for no other reason than that women’s work is undervalued. https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/when-an-occupation-becomes-female-dominated-pay-declines/ https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/when-an-occupation-be... https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/2235342 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...
    - xwolfi 4y ago
      It is relatively high paying where I live (Hong Kong) and just like where I was born (France) or where you stand (US I guess), the 10 to 1 ratio stays. Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise. Not that I have any conclusion lol I have a 4 yo daughter I try to raise like a boy and her fav color is still pink, to my utter rage lol
      - tchaffee 4y ago
        > Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise. What docker or fishermen are required to have a minimum of a 2 year degree and a difficult licensing test? A test that some states require you to re-take at regular intervals? A better comparison would be programmers. Although there is no minimum degree, no licensing test, and the pay is quite a bit higher than nursing. Significantly the pay was much lower when it was a female dominated profession.
- dang 4y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html What you've posted here was already a hellish flamewar cliché when the article came out 6 years ago.
Nesco 4y ago
Interesting that what the author found contrer-intuitive correspond in my case to my prior. It’s well known in France for the competitive exams that in domains with gender imbalance interviewers tend to help a bit the minority gender, I would guess it’s the same for tech interview. As for the difference of observed performance some explanations can be easily found (even if it doesn’t mean they are true). Men are far likelier to be on the autistic spectrum than women and CS is may be the most suited domain for people on the spectrum
- impowski 4y ago
  I don’t think that “autistic spectrum” only applies for CS it happens for any field. We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming. Because there are masculine men working as manicurists or like in beauty and there are women who are working in construction. And in terms of predominately men or women industries it’s not that we cannot switch or cannot figure it out it’s just differences in our interests and biology. We just have to embrace it like they did it in Sweden (as I remember)
  - km3r 4y ago
    > We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming This would be great, but the question remains what to do if the jobs men prefer are being paid more than jobs women prefer. Is sexism why that's the case, or is there some other driving factor why society is valuing male preferred jobs higher?
    - contravariant 4y ago
      I think we'd already be a lot better off if the type of work you did was the only thing deciding how much you earn.
    - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
      Are jobs that nerds prefer well-paid because society has a widespread bias towards valuing and supporting nerds? Or is it just that the work itself is valuable (to someone), and also that's how much it takes to get someone to do it?
programmarchy 4y ago
In the second video, the modulated voice didn't sound very masculine, which makes me wonder how accurate the results of this experiment would be. The video in the FastCompany article did sound more masculine, though, so maybe it's fine. If you want a voice modulator to improve your odds in an interview, then have it filter out uptalk.
- sdflhasjd 4y ago
  I didn't find it too convincing either, although part of that could be priming with the initial unmodulated audio. I'd be interested in a standalone study of how effective the modulation is at masking.
Twirrim 4y ago
Needs a [2016] tag on this one.
- mkl 4y ago
  Related from a few months later: https://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/ https://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-... Related from 2019: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-pipeline-problem-in-eng-hiring/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-re... As far as I can tell from https://blog.interviewing.io/category/diversity/ https://blog.interviewing.io/category/diversity/, they haven't done a follow-up with the same thing but more data.
fxtentacle 4y ago
"it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing" I believe this might be a direct result of presentation in movies. For example, She-Hulk had a scene where I'm quite convinced that it's hurting women, despite contrary intentions. The male Hulk had to overcome plenty of challenges to become halfway stable. The female Hulk skipped all that. But then, how do girls learn the value of grit if their role models don't need it?
- voxl 4y ago
  Wow, I never thought of that, i think it's even worse then you're letting on. She Hulk didn't need to because, by suggestion of the dialogue, women already have to control their internal anger to survive in the world we live in. It's a proclamation that you should already have everything figured out, because you're dealing with it every day. Yet, what if you don't have shit figured out? What if your confidence is cratered? What if you have crippling anxiety? These are not women specific issues, and the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others. However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    > the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others. Perhaps that hasn't been portrayed in a while, but then again, when was the last time men and boys actually had a role model and one with actual "grit"? Yes, we have male protagonists, and ones with substantial authority and muscle growth, but it's been a long time since I've actually seen a legit role model. The reason you can't easily convey a value about depending on others is that modern storytelling requires that every character must be significantly flawed. Having one character lean on others only is called for if that creates an opportunity where said character can be betrayed, which is useful for dramatic purposes. Look at any plot from a movie before the 2000's that's focused on a strong male character. Usually there's a subplot where he's got to rely on some other guy or inspire other men to take action when they otherwise wouldn't. > However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to. This is reality. You are describing the quintessential male experience. Having to start with nothing and work your way up (or fail) is what it is to be a man. We are not told we are handsome or attractive by anyone but our mother unless we find a partner who can express that or if we are a 9 or above on the decile scale. Women aren't as greatly valued for their problem solving capability as they are for their beauty and reproductive capability. That's just how it is based on how the sexes differ, and it isn't even something that necessarily has to be fixed. People who deviate from the norm shouldn't be forced into roles that don't suit them as individuals, and those who it a norm shouldn't have to give up who they are in order to satisfy the minority.
Daishiman 4y ago
Anecdotally, the biggest piece of advice when I mentor friends in the earlier stages of their career is to fake it till they make it, as no one has the answers to anything and in this field everything is learnable given enough time and research. Surely enough, men seem to take the advice to heart much more, with women questioning their abilities and feeling something morally off about the advice. I have no suggestions on how this gets fixed; there's evidently something wrong in hiring when young people need to "fake" their credentials and still do very well while people who to try to be honest and humble but of objectively similar performance get rejected. Hiring and performance in our field is still very much in the pre-science stage where we mostly do with ancient incantations and magical beliefs and vibes.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  We had one developer woman in our 200 people team, we all respected. She quit "because she didnt feel as good as the rest" she said (ofc, one says what one wants in these circumstances). It felt weird, if I see someone better than me, I ask him to teach me. If he s an ass, he becomes my worst enemy and I wont sleep until I beat him. Objectively she was above the average dude we had, to top all...
  - Valmar 4y ago
    Overall, I get the feeling that women have far more confidence issues than men do, sadly. Women aren't being systematically oppressed ~ but confidence issues might lead them to believe that they are, even if they can't identify any actual causes. The real systematic issue seems to me to be that women aren't getting help in the confidence apartment, hence they can't easily stay standing in the face of something that may well crush one's self-confidence. And there may be many, many things in workplace, not just interviews, that can feel defeating... interviewers are there to filter out those who can't handle the strain of the job, those who don't have the qualifications, etc. And even if that's overcome, then the job itself may overtime wear one down. Burnout and imposter syndrome aren't nice to run into... :/
    - mathgladiator 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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tchaffee 4y ago
The premise of the experiment is that the only clue interviewers have about gender in an interview is voice. You'd need to establish that fact in a prior experiment. Far too many assumptions and guessing for me to take anything useful away from this article.
- erichocean 4y ago
  There was no difference between men and women's evaluations after controlling for attrition. It's literally the entire point of the article.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Can you quote the part of the article where they say there was no difference in evaluations after controlling for attrition? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I do not see that claim anywhere in the article. What I see are claims that: 1. There is no interviewer bias: because women performed exactly the same even with voices that sound like men's voices. Which has the serious flaw I pointed out. I.e "we made women sound like men but they still under-performed in interviews compared to men" so therefor interviewers must not be biased. Ugh. That's terrible science. Because if interviewers can still detect gender after voice modulation then the voice modulation accomplished nothing. 2. Since the interviewers could no longer be biased, the gender gap in performance must come from something else. Oops, the experiment never proved that the interviewers couldn't detect gender. The writer goes on to talk about how bad the problem of attrition is, but I see nowhere that the writer claims performance differences disappear after controlling for attrition. And there is no proof that the attrition wasn't caused by....... women leaving after interviews they felt were sexist. This is just piss poor science. Which explains why it's an only article and not a peer-reviewed study. And why it got no attention after it was published in 2016.
    - hawkesnest 4y ago
      This text in in bold in the concluding paragraph >>Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely.
sqrt_1 4y ago
This reminds me of when the Australian government did blind recruitment. "Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications." "The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  The intersectionality hypothesis is just constantly destroyed by evidence like that, and this voice modulator experiment. And yet it seems to be evangelized more fervently than ever in academic institutions, governments, journalism, etc. It's really a weird, strange kind of twilight zone. Alleged experts are just spouting totally unfounded (and even contradicted by evidence) assertions and stating them as fact. Some of them really hurtful and hateful even. And few dare to call them out, demand evidence for their unproven claims, or demand metrics and results of improvements they claim their policies would result in. It's like a nutty cult that's being ruled by fear. In my opinion it is also profoundly damaging to the cause of actually improving inequality and reducing discrimination and reducing division.
  - reverius42 4y ago
    What is the intersectionality hypothesis? This is a phrase I'm not familiar with.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      The hypothesis is that women, racial minorities, etc, are discriminated against universally in modern society.
    - GolDDranks 4y ago
      I haven't heard of it either, but "intersectionality" means (according to Google, but in my experience, sounds accurate.) > Intersectionality is a theoretical framework rooted in the premise that human experience is jointly shaped by multiple social positions (e.g. race, gender), and cannot be adequately understood by considering social positions independently.
Kalanos 4y ago
that male mask sounds pretty feminine
Ancapistani 4y ago
I only skimmed the article, but I didn’t see one measure that I was looking for: the performance of women who participated in the study but were unmodulated compared to the performance of women who were not participants of the study. My (completely instinctual, and explicitly not fact-based) theory is that perhaps women expect to do less well because they expect that women do less well. This should cause women who believed they were modulated (or that they could be) to be more likely to continue with the process because they believe that they are more likely to make it through than they otherwise would be.
- antihero 4y ago
  Confidence is a huge factor in so many things.
  - Ancapistani 4y ago
    True. My thought behind this is that if women believe that being a woman negatively impacts their employability, and their behavior changes as a result of that belief in a way that negatively impacts their employability - it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
- brigandish 4y ago
  More data or access to the data would be nice but I believe this was addressed: > In the spirit of not giving away what we were doing and potentially compromising the experiment, we told both interviewees and interviewers that we were slowly rolling out our new voice masking feature and that they could opt in or out of helping us test it out. Most people opted in, and we informed interviewees that their voice might be masked during a given round and asked them to refrain from sharing their gender with their interviewers. Women couldn’t be sure they would sound like women and thus be judged as women.
- hedora 4y ago
  It is buried, but they say that women that were modulated to male did slightly worse than unmodulated women. Men modulated to female did slightly better than unmodulated men. Men did better than women on average, regardless of modulation. To me, this suggests the interviewers are slightly biased toward women, but the interview process is strongly biased toward men. In a throwaway comment, they say that ignoring people that dropped out after 1-2 failed interviews eliminated the gender gap. To me, that suggests there are confounding factors at play.
mmanfrin 4y ago
I wonder if there is a bias at play here in the interviewers -- those who are willing to step in and do mock interviews for people might be people who are more empathetic or sympathetic to systemic biases and therefore try to adjust more than the general population of people giving tech interviews out in the wild?
- brigandish 4y ago
  How does that work with respect to the masked voices? I mean, shouldn’t this bias be prevented or at least mitigated by the masking?
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    The hypothesis is that gender bias could be driven by a population of interviewers who don't tremendously like interviewing, meaning both that they don't care to correct for their biases and they aren't likely to sign up for interviewing.io.
xwowsersx 4y ago
Their "surprising" result could be interpreted to mean that employers are eager to hire women, but ultimately are hiring the best candidate regardless of gender so that when they interview a qualified man who's using a woman's voice, they're even more excited about hiring them than they are about hiring a person with equivalent skill who appears to be/sounds like a man.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Eh no. I was the lead engineer and was hiring for my team in a fortune 100 company. I got told to hire the worse candidate for the role because we needed more diversity. Anyone who still calls it 'reverse' sexism/racism/ageism really hasn't worked in corporate America in the last 10 years.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    This effect also comes into play re: firing. Any fortune 100 EM who's had an extremely under-performing female report knows the pressure to find a way, any way, to sweep that under the rug.
    - llanowarelves 4y ago
      The standard operating procedure when your company is going into controlled decline and you want to soften the landing: put women in leadership positions. Less likely to be under fire, unless critics want to be branded womenhaters.
  - datagram 4y ago
    That's only one data point, and I'm sure plenty of people could say the opposite about their companies. In my case, I've been involved in tons of engineering hiring meetings at my company and diversity has never swayed things in one direction or the other when evaluating candidate performance.
hamilyon2 4y ago
Maybe interviewers picked up language/behavioral/cultural cues? Gender identification is such a basic brain function, trained on countless examples, very crucial for species survival too. I expect that it cannot be fooled easily.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Out of curiousity, are age ranges of all participants comparable, i.e. not skewed male vs. female?
Animats 4y ago
So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection. This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting. See also this Harvard Business Review article.[1] Not clear why this is. I saw a study a few years back where someone was looking at number of applications required to get a job vs number of tries made by applicants. They reported a similar result. Could this be helped simply by coaching? Just knowing that on average it takes N tries is useful. [1] https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  > So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection. > This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting. I think that those who are more resilient of rejection end up producing children more often. I also believe men are more conditioned to accept rejection from potential sexual partners, so the job knockbacks are not taken personally.
- 8note 4y ago
  Women who got to the stage of job applications are more likely to give up after than rejection than men who do. Who's to say that the two are comparable? The men who would give up may have given up earlier in the process
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  Either give up or switch to a different platform I think?
- cookieswumchorr 4y ago
  is this really a bad strategy though? Assuming we have enough jobs to apply to (in tech), why not walk away once you feel your counterpart is not excited, and switch to the next one?
  - silveroriole 4y ago
    Yes, we could flip this around and say that men are more likely to bash their head against a wall. Women say “hmm, clearly I’m not getting anywhere with this, I’ll go try something else.” Which is better? Both strategies probably work out fine, but you’ll end up with fewer women in jobs which involve a lot of head-wall-bashing and a lot of evaluations without much support/guidance/encouragement (and surely programming is one of those jobs).
kurtreed 4y ago
Tldr: "masking gender had no effect on interview performance"
kurtreed 4y ago
See also * "Woman Who Switched to Man's Name on Resume Goes From 0 to 70 Percent Response Rate" https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/woman-who-switched-to-man's-name-on-resume-goes-from-0-to-70-percent-response-rate-060816 https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes... * "applications randomly assigned a female name exhibit a 41% higher probability of being invited to move forward in the interview process than those with male names" https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley.senior_essay.pdf https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...
causality0 4y ago
As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. Makes sense. Men are conditioned to experience rejection more than women. Considering reproductive dynamics, men may even be biologically adapted to rejection to a greater degree than women. I'll bet there's some interesting studies out there on, for example, sexually dimorphic cortisol levels/activity.
- mring33621 4y ago
  I don't know what women experience, or men in other places, but I would say that many American males, in my generation (Gen-X), experienced frequent rejection, from about 12 until their early 20's. Then, once women became interested in them, there was often constant pressure to get a better job, in order to move through the expected life stages. I think that this regular rejection, plus the pressure to fight upward, is what trains and motivates men to keep going.
  - User23 4y ago
    I was told as a young man that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I was going to have to learn to thrive on rejection. Experience has proved it true many times over. The key of course is framing your experience. I think the submission’s parallel between interviewing and dating is a good observation. In both cases you need to be willing to realize that rejection can be because of something you can control, but it also can be because of something you can’t. Another thing is once you experience it enough rejection loses its sting. The handful of hours you spend pursuing a job or a date just isn’t a serious cost, especially if you learn something from the experience.
- mattwilsonn888 4y ago
  Funny you say that - the article concludes with the author noting her community feedback often mentioned the same idea, though she gives it less credibility than you did; to note, I'm also convinced by this idea.
  - causality0 4y ago
bee_rider 4y ago
It is an interesting experiment, but > So if there’s no systemic bias, why are women performing worse? is a pretty wild leap. For example there could still a tendency for men to be over-confident, and a bias toward over-confident interviewees.
aaron695 4y ago
a-user-you-like 4y ago
It’s so silly that you’re prevented from hiring whatever gender you want. A bunch of guys want to start a video game company and now they are forced to hire a woman which throws the whole vibe of the company off.
- brigandish 4y ago
  Who is preventing whom from hiring whomever they want, and where is this happening? A few more specifics would be nice.
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    It would be highly illegal in the US if that company said they were only going to hire dudes to keep the culture the same.
    - brigandish 4y ago
      Being able to hire who you like and openly declaring an intent to discriminate based on sex are not the same thing. One is a subset of the other.
      - a-user-you-like 4y ago
        And if what you like to hire is only dudes to keep the culture the same? Like I said, illegal.
        cercatrova 4y ago
        It should be illegal. Why do you think it shouldn't be?
        a-user-you-like 4y ago
        By nature, dudes will want to work with dudes. It takes immoral legislation to force them into doing something different.
deleted 4y ago
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mgraczyk 4y ago
Since the title is clickbait, here's what happened. interviewing.io runs an interviewing platform. They noticed women were performing worse than men. They built a voice modulator to mask the gender of candidates. Masking had no effect on interview performance for any scoring criteria. They speculate that gender differences in outcomes are caused by women quitting more quickly in response to negative feedback.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  The title doesn't seem like clickbait to me. Seems pretty straightforward really. Now if they had written the second part of the title like, "You won't believe what happened next!" that would be clickbait.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    They could have said what happens next in just as many characters, but chose not to. I assume the reason is because fewer people would read the article in that case.
    - toxicFork 4y ago
      That sounds like the opposite of click bait. Not revealing something that would make people have aversion. I don't know if it has a name.
      - tpoacher 4y ago
        It does. It's called clickbait. :p If you'd like to clearly differentiate it from a more stringent definition of clickbait, I guess one could call it clickbait by omission. It's like when you pretend to have thrown a nut to a squirrel, but in reality you just made a gesture. The squirrel will go look for the nut regardless. You not throwing a 'decoy' nut isn't the important part w.r.t. the desired outcome. You still 'baited' them.
      - knighthack 4y ago
        Clickbait is just as often about half-truths, or omissions. Anything that leads to a reader/viewer asking "Why?/What?", and which triggers the human curiosity that leads to a click - constitutes clickbait. Such content may later disappoint or cause annoyance to the reader/viewer; but they still clicked, which is all that matters.
jejones3141 4y ago
Hmmm... I wonder whether the modulator did anything about upspeak or vocal fry. Those might give away a woman despite changes in pitch.
manv1 4y ago
TL, DR: "It's not me, it's you."
Barrin92 4y ago
>Armed with the ability to hide gender I listened to the examples and I don't find them convincing at all at masking gender, which is the first thing that would explain to me why they don't find any difference in their outcomes. Unless I missed something they didn't even ask the interviewers to take a guess after the interviews to get an indication of whether their pitch changing is sufficient to throw them off. In general I'd say voice modulation isn't even remotely enough to mask someone's gender. In particular people who interview for a living can probably tell from the tone of the conversation.
phs 4y ago
> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). Or here's another hot take: the masking did not work. What if there is more gender signal in speech than just in voice pitch? I don't see any mention of explicitly asking interviewers what gender they perceived the interviewee to be, and with what confidence.
- benjaminl 4y ago
  Yeah, pitch is only one of the components of speech pattern differences between genders. Others include resonance, intonation, rhythm and more. Ask a trans person and they will tell you that changing your perceived speech gender is much more than just the pitch.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  As per the article: > You might ask why we included the second condition, i.e. modulated interviews that didn’t change the interviewee’s pitch. As you probably noticed, if you played the videos above, the modulated one sounds fairly processed. The last thing we wanted was for interviewers to assume that any processed-sounding interviewee must summarily have been the opposite gender of what they sounded like. So we threw that condition in as a further control. It wouldn't affect things like cadence, but they did include a modulated (but not cross gender) control group.
- deleted 4y ago
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- collegeburner 4y ago
  i agree the masking was not sufficient. there's no sample of how a masked man's voice sounds but tbh i'd have guessed stereotypical gay male for the masked woman. like when i talk vs. my female peers i notice my voice doesn't rise in pitch at the end of a phrase, or go creaky. i also notice differences in word choice: it's crazy the number of people i hear saying "perfect" instead of just "thanks" when i send over a document, and definitely more women doing that than men. they also seem to qualify their words more with "i think" or "maybe" preceding a statement. anyway i'm guessing i could do an ok job of guessing male vs female with them modulated like this.
aj7 4y ago
I don’t believe a voice modulator alone would be effective in the gender “equalization“ of speech. It would act as a form of distortion, not equalization, and cannot mask differences in usage, pauses, emotional messages like giggles, breath intake, etc. I can even envisions situations where, regarding the hypothesis, it makes things “worse.”
- deleted 4y ago
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hedora 4y ago
I found the results to be unsurprising: Masking a woman into a male voice created a slight disadvantage, the other way a slight advantage. Also, women underperformed men by about 0.5 on the scoring metric before the modulation. After interviewing 100's of candidates, I realized women are more easily intimidated on average and also need to be much more careful in how they present themselves in interviews. (Some non-trivial percent of interviewers think aggressive males are confident, but aggressive women are combative. The candidate doesn't know if I am such a person when they come into the interview.) I noticed that, on average, women with scores that match those of men (on my own scoring) significantly outperformed the men when hired. I settled on adding 0.5 points to the score of every woman I interview (then rounding to a whole number). Also, I champion them if they are borderline in the panel discussion. Based on the gender ratio and performance of the team I recently helped hire, this works great (when I am the interviewer). Edit: There was a wonderful article by a VC along these lines. Some other VC bragged that their female founders were all way more competent than their average successful male founders. The first VC pointed out that this was as close as possible to incontrovertible proof that they were holding women to a higher bar before funding them. I can't find a link...
- rank0 4y ago
  Setting a hard rule like this is quite strange… Did I understand that right? Women you interview get an automatic 0.5-1.0 handicap?
  - hedora 4y ago
    0.0-0.5 depending on how they do. A solid "meh" is still a no hire. A "they almost got it, and are obviously intelligent" turns into "they froze up, but would have gotten it otherwise". (To be clear: I've recommended hiring men that obviously froze up. I don't care how programmers perform in high stress environments. We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park, FFS.)
    - wruza 4y ago
      We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park That would be stressful, but not only that. Stress may come from pretty “calm” sides, like the lack of task explanation or illogical authoritative statements, indecision due to vague constraints, unreasonable time pressure, monotonous grind, working hard weeks right into the trash without any explanation (to name a few just from the top of my personal experience). Stress is something that bothers you so much for months or years but you can do nothing about it.
icholy 4y ago
I'm curious if changing the interviewers voice would have had an impact.
yazzku 4y ago
Isn't this kind of missing the forest for the trees? Why would you want to interview or be interviewed anonymously? Perhaps whatever biases may exist should be addressed in all of the outcomes along the way that lead to that unfavorable situation...
dudeinjapan 4y ago
"Women quitting more quickly than men" could be partially explained by women having more job opportunities than men. Who is more likely to be more persistent to get a *specific* job: person A who has 10 other opportunities, or person B who doesn't have any other opportunities? It is a shame the study did not attempt to quantify this aspect by asking a question post-interview ("How many other opportunities did you have?")
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  A while back there was something from I think LinkedIn that looked at things like length of job search by sex. All my search attempts now come back with a flood of bs listicles, but IIRC it claimed that women tended to have slightly (but not hugely) shorter searches. Nowhere near as much of a difference as the 7x bounce rate here would lead to without a good chunk of it being people switching to continue looking elsewhere.
  - dudeinjapan 4y ago
    It's also plausible that women are taking negative feedback/rejection more personally is another factor for giving up early. Or women being more skewed toward negative emotion in general, which is a well-documented trait in behavioral psychology. Or being more "agreeable", i.e. being less likely to "bother" the interviewer by challenging their negative assessment. The authors of this "study" (if we can even call it that) didn't bother to ask, so we won't know.
oneby137 4y ago
"[...] we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, 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." Another data point that suggests that instead of suffering from systemic negative bias, women are really enjoying systemic positive bias.
Eumenes 4y ago
Notice how "unconscious bias" is no longer in vogue when it comes to interviewer training or best practice. HR has skipped that, because it doesn't translate to more DEI hires, so now they just openly discriminate.

244 points by dmitrygr 4y ago

poopnugget 4y ago
erehweb 4y ago
A few seconds Googling shows an example of women being barred from applying for garbage collecting jobs https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2015/11/eeoc-trashes-the-garbage-business--gender-discri__ https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2015/11/eeoc-t...
- impowski 4y ago
  But isn’t it a discrimination towards men too when companies hire men for low paying and hard or dangerous jobs presumably that they’ll do it better? EEOC says “33 qualified women” but did they check how they would perform after a week, a month, a year. Just how they exactly understood that they are qualified? There is no answer to the root question “why?”. Why it’s a male only position? Did they hired before and had a bad experience? Is just easier for them so that males feel more comfortable connecting? There is no clear dialog about it maybe it’s in the lawsuit but not there. I see nothing bad in terms of “male only” or “female only” in terms of business. Because why they have to hide it? It’s honest and people don’t have to lose time applying for it because they are not meeting a requirement for that specific company. If I’m a “female only” company and hiring only females because I believe that they are better than men for me and my company then it’s fine but at the same time if I’m a “male only” company it’s they can put a lot of labels on you for that.
llampx 4y ago
Let's do one on systemic sexism in primary schools and Kindergartens as well, oh and nursing too.
0x445442 4y ago
> Can we do a study on brick laying, plumbing, garbage collecting and other similar industries? Maybe we will find it there? I doubt you'd find anything statistically significant. The reality is different categories of people have different job and life preferences. Take nursing for example, it's an in demand, relatively high paying job and yet the Intelligentsia doesn't seem to mind women out numbering men 10 to 1 in that field. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nurses-across-50-states.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/gender-ratio-of-nur...
- tchaffee 4y ago
  Nursing is not relatively high paying. The opposite. When you look at the training required and the hours you have to put in, it's underpaid compared to male dominated professions that require similar training and hours. Researchers analyzed 50 years of U.S. Census data and found that pay drops when professions move from predominantly male to female – in short, if women do a job, it’s likely to be low-paid, for no other reason than that women’s work is undervalued. https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/when-an-occupation-becomes-female-dominated-pay-declines/ https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/when-an-occupation-be... https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/2235342 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/88/2/865/223534...
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    It is relatively high paying where I live (Hong Kong) and just like where I was born (France) or where you stand (US I guess), the 10 to 1 ratio stays. Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise. Not that I have any conclusion lol I have a 4 yo daughter I try to raise like a boy and her fav color is still pink, to my utter rage lol
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      > Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise. What docker or fishermen are required to have a minimum of a 2 year degree and a difficult licensing test? A test that some states require you to re-take at regular intervals? A better comparison would be programmers. Although there is no minimum degree, no licensing test, and the pay is quite a bit higher than nursing. Significantly the pay was much lower when it was a female dominated profession.
dang 4y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html What you've posted here was already a hellish flamewar cliché when the article came out 6 years ago.

Interesting that what the author found contrer-intuitive correspond in my case to my prior. It’s well known in France for the competitive exams that in domains with gender imbalance interviewers tend to help a bit the minority gender, I would guess it’s the same for tech interview. As for the difference of observed performance some explanations can be easily found (even if it doesn’t mean they are true). Men are far likelier to be on the autistic spectrum than women and CS is may be the most suited domain for people on the spectrum

impowski 4y ago
I don’t think that “autistic spectrum” only applies for CS it happens for any field. We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming. Because there are masculine men working as manicurists or like in beauty and there are women who are working in construction. And in terms of predominately men or women industries it’s not that we cannot switch or cannot figure it out it’s just differences in our interests and biology. We just have to embrace it like they did it in Sweden (as I remember)
- km3r 4y ago
  > We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming This would be great, but the question remains what to do if the jobs men prefer are being paid more than jobs women prefer. Is sexism why that's the case, or is there some other driving factor why society is valuing male preferred jobs higher?
  - contravariant 4y ago
    I think we'd already be a lot better off if the type of work you did was the only thing deciding how much you earn.
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    Are jobs that nerds prefer well-paid because society has a widespread bias towards valuing and supporting nerds? Or is it just that the work itself is valuable (to someone), and also that's how much it takes to get someone to do it?

programmarchy 4y ago

In the second video, the modulated voice didn't sound very masculine, which makes me wonder how accurate the results of this experiment would be. The video in the FastCompany article did sound more masculine, though, so maybe it's fine. If you want a voice modulator to improve your odds in an interview, then have it filter out uptalk.

sdflhasjd 4y ago
I didn't find it too convincing either, although part of that could be priming with the initial unmodulated audio. I'd be interested in a standalone study of how effective the modulation is at masking.

Twirrim 4y ago

Needs a [2016] tag on this one.

mkl 4y ago
Related from a few months later: https://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/ https://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-... Related from 2019: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-pipeline-problem-in-eng-hiring/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-re... As far as I can tell from https://blog.interviewing.io/category/diversity/ https://blog.interviewing.io/category/diversity/, they haven't done a follow-up with the same thing but more data.

fxtentacle 4y ago

"it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing" I believe this might be a direct result of presentation in movies. For example, She-Hulk had a scene where I'm quite convinced that it's hurting women, despite contrary intentions. The male Hulk had to overcome plenty of challenges to become halfway stable. The female Hulk skipped all that. But then, how do girls learn the value of grit if their role models don't need it?

voxl 4y ago
Wow, I never thought of that, i think it's even worse then you're letting on. She Hulk didn't need to because, by suggestion of the dialogue, women already have to control their internal anger to survive in the world we live in. It's a proclamation that you should already have everything figured out, because you're dealing with it every day. Yet, what if you don't have shit figured out? What if your confidence is cratered? What if you have crippling anxiety? These are not women specific issues, and the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others. However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  > the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others. Perhaps that hasn't been portrayed in a while, but then again, when was the last time men and boys actually had a role model and one with actual "grit"? Yes, we have male protagonists, and ones with substantial authority and muscle growth, but it's been a long time since I've actually seen a legit role model. The reason you can't easily convey a value about depending on others is that modern storytelling requires that every character must be significantly flawed. Having one character lean on others only is called for if that creates an opportunity where said character can be betrayed, which is useful for dramatic purposes. Look at any plot from a movie before the 2000's that's focused on a strong male character. Usually there's a subplot where he's got to rely on some other guy or inspire other men to take action when they otherwise wouldn't. > However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to. This is reality. You are describing the quintessential male experience. Having to start with nothing and work your way up (or fail) is what it is to be a man. We are not told we are handsome or attractive by anyone but our mother unless we find a partner who can express that or if we are a 9 or above on the decile scale. Women aren't as greatly valued for their problem solving capability as they are for their beauty and reproductive capability. That's just how it is based on how the sexes differ, and it isn't even something that necessarily has to be fixed. People who deviate from the norm shouldn't be forced into roles that don't suit them as individuals, and those who it a norm shouldn't have to give up who they are in order to satisfy the minority.

Daishiman 4y ago

Anecdotally, the biggest piece of advice when I mentor friends in the earlier stages of their career is to fake it till they make it, as no one has the answers to anything and in this field everything is learnable given enough time and research. Surely enough, men seem to take the advice to heart much more, with women questioning their abilities and feeling something morally off about the advice. I have no suggestions on how this gets fixed; there's evidently something wrong in hiring when young people need to "fake" their credentials and still do very well while people who to try to be honest and humble but of objectively similar performance get rejected. Hiring and performance in our field is still very much in the pre-science stage where we mostly do with ancient incantations and magical beliefs and vibes.

xwolfi 4y ago
We had one developer woman in our 200 people team, we all respected. She quit "because she didnt feel as good as the rest" she said (ofc, one says what one wants in these circumstances). It felt weird, if I see someone better than me, I ask him to teach me. If he s an ass, he becomes my worst enemy and I wont sleep until I beat him. Objectively she was above the average dude we had, to top all...
- Valmar 4y ago
  Overall, I get the feeling that women have far more confidence issues than men do, sadly. Women aren't being systematically oppressed ~ but confidence issues might lead them to believe that they are, even if they can't identify any actual causes. The real systematic issue seems to me to be that women aren't getting help in the confidence apartment, hence they can't easily stay standing in the face of something that may well crush one's self-confidence. And there may be many, many things in workplace, not just interviews, that can feel defeating... interviewers are there to filter out those who can't handle the strain of the job, those who don't have the qualifications, etc. And even if that's overcome, then the job itself may overtime wear one down. Burnout and imposter syndrome aren't nice to run into... :/
  - mathgladiator 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tchaffee 4y ago

The premise of the experiment is that the only clue interviewers have about gender in an interview is voice. You'd need to establish that fact in a prior experiment. Far too many assumptions and guessing for me to take anything useful away from this article.

erichocean 4y ago
There was no difference between men and women's evaluations after controlling for attrition. It's literally the entire point of the article.
- tchaffee 4y ago
  Can you quote the part of the article where they say there was no difference in evaluations after controlling for attrition? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I do not see that claim anywhere in the article. What I see are claims that: 1. There is no interviewer bias: because women performed exactly the same even with voices that sound like men's voices. Which has the serious flaw I pointed out. I.e "we made women sound like men but they still under-performed in interviews compared to men" so therefor interviewers must not be biased. Ugh. That's terrible science. Because if interviewers can still detect gender after voice modulation then the voice modulation accomplished nothing. 2. Since the interviewers could no longer be biased, the gender gap in performance must come from something else. Oops, the experiment never proved that the interviewers couldn't detect gender. The writer goes on to talk about how bad the problem of attrition is, but I see nowhere that the writer claims performance differences disappear after controlling for attrition. And there is no proof that the attrition wasn't caused by....... women leaving after interviews they felt were sexist. This is just piss poor science. Which explains why it's an only article and not a peer-reviewed study. And why it got no attention after it was published in 2016.
  - hawkesnest 4y ago
    This text in in bold in the concluding paragraph >>Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely.

sqrt_1 4y ago

This reminds me of when the Australian government did blind recruitment. "Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications." "The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

throwawaylinux 4y ago
The intersectionality hypothesis is just constantly destroyed by evidence like that, and this voice modulator experiment. And yet it seems to be evangelized more fervently than ever in academic institutions, governments, journalism, etc. It's really a weird, strange kind of twilight zone. Alleged experts are just spouting totally unfounded (and even contradicted by evidence) assertions and stating them as fact. Some of them really hurtful and hateful even. And few dare to call them out, demand evidence for their unproven claims, or demand metrics and results of improvements they claim their policies would result in. It's like a nutty cult that's being ruled by fear. In my opinion it is also profoundly damaging to the cause of actually improving inequality and reducing discrimination and reducing division.
- reverius42 4y ago
  What is the intersectionality hypothesis? This is a phrase I'm not familiar with.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    The hypothesis is that women, racial minorities, etc, are discriminated against universally in modern society.
  - GolDDranks 4y ago
    I haven't heard of it either, but "intersectionality" means (according to Google, but in my experience, sounds accurate.) > Intersectionality is a theoretical framework rooted in the premise that human experience is jointly shaped by multiple social positions (e.g. race, gender), and cannot be adequately understood by considering social positions independently.

Kalanos 4y ago

that male mask sounds pretty feminine

Ancapistani 4y ago

I only skimmed the article, but I didn’t see one measure that I was looking for: the performance of women who participated in the study but were unmodulated compared to the performance of women who were not participants of the study. My (completely instinctual, and explicitly not fact-based) theory is that perhaps women expect to do less well because they expect that women do less well. This should cause women who believed they were modulated (or that they could be) to be more likely to continue with the process because they believe that they are more likely to make it through than they otherwise would be.

antihero 4y ago
Confidence is a huge factor in so many things.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  True. My thought behind this is that if women believe that being a woman negatively impacts their employability, and their behavior changes as a result of that belief in a way that negatively impacts their employability - it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
brigandish 4y ago
More data or access to the data would be nice but I believe this was addressed: > In the spirit of not giving away what we were doing and potentially compromising the experiment, we told both interviewees and interviewers that we were slowly rolling out our new voice masking feature and that they could opt in or out of helping us test it out. Most people opted in, and we informed interviewees that their voice might be masked during a given round and asked them to refrain from sharing their gender with their interviewers. Women couldn’t be sure they would sound like women and thus be judged as women.
hedora 4y ago
It is buried, but they say that women that were modulated to male did slightly worse than unmodulated women. Men modulated to female did slightly better than unmodulated men. Men did better than women on average, regardless of modulation. To me, this suggests the interviewers are slightly biased toward women, but the interview process is strongly biased toward men. In a throwaway comment, they say that ignoring people that dropped out after 1-2 failed interviews eliminated the gender gap. To me, that suggests there are confounding factors at play.

mmanfrin 4y ago

I wonder if there is a bias at play here in the interviewers -- those who are willing to step in and do mock interviews for people might be people who are more empathetic or sympathetic to systemic biases and therefore try to adjust more than the general population of people giving tech interviews out in the wild?

brigandish 4y ago
How does that work with respect to the masked voices? I mean, shouldn’t this bias be prevented or at least mitigated by the masking?
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  The hypothesis is that gender bias could be driven by a population of interviewers who don't tremendously like interviewing, meaning both that they don't care to correct for their biases and they aren't likely to sign up for interviewing.io.

xwowsersx 4y ago

Their "surprising" result could be interpreted to mean that employers are eager to hire women, but ultimately are hiring the best candidate regardless of gender so that when they interview a qualified man who's using a woman's voice, they're even more excited about hiring them than they are about hiring a person with equivalent skill who appears to be/sounds like a man.

thrown_22 4y ago
Eh no. I was the lead engineer and was hiring for my team in a fortune 100 company. I got told to hire the worse candidate for the role because we needed more diversity. Anyone who still calls it 'reverse' sexism/racism/ageism really hasn't worked in corporate America in the last 10 years.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  This effect also comes into play re: firing. Any fortune 100 EM who's had an extremely under-performing female report knows the pressure to find a way, any way, to sweep that under the rug.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    The standard operating procedure when your company is going into controlled decline and you want to soften the landing: put women in leadership positions. Less likely to be under fire, unless critics want to be branded womenhaters.
- datagram 4y ago
  That's only one data point, and I'm sure plenty of people could say the opposite about their companies. In my case, I've been involved in tons of engineering hiring meetings at my company and diversity has never swayed things in one direction or the other when evaluating candidate performance.

hamilyon2 4y ago

Maybe interviewers picked up language/behavioral/cultural cues? Gender identification is such a basic brain function, trained on countless examples, very crucial for species survival too. I expect that it cannot be fooled easily.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Out of curiousity, are age ranges of all participants comparable, i.e. not skewed male vs. female?

Animats 4y ago

So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection. This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting. See also this Harvard Business Review article.[1] Not clear why this is. I saw a study a few years back where someone was looking at number of applications required to get a job vs number of tries made by applicants. They reported a similar result. Could this be helped simply by coaching? Just knowing that on average it takes N tries is useful. [1] https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...

worthless-trash 4y ago
> So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection. > This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting. I think that those who are more resilient of rejection end up producing children more often. I also believe men are more conditioned to accept rejection from potential sexual partners, so the job knockbacks are not taken personally.
8note 4y ago
Women who got to the stage of job applications are more likely to give up after than rejection than men who do. Who's to say that the two are comparable? The men who would give up may have given up earlier in the process
tbrownaw 4y ago
Either give up or switch to a different platform I think?
cookieswumchorr 4y ago
is this really a bad strategy though? Assuming we have enough jobs to apply to (in tech), why not walk away once you feel your counterpart is not excited, and switch to the next one?
- silveroriole 4y ago
  Yes, we could flip this around and say that men are more likely to bash their head against a wall. Women say “hmm, clearly I’m not getting anywhere with this, I’ll go try something else.” Which is better? Both strategies probably work out fine, but you’ll end up with fewer women in jobs which involve a lot of head-wall-bashing and a lot of evaluations without much support/guidance/encouragement (and surely programming is one of those jobs).

kurtreed 4y ago

Tldr: "masking gender had no effect on interview performance"

kurtreed 4y ago

See also * "Woman Who Switched to Man's Name on Resume Goes From 0 to 70 Percent Response Rate" https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/woman-who-switched-to-man's-name-on-resume-goes-from-0-to-70-percent-response-rate-060816 https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes... * "applications randomly assigned a female name exhibit a 41% higher probability of being invited to move forward in the interview process than those with male names" https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley.senior_essay.pdf https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...

causality0 4y ago

As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. Makes sense. Men are conditioned to experience rejection more than women. Considering reproductive dynamics, men may even be biologically adapted to rejection to a greater degree than women. I'll bet there's some interesting studies out there on, for example, sexually dimorphic cortisol levels/activity.

mring33621 4y ago
I don't know what women experience, or men in other places, but I would say that many American males, in my generation (Gen-X), experienced frequent rejection, from about 12 until their early 20's. Then, once women became interested in them, there was often constant pressure to get a better job, in order to move through the expected life stages. I think that this regular rejection, plus the pressure to fight upward, is what trains and motivates men to keep going.
- User23 4y ago
  I was told as a young man that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I was going to have to learn to thrive on rejection. Experience has proved it true many times over. The key of course is framing your experience. I think the submission’s parallel between interviewing and dating is a good observation. In both cases you need to be willing to realize that rejection can be because of something you can control, but it also can be because of something you can’t. Another thing is once you experience it enough rejection loses its sting. The handful of hours you spend pursuing a job or a date just isn’t a serious cost, especially if you learn something from the experience.
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Funny you say that - the article concludes with the author noting her community feedback often mentioned the same idea, though she gives it less credibility than you did; to note, I'm also convinced by this idea.
- causality0 4y ago

bee_rider 4y ago

It is an interesting experiment, but > So if there’s no systemic bias, why are women performing worse? is a pretty wild leap. For example there could still a tendency for men to be over-confident, and a bias toward over-confident interviewees.

aaron695 4y ago

a-user-you-like 4y ago

It’s so silly that you’re prevented from hiring whatever gender you want. A bunch of guys want to start a video game company and now they are forced to hire a woman which throws the whole vibe of the company off.

brigandish 4y ago
Who is preventing whom from hiring whomever they want, and where is this happening? A few more specifics would be nice.
- a-user-you-like 4y ago
  It would be highly illegal in the US if that company said they were only going to hire dudes to keep the culture the same.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    Being able to hire who you like and openly declaring an intent to discriminate based on sex are not the same thing. One is a subset of the other.
    - a-user-you-like 4y ago
      And if what you like to hire is only dudes to keep the culture the same? Like I said, illegal.
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        It should be illegal. Why do you think it shouldn't be?
        a-user-you-like 4y ago
        By nature, dudes will want to work with dudes. It takes immoral legislation to force them into doing something different.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mgraczyk 4y ago

Since the title is clickbait, here's what happened. interviewing.io runs an interviewing platform. They noticed women were performing worse than men. They built a voice modulator to mask the gender of candidates. Masking had no effect on interview performance for any scoring criteria. They speculate that gender differences in outcomes are caused by women quitting more quickly in response to negative feedback.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
The title doesn't seem like clickbait to me. Seems pretty straightforward really. Now if they had written the second part of the title like, "You won't believe what happened next!" that would be clickbait.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  They could have said what happens next in just as many characters, but chose not to. I assume the reason is because fewer people would read the article in that case.
  - toxicFork 4y ago
    That sounds like the opposite of click bait. Not revealing something that would make people have aversion. I don't know if it has a name.
    - tpoacher 4y ago
      It does. It's called clickbait. :p If you'd like to clearly differentiate it from a more stringent definition of clickbait, I guess one could call it clickbait by omission. It's like when you pretend to have thrown a nut to a squirrel, but in reality you just made a gesture. The squirrel will go look for the nut regardless. You not throwing a 'decoy' nut isn't the important part w.r.t. the desired outcome. You still 'baited' them.
    - knighthack 4y ago
      Clickbait is just as often about half-truths, or omissions. Anything that leads to a reader/viewer asking "Why?/What?", and which triggers the human curiosity that leads to a click - constitutes clickbait. Such content may later disappoint or cause annoyance to the reader/viewer; but they still clicked, which is all that matters.

jejones3141 4y ago

Hmmm... I wonder whether the modulator did anything about upspeak or vocal fry. Those might give away a woman despite changes in pitch.

manv1 4y ago

TL, DR: "It's not me, it's you."

Barrin92 4y ago

>Armed with the ability to hide gender I listened to the examples and I don't find them convincing at all at masking gender, which is the first thing that would explain to me why they don't find any difference in their outcomes. Unless I missed something they didn't even ask the interviewers to take a guess after the interviews to get an indication of whether their pitch changing is sufficient to throw them off. In general I'd say voice modulation isn't even remotely enough to mask someone's gender. In particular people who interview for a living can probably tell from the tone of the conversation.

phs 4y ago

> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). Or here's another hot take: the masking did not work. What if there is more gender signal in speech than just in voice pitch? I don't see any mention of explicitly asking interviewers what gender they perceived the interviewee to be, and with what confidence.

benjaminl 4y ago
Yeah, pitch is only one of the components of speech pattern differences between genders. Others include resonance, intonation, rhythm and more. Ask a trans person and they will tell you that changing your perceived speech gender is much more than just the pitch.
Manuel_D 4y ago
As per the article: > You might ask why we included the second condition, i.e. modulated interviews that didn’t change the interviewee’s pitch. As you probably noticed, if you played the videos above, the modulated one sounds fairly processed. The last thing we wanted was for interviewers to assume that any processed-sounding interviewee must summarily have been the opposite gender of what they sounded like. So we threw that condition in as a further control. It wouldn't affect things like cadence, but they did include a modulated (but not cross gender) control group.
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collegeburner 4y ago
i agree the masking was not sufficient. there's no sample of how a masked man's voice sounds but tbh i'd have guessed stereotypical gay male for the masked woman. like when i talk vs. my female peers i notice my voice doesn't rise in pitch at the end of a phrase, or go creaky. i also notice differences in word choice: it's crazy the number of people i hear saying "perfect" instead of just "thanks" when i send over a document, and definitely more women doing that than men. they also seem to qualify their words more with "i think" or "maybe" preceding a statement. anyway i'm guessing i could do an ok job of guessing male vs female with them modulated like this.

aj7 4y ago

I don’t believe a voice modulator alone would be effective in the gender “equalization“ of speech. It would act as a form of distortion, not equalization, and cannot mask differences in usage, pauses, emotional messages like giggles, breath intake, etc. I can even envisions situations where, regarding the hypothesis, it makes things “worse.”

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hedora 4y ago

I found the results to be unsurprising: Masking a woman into a male voice created a slight disadvantage, the other way a slight advantage. Also, women underperformed men by about 0.5 on the scoring metric before the modulation. After interviewing 100's of candidates, I realized women are more easily intimidated on average and also need to be much more careful in how they present themselves in interviews. (Some non-trivial percent of interviewers think aggressive males are confident, but aggressive women are combative. The candidate doesn't know if I am such a person when they come into the interview.) I noticed that, on average, women with scores that match those of men (on my own scoring) significantly outperformed the men when hired. I settled on adding 0.5 points to the score of every woman I interview (then rounding to a whole number). Also, I champion them if they are borderline in the panel discussion. Based on the gender ratio and performance of the team I recently helped hire, this works great (when I am the interviewer). Edit: There was a wonderful article by a VC along these lines. Some other VC bragged that their female founders were all way more competent than their average successful male founders. The first VC pointed out that this was as close as possible to incontrovertible proof that they were holding women to a higher bar before funding them. I can't find a link...

rank0 4y ago
Setting a hard rule like this is quite strange… Did I understand that right? Women you interview get an automatic 0.5-1.0 handicap?
- hedora 4y ago
  0.0-0.5 depending on how they do. A solid "meh" is still a no hire. A "they almost got it, and are obviously intelligent" turns into "they froze up, but would have gotten it otherwise". (To be clear: I've recommended hiring men that obviously froze up. I don't care how programmers perform in high stress environments. We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park, FFS.)
  - wruza 4y ago
    We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park That would be stressful, but not only that. Stress may come from pretty “calm” sides, like the lack of task explanation or illogical authoritative statements, indecision due to vague constraints, unreasonable time pressure, monotonous grind, working hard weeks right into the trash without any explanation (to name a few just from the top of my personal experience). Stress is something that bothers you so much for months or years but you can do nothing about it.

icholy 4y ago

I'm curious if changing the interviewers voice would have had an impact.

yazzku 4y ago

Isn't this kind of missing the forest for the trees? Why would you want to interview or be interviewed anonymously? Perhaps whatever biases may exist should be addressed in all of the outcomes along the way that lead to that unfavorable situation...

dudeinjapan 4y ago

"Women quitting more quickly than men" could be partially explained by women having more job opportunities than men. Who is more likely to be more persistent to get a *specific* job: person A who has 10 other opportunities, or person B who doesn't have any other opportunities? It is a shame the study did not attempt to quantify this aspect by asking a question post-interview ("How many other opportunities did you have?")

tbrownaw 4y ago
A while back there was something from I think LinkedIn that looked at things like length of job search by sex. All my search attempts now come back with a flood of bs listicles, but IIRC it claimed that women tended to have slightly (but not hugely) shorter searches. Nowhere near as much of a difference as the 7x bounce rate here would lead to without a good chunk of it being people switching to continue looking elsewhere.
- dudeinjapan 4y ago
  It's also plausible that women are taking negative feedback/rejection more personally is another factor for giving up early. Or women being more skewed toward negative emotion in general, which is a well-documented trait in behavioral psychology. Or being more "agreeable", i.e. being less likely to "bother" the interviewer by challenging their negative assessment. The authors of this "study" (if we can even call it that) didn't bother to ask, so we won't know.

oneby137 4y ago

"[...] we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, 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." Another data point that suggests that instead of suffering from systemic negative bias, women are really enjoying systemic positive bias.

Eumenes 4y ago

Notice how "unconscious bias" is no longer in vogue when it comes to interviewer training or best practice. HR has skipped that, because it doesn't translate to more DEI hires, so now they just openly discriminate.