6 ms·

Orchestras had a male/female diversity problem until they started doing "blind" auditions where you could hear the music but not see the person playing the inst

Orchestras had a male/female diversity problem until they started doing "blind" auditions where you could hear the music but not see the person playing the instrument. They even went so far as to reschedule an interview if they could figure out the gender based on something else e.g. heels clicking on the floor. The outcome? More women started appearing in traditionally male instruments positions e.g. the French horn which for a long time was considered a "man's instrument" You could do something similar in tech where one group performs the coding interview under supervision (to make sure it's actually the person to take the test) and another group reviews experience etc but without knowing the gender of the candidate. Granted, people may try to hack this system by using back channels etc but I would argue it's better than nothing. PS My favorite back channel approach was a college dean who have the same letter for all grad school reference letters but would use the student's first name for a positive reference vs last name for a negative reference. e.g. - "Susan is fantastic" == positive - "Miss Jones is fantastic" ==

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
I think playing an instrument is easier to do this kind of interviewing for than software development. The latter is mostly about communication, whether it be by speech or writing. Those are things in which gendered signals are found all over the place.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  I would say it's actually the opposite. Most comms in software engineering is async/textual, and the work we produce is also textual. The takeaway here for me is maybe there is something to be said for doing an all-text interview.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Textual communication is inefficient in many collaborative scenarios. Humans speak faster than type.
    - jason-phillips 4y ago
      And yet my brain functions at least 100x faster than I can speak, leaving me to unsnarl the proverbial traffic jam in my head as the rate at which speech can communicate ideas lags behind the vast decision trees quickly generated in my thoughts. It's much more effective for me to write something that's both clear and persuasive than trying to express the same idea with synchronous, expository speech. For full disclosure, I was trained as a writer. Whenever the interview process includes a writing component, I invariably ace them. I'm a software engineer.
    - sam0x17 4y ago
      I find that verbal communication is often very inefficient in engineering scenarios. There is a reason RFCs are not done verbally.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  Also, if I want to know how good someone is at playing a musical instrument, I can usually get a good idea from just a few minutes or even seconds of hearing them play. There's no similarly fast way to judge how well someone will perform in a programming job. (Or at least if there was, hiring would be a lot easier.)
schemester 4y ago
That blind audition claim is actually pretty weak: https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition-study-11571599303 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
There was literally a big discussion on this 2 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33168581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33168581
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  was Bobby Fisher right? Bobby Fisher on women in 1963: https://twitter.com/olimpiuurcan/status/969224340297302021?t=JrFNf3_m-cDs3fBOrGFBiA&s=19 https://twitter.com/olimpiuurcan/status/969224340297302021?t...
collegeburner 4y ago
- lupire 4y ago
  You are telling on yourself a little here.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    not sure what you mean? my only point is if there's an unconscious bias concern it's pretty hard to accurately address in situations where people don't just play music.
    - ketzo 4y ago
      meh, the way you're talking about the things that women do more comes off as pretty condescending "I feel" / "maybe we should" are not weasel words, they are phrases to start a conversation with an acknowledgement that you're not perfect "effusive praise for pedestrian situations" what does this even mean, different people speak more emphatically about things "don't get me started on emojis" why not? you're not saying anything hateful or whatever, but idk, if you were having this conversation with me in real life, I would come away with the impression that you do not take women very seriously
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  "normal man" vs "gay male" is a bit worrisome here.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    i mean "average man". the modulated example sounded a lot like the stereotypical "gay voice", how is that observation worrisome? since that voice is intentionally not like a regular man i don't see how it's problematic.
    - 4y ago
Aransentin 4y ago
The "blind orchestra auditions" story gets repeated a lot, but the study it originates from did not find any statistically significant effect (and even so the ultimate outcome was that men benefit from blind auditions, not women). http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/ http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/
- tarboreus 4y ago
  Thank Malcolm Gladwell for that one.
- ackfoobar 4y ago
  > While women have a higher proportion advanced in several categories, they have a lower proportion advanced in the semifinals category. Do you think greater male variability (hypothesis) has to do with this?
commandlinefan 4y ago
> You could do something similar in tech Honestly... why bother though? Whatever process you put in place to ensure diversity will be scrapped as a failure if it doesn't produce a very specific outcome (say, 50% men and 50% women). The only process that will be considered a success is one that leads to a particular outcome, so why not stop with the whole song and dance and just mandate the outcome and stop playing games with the process to get there?
- awb 4y ago
  Removing bias and increasing diversity are two different goals.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    he knows that, that's what he's saying
    - awb 4y ago
      I don't think so. They're saying, just mandate diversity, rather than trying to develop complex processes that are judged on how diverse their outcomes are. Which is a fair point. But, the piece I think OC is missing is that another worthy objective is to reduce bias, which may or may not lead to diverse outcomes. So, that's why it would still be worth doing something like a double-blind coding test if your objective is solely to reduce bias. If your objective is to boost diversity, then OC is right that a double-blind coding test is a complex route to get to that outcomes and that a different, more direct and explicit route might be better.
      - fsckboy 4y ago
        you're saying "do these things to get better" and he's saying "doesn't matter because": the people who most frequently say they are against bias and they are in favor of diversity in fact don't care about either, what they care about is evening out the employed %ages of (choose euphemism) underrepresented, vulnerable, at risk, traditionally overlooked, etc. etc., with no regard for measuring qualification, skill, productivity, preparedness, etc., and they also want equal pay regardless of the value of the work being performed. (people who become wealthy generally have skills that are highly leveraged over many customers, so blockbuster films, popular music, ubiquitous cellphones, disruptive X, etc. But shouldn't childcare workers earn as much? Our children are precious, our children are the future... but children need full-time a very high adult-to-child care ratio, and looking at traditional societies essentially half the population has made excellent childcare workers and the other half has been willing and able to do a bang-up job in a pinch, so while it's vital to each child, it's not exactly a skilled task, and will never command a high salary because there isn't money to pay for it)
haberman 4y ago
Blind orchestra auditions are a great idea that is sadly being called into question for not being progressive enough: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition... https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/eyes-wide-shut-the-case-against-blind-auditions/ https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/eyes-wide-shut-the-case-against... There is no clearer example of the divide between equality and equity, and the ways in which those two schools of thought are increasingly diverging. Equality: remove bias as much as possible Equity: intentionally introduce bias to achieve desired outcomes
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  I've been on the equity side of the fence for a long time now. My conviction comes from the fact that I (as very-low-but-not-poor middle class) got a chance to go to a "wealthier" high school and that made all the difference in my life. There's such a huge gap in confidence, persuasion, and even believing in what one can realistically achieve based on who you are surrounded with. My college on the other hand had a mix of students from all sorts of backgrounds and that's where I first hand saw the huge difference this makes. Even those with good grades came across as extremely lacking in confidence. A variety of other factors then adds up to completely mask their talent. And because there's not a single interview (at least in our industry) that doesn't look at your communication and other soft skills, these students mostly hung back and didn't get the same internship or jobs that I could get. And I was in the exact same social background as them. These differences are now extremely huge after about a decade and a half. That's why I'm convinced that comparing two people works well only when the platform they are operating on is comparable as well. Otherwise, you are not-quite-but-close-to comparing just the platforms/social strata.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    you benefited from your spot in what you describe as a wealthy high school, and we read into that better teachers, more extra programs, etc. (not a challenge or a criticism) in general though (i.e. not in public school), taking a spot in a program denies that spot to somebody else. The human capacity for a sense of fairness and rooting for the underdog on the one hand says "great, it's nice that it happened for you!". But in the types of equity/equality decisions that are being made in general, what happened to the other person who didn't get the benefit you got? what if she was "better qualified" or "more deserving" or "would have benefited society at large more"?
scarmig 4y ago
Andrew Gelman had a good post[0] about the blind orchestra auditions: > I think they’re talking about the estimates of 0.011 +/- 0.013 and 0.006 +/- 0.013. To say that “the impact . . . is about 1 percentage point” . . . that’s not right. The point here is not to pick on the authors for doing what everybody used to do, 20 years ago, but just to emphasize that we can’t really trust these numbers. Along the same lines, one recruiting startup did a voice modulation experiment[1] to test the effects of masking gender: > After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. 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). If anything, 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. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data. Australia did a study[2] where they hid gender on resumes for high level Australian Public Service positions: > What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage of recruitment does not appear to assist in promoting diversity in hiring. In fact, in the trial we found that overall, APS officers generally discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. This suggests that the APS has been successful to some degree in efforts to promote awareness and support for diversity among senior staff. It also means that introducing de-identification of applications in such a context may have the unintended consequence of decreasing the number of female and minority candidates shortlisted for senior APS positions, setting back efforts to promote more diversity at the senior management levels in the public service. [0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-... [1] https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma... [2] https://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/projects/unconscious-bias.pdf https://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/...

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

I think playing an instrument is easier to do this kind of interviewing for than software development. The latter is mostly about communication, whether it be by speech or writing. Those are things in which gendered signals are found all over the place.

sam0x17 4y ago
I would say it's actually the opposite. Most comms in software engineering is async/textual, and the work we produce is also textual. The takeaway here for me is maybe there is something to be said for doing an all-text interview.
- lupire 4y ago
  Textual communication is inefficient in many collaborative scenarios. Humans speak faster than type.
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    And yet my brain functions at least 100x faster than I can speak, leaving me to unsnarl the proverbial traffic jam in my head as the rate at which speech can communicate ideas lags behind the vast decision trees quickly generated in my thoughts. It's much more effective for me to write something that's both clear and persuasive than trying to express the same idea with synchronous, expository speech. For full disclosure, I was trained as a writer. Whenever the interview process includes a writing component, I invariably ace them. I'm a software engineer.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    I find that verbal communication is often very inefficient in engineering scenarios. There is a reason RFCs are not done verbally.
whoooooo123 4y ago
Also, if I want to know how good someone is at playing a musical instrument, I can usually get a good idea from just a few minutes or even seconds of hearing them play. There's no similarly fast way to judge how well someone will perform in a programming job. (Or at least if there was, hiring would be a lot easier.)

schemester 4y ago

That blind audition claim is actually pretty weak: https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-audition-study-11571599303 https://www.wsj.com/articles/blind-spots-in-the-blind-auditi...

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

There was literally a big discussion on this 2 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33168581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33168581

Silverback_VII 4y ago
was Bobby Fisher right? Bobby Fisher on women in 1963: https://twitter.com/olimpiuurcan/status/969224340297302021?t=JrFNf3_m-cDs3fBOrGFBiA&s=19 https://twitter.com/olimpiuurcan/status/969224340297302021?t...

collegeburner 4y ago

lupire 4y ago
You are telling on yourself a little here.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  not sure what you mean? my only point is if there's an unconscious bias concern it's pretty hard to accurately address in situations where people don't just play music.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    meh, the way you're talking about the things that women do more comes off as pretty condescending "I feel" / "maybe we should" are not weasel words, they are phrases to start a conversation with an acknowledgement that you're not perfect "effusive praise for pedestrian situations" what does this even mean, different people speak more emphatically about things "don't get me started on emojis" why not? you're not saying anything hateful or whatever, but idk, if you were having this conversation with me in real life, I would come away with the impression that you do not take women very seriously
UncleMeat 4y ago
"normal man" vs "gay male" is a bit worrisome here.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  i mean "average man". the modulated example sounded a lot like the stereotypical "gay voice", how is that observation worrisome? since that voice is intentionally not like a regular man i don't see how it's problematic.
  - 4y ago

Aransentin 4y ago

The "blind orchestra auditions" story gets repeated a lot, but the study it originates from did not find any statistically significant effect (and even so the ultimate outcome was that men benefit from blind auditions, not women). http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/ http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/

tarboreus 4y ago
Thank Malcolm Gladwell for that one.
ackfoobar 4y ago
> While women have a higher proportion advanced in several categories, they have a lower proportion advanced in the semifinals category. Do you think greater male variability (hypothesis) has to do with this?

commandlinefan 4y ago

> You could do something similar in tech Honestly... why bother though? Whatever process you put in place to ensure diversity will be scrapped as a failure if it doesn't produce a very specific outcome (say, 50% men and 50% women). The only process that will be considered a success is one that leads to a particular outcome, so why not stop with the whole song and dance and just mandate the outcome and stop playing games with the process to get there?

awb 4y ago
Removing bias and increasing diversity are two different goals.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  he knows that, that's what he's saying
  - awb 4y ago
    I don't think so. They're saying, just mandate diversity, rather than trying to develop complex processes that are judged on how diverse their outcomes are. Which is a fair point. But, the piece I think OC is missing is that another worthy objective is to reduce bias, which may or may not lead to diverse outcomes. So, that's why it would still be worth doing something like a double-blind coding test if your objective is solely to reduce bias. If your objective is to boost diversity, then OC is right that a double-blind coding test is a complex route to get to that outcomes and that a different, more direct and explicit route might be better.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      you're saying "do these things to get better" and he's saying "doesn't matter because": the people who most frequently say they are against bias and they are in favor of diversity in fact don't care about either, what they care about is evening out the employed %ages of (choose euphemism) underrepresented, vulnerable, at risk, traditionally overlooked, etc. etc., with no regard for measuring qualification, skill, productivity, preparedness, etc., and they also want equal pay regardless of the value of the work being performed. (people who become wealthy generally have skills that are highly leveraged over many customers, so blockbuster films, popular music, ubiquitous cellphones, disruptive X, etc. But shouldn't childcare workers earn as much? Our children are precious, our children are the future... but children need full-time a very high adult-to-child care ratio, and looking at traditional societies essentially half the population has made excellent childcare workers and the other half has been willing and able to do a bang-up job in a pinch, so while it's vital to each child, it's not exactly a skilled task, and will never command a high salary because there isn't money to pay for it)

haberman 4y ago

Blind orchestra auditions are a great idea that is sadly being called into question for not being progressive enough: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition... https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/eyes-wide-shut-the-case-against-blind-auditions/ https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/eyes-wide-shut-the-case-against... There is no clearer example of the divide between equality and equity, and the ways in which those two schools of thought are increasingly diverging. Equality: remove bias as much as possible Equity: intentionally introduce bias to achieve desired outcomes

8ytecoder 4y ago
I've been on the equity side of the fence for a long time now. My conviction comes from the fact that I (as very-low-but-not-poor middle class) got a chance to go to a "wealthier" high school and that made all the difference in my life. There's such a huge gap in confidence, persuasion, and even believing in what one can realistically achieve based on who you are surrounded with. My college on the other hand had a mix of students from all sorts of backgrounds and that's where I first hand saw the huge difference this makes. Even those with good grades came across as extremely lacking in confidence. A variety of other factors then adds up to completely mask their talent. And because there's not a single interview (at least in our industry) that doesn't look at your communication and other soft skills, these students mostly hung back and didn't get the same internship or jobs that I could get. And I was in the exact same social background as them. These differences are now extremely huge after about a decade and a half. That's why I'm convinced that comparing two people works well only when the platform they are operating on is comparable as well. Otherwise, you are not-quite-but-close-to comparing just the platforms/social strata.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  you benefited from your spot in what you describe as a wealthy high school, and we read into that better teachers, more extra programs, etc. (not a challenge or a criticism) in general though (i.e. not in public school), taking a spot in a program denies that spot to somebody else. The human capacity for a sense of fairness and rooting for the underdog on the one hand says "great, it's nice that it happened for you!". But in the types of equity/equality decisions that are being made in general, what happened to the other person who didn't get the benefit you got? what if she was "better qualified" or "more deserving" or "would have benefited society at large more"?

scarmig 4y ago

Andrew Gelman had a good post[0] about the blind orchestra auditions: > I think they’re talking about the estimates of 0.011 +/- 0.013 and 0.006 +/- 0.013. To say that “the impact . . . is about 1 percentage point” . . . that’s not right. The point here is not to pick on the authors for doing what everybody used to do, 20 years ago, but just to emphasize that we can’t really trust these numbers. Along the same lines, one recruiting startup did a voice modulation experiment[1] to test the effects of masking gender: > After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. 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). If anything, 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. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data. Australia did a study[2] where they hid gender on resumes for high level Australian Public Service positions: > What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage of recruitment does not appear to assist in promoting diversity in hiring. In fact, in the trial we found that overall, APS officers generally discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. This suggests that the APS has been successful to some degree in efforts to promote awareness and support for diversity among senior staff. It also means that introducing de-identification of applications in such a context may have the unintended consequence of decreasing the number of female and minority candidates shortlisted for senior APS positions, setting back efforts to promote more diversity at the senior management levels in the public service. [0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-... [1] https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma... [2] https://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/projects/unconscious-bias.pdf https://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/...