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Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired
- altero 13y agoStudy: 90% deaths at workplace are men. Study: most victims of violent rapes are men (prison) Study: college hostile towards men, most graduates are woman.
- petermonsson 13y agoThis is a shame. My anecdotic experience is that 9 out of 10 female engineers are solid, productive members of society and 1 out of 10 is marginal. The male side is much worse. Yes there is 1 out of 10 who is really good, but 2 out of 10 are not worth their paycheck at all, 1 is marginal and 6 out of 10 are solid productive members of society.
- sdrothrock 13y agoAre you saying that there are no female engineers at either extreme ("really good" or "not worth their paycheck") at all?
- eru 13y agoAmong the one petermonsson has met.
- gernb 13y agoMy experience is the opposite of yours (I wish it wasn't so). I've haven't worked with that many female engineers in 28 years as an engineer. There's been maybe 12 total as there are so few. Of those 12 only 2 would I personally hire. That's under 20%. On the male side, depending on the company, it's between 95% at good companies and 50% at bad. In other words, 80% of the women I've worked with didn't seem like a peer (as in able to keep up) whereas less than 50% of the men couldn't keep up. In both camps, men and women, there were plenty of people I liked as people and would be happy to have as friends but I wouldn't hire them to work with. I know that's just an anecdote Maybe we're saying different things though. You're claiming in your experience 9 of 10 female engineers are productive members of society. I'm claiming in mine 10 of 12 female engineers are not productive engineers. They may be productive members of society but at work I need productive engineers. It would really be nice if there was an objective way to measure and or fix this. I'd really like engineering more if there were more women and every time I interview a woman for a job position I hope she's going to pass but even that has been poor. Then again, so few women interview that I don't know what the hit vs miss ratio is there vs men. I'd say it's 1 of 6 or men at best. So far it's 1 of 5 for women meaning I've only interview 5 women since we get so few female applicants.
- magicalist 13y ago> I know that's just an anecdote that's not just an anecdote, that's a disastrous sampling scheme.
- Dewie 13y ago> My anecdotic experience HN has to stop complaining about people's experiences that they don't like by crying "anectdotes", or "anectdata is not data". If someone says that it is their experience then that's it, take it for what it is rather than demanding that they should start peer-reviewing their life. Same goes for apologizing for sharing one's experiences...
- belorn 13y agoReading the abstract, it is interesting that the gender of the manager do not effect the bias. I did however not like the idea put forth by the paper that managers should assume that people lie about their performance. Doing so will only cause inflation in the lies, in which honest people will lie to balance it up and dishonest people will lie even further to get an advantage over honest people.
- peteretep 13y ago> I did however not like the idea put forth by the > paper that managers should assume that people lie > about their performance How about: people are generally poor at objective appraisals of themselves?
- ASneakyFox 13y agomy resume is a little on the exageration side. mainly so that when hiring managers read my resume and assume i'm lying they'll hopefully end up with a picture of me thats about at the right place. Also I think that appearing to be better than you really are is a skill that companies are interested in having on their work force. So being frank and transparent could possibly work against you, especially if the hiring manager knows youre being frank and transparent.
- peteretep 13y agoI think you are over thinking this. I interview a lot of people for engineering positions. If I think you're trying to deceive me, or I think you've lied on your CV, you're getting a much bigger black mark than if you struggle a bit on the technical tests. An aside: if you consider a $30,000 wage bracket a senior developer might fall in to ($80k-$110k), I see little correlation between what people ask for and what they 'deserve' based on their technical skills (inside of that bracket)
- Dewie 13y ago> Reading the abstract, it is interesting that the gender of the manager do not effect the bias. I don't think it was that interesting. There often seems to be an implicit assumption when these things come up that people can't or are less likely to be sexist against their own gender, but these kinds of assumptions are seldom given any good arguments. Maybe it has to do with viewing gender issues as a men-against-women, as if these two groups are united teams that uniformly benefit from either team "winning", without regard for their background (social class, race, culture etc.). I don't think that's the case. Nonetheless, in this case, it seems to be a subconscious bias that doesn't serve the employer. Maybe some decades ago, male managers were likely to be sexist to women. But maybe that had more to do with the fact that most managers were men, rather than that women wouldn't also be sexist against other women in the same scenario.
- femto 13y agoI just did an Implicit Association Test, as suggested by the article, and got a result that was interesting in light of my views of myself. http://implicit.harvard.edu/ http://implicit.harvard.edu/
- girvo 13y agoOh, wow, I highly suggest everyone try this. It really puts your subconscious bias into stark focus.
- mahyarm 13y agoAll the tests are highly political topics centered on identity politics & social justice topics. They also have weird American classifications of ethnicity being only "Hispanic vs non-hispanic" and "race" which seems more attached to skin color vs who the person is. I tapped around other countries and saw that they used some more or less classifiers of ethnicity & 'race' but the distinction are still there. It makes me put doubts about the testing itself and how much it would be used to advance political agendas.
- eru 13y agoHmm, I just get a java.lang.NullPointerException.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI took it once and found out that as an Ashkenazi Jew I have a slight bias towards liking black people. Bit of a "lolwut".
- NamTaf 13y agoThat is incredible and I completely agree with your statements.
- facepalm 13y agoThese tests are amusing, but I wouldn't put too much weight onto them. I randomly picked one about attitudes towards homosexuality. Then it showed I associated some negative things with that (like "homosexuals are more often depressed" or whatever). It was not clear to me that this indicates negative attitudes on my part. Rather, I have read a lot about homosexuals having problems, so when the test presented me with such issues, of course I thought about them. That doesn't imply I think every homosexual is depressed (or whatever). Not saying the tests are not interesting, but I think they are biased in their interpretation. They don't necessarily show what the test designers think they show.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoI wish we had the actual paper, because the abstract and summary are odd: We studied the effect of such stereotypes in an experimental market, where subjects were hired to perform an arithmetic task that, on average, both genders perform equally well. If this is actually what they did, then it's a bit shady. Most of the data shows that men and women are the same on average, but men have a higher variance. So if managers are hiring the best, you'll get more men. Of course, the paper is paywalled, so who knows? It is nice to know that objective measurements can reduce bias. Score 1 for hiring by github. I'd be curious to see what happens with incentives taken into account - make the employees do math problems and the manager gets $1 for every correct answer.
- anon453456 13y agoHere you go: https://mega.co.nz/#!6UxzVLIA!BVUOujU76VnhZM45QE4N2oFz0yLRTfgO4Mj6GRgT9wU https://mega.co.nz/#!6UxzVLIA!BVUOujU76VnhZM45QE4N2oFz0yLRTf...
- yummyfajitas 13y agoActually this paper is very interesting. So they did in fact reward employers for employee performance. What I found the most interesting: If, instead, we were to impose a random choice on employers, their earnings would drop by 11.4%, because employers do gain some relevant information from the appearance of the candidates, and this information allows them to make better-than-random choices (as can be seen in Fig. 1, which shows that employers in this condition choose the higher-performing candidate 55% of the time). If we remove the anti-women bias in expectations [in the case of appearance only], employers would earn only 0.1% more in compensation. So it turns out that anti-female bias is almost negligible when basing decisions entirely on candidate appearance. That's really surprising to me. I wish they included a table describing how much alpha could be gained by eliminating anti-female bias in all cases. Also, it looks like the best (and least biased) predictor was Past Performance. Surprise surprise. Maybe people will now stop complaining about employers who ask for a github (aka "Past Performance") instead of a resume ("aka "Cheap Talk")?
- throwaway13qf85 13y ago
- rachellaw 13y agoIt's not just math, you can put any traditionally male-dominated field in and it'll still work i.e. Study: Women Who Can Code Still Don't Get Hired; Study: Women Who Write Games Still Don't Get Hired etc etc
- altero 13y agoI call bs on this. Companies are desperate to hire programmers.
- rachellaw 13y agoDepends on what type I think. I'm a front-end primarily, and it's not that bad (as a woman) but my friends who are back-end developers find it harder to get accepted at workplace. This is all anecdotal of course
- facepalm 13y agoWho is hiring game developers?
- rachellaw 13y agoIn New York, there's a relatively large indie game scene. They hire game developers, but usually for casual games i.e. iOS app games (think flappy bird) or indie games
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI'd be interested in seeing a meta-version of this: give two papers with identical methodologies, one showing that employers tend to hire women less because they are biased, and one showing that employers tend to hire women less because the women are less capable. Then present them to reviewers and see which ones they would accept for publication.
- NextUserName 13y agoEdit: if you want to down-vote this, go ahead, but please tell me which one of the facts I have written is incorrect. I also welcome opposing viewpoints with explanations. I am merely providing some of the reasons that men are hired above women. This does not necessarily represent my personal viewpoints, I am playing devils advocate in some cases here. >The economist Larry Summers famously suggested once that so few women become scientists and engineers because of discrimination, preference and even differences in innate ability. Ability? There are many teenage prodigies who become homeless and total failures in life. Who ever thought that ability alone guarantees anything? This is a flawed and narrow minded mentality. Does anyone ever stop and think that there may be more logical reasons than ability that men are hired above women? There are probably thousands of reasons that men get hired in front of women. Here are some (many of which are not politically correct) facts. As derived by science, statistics, and surveys. I am only echoing information based on research and experience (as a HR specialist for 15 years). These are generalities and certainly don't apply to all women and all men. Women are generally less ambitious (even if they had better grades). Less creative problem solvers, and less logical (more emotional) with their decisions. Most of them lack the strong drive that men have for career advancement and success. Many men relentlessly work toward advancement and achievement despite having to make sacrifices such as family time, and other obstacles. Much of this is because of the role of testosterone and the design of the male brain (for competition and dominance). I am not saying that there are no women who are ambitions. I am just saying that the ratio is highly in favor of men here. I mentioned the testosterone part because many of you will respond that it is only that women have not been given the proper chance and thus the difference. This has been dis-proven by science and statistical studies. Most women at some point get pregnant and have kids. This (moderately to severely depending on the person) affects their productivity and mood while pregnant (9 months). Afterward they are off work for 4-6 months (or potentially much longer if the newborn has health problems). The women cannot be legally replaced during this time. Her job has to be waiting there for her when (and if) she eventually comes back. When she does come back, women miss far more work than men to take care of sick kids. This all puts a company in a difficult position (financially and otherwise) that does not exist for men. Women miss work more often than men because of personal illness and depression. Women are far less amenable to overtime and don't perform well in crunch situations. They do not cope with stress as well as men, and emotionally degrade with fatigue at a far faster rate than males. When distressed, they become irritable, combative and irrational more often than men when in high stress situations (their emotions escalate more quickly). Women's hormones fluctuate at a far higher rate and frequency, often affecting their moods, concentration, and productivity. Estrogen causes emotional instability and fluctuation. Men have little estrogen and don't experience the peaks and valleys that women do. Women are more likely to form clicks and ostracize, other women among other social problems. Women just don't get along with women quite often. It causes a real distraction for everyone and hurts workplace morale. Women (attractive ones) are a distraction to many men. I am generally not blaming women for this, but it is a fact. Men will spend time talking to a pretty female employee just because. Workplace relationship that may form are often disastrous. When the relationship ends, a real mess ensues. Men can and do occasionally (some men more than occasionally) talk dirty when women aren't around. You have a women around and men have to watch everything they say. They can't say t__s or b__bs out loud. That could land them in the unemployment line because of a sexual harassment complaint. Men have been in charge since the beginning of time. They have leadership built into their DNA. They see women as trying to encroach on that and being the competitors that they are - don't want extra competition. This is natural. Political correctness and "equality". Wither you are are for or against them, are not natural, logical or intuitive. Men thinking that men should be selected above women in tech/science because as a whole, they posses more natural skills and posses less natural challenges is logically the best bet. There are instances where a women will outperform a man, but statistically the odds are against this happening by a large scale. Edit: here are a couple more statistics: Women are more likely to quit a job. Women are more likely to exit the workforce altogether. There are a number of books rationalizing gender based wage and hiring inequality that point out far more statistics and logical (cause and effect) reasoning than I have mentioned here. I will try to dig up a couple.