So this experiment shows there is a ‘women bonus’ in tech. Men should demand equal treatment under the law. Sexism has no place in the industry.

>> Why I’m not depressed by our results and why you shouldn’t be either

Here’s a crazy hypothesis. Maybe, just maybe, men and women are different? Maybe they have different strengths and aptitudes? Crazy right? I know!!!

I think it has more to do with culture. People in the nerdy world tend to fail at social cohesion with people who have interests outside of the nerdy world. This is true of any culture, but I think it’s worse in any profession historically male dominated. People who don’t feel they stand together with their peers tend to feel rejected. I think in combination with women being more sensitive to rejection and women tending to be the social butterfly it’s natural to want to find a career where it feels right. Which usually isn’t one where you need to be good at fending off doubts. My self identity is rebellious to expectations outside of my own and proud of my geeky-ness. I don’t struggle with that. I totally see it with other women. That feeling of rejection is less a bias and more a cultural gap that further feeds into a feeling of rejection.

A thought on your initial results of “no apparent change”. Maybe your assumption that voice modulation is a gender mask is incorrect? There might be subtle cues in language choice or communication style that are not affected by the voice modulation.

You might be able to determine effectiveness by asking the interviewer to guess interviewee gender at the end of the interview.

Upvote for “Tharrrrr be the gender gap”

I wonder whether it matters whether the interviewer is male or female. Would that make a difference? Are names revealed? I’m not familiar with the platform and from the article I got that they want to keep things anonymous so I’m supposing they’re not. But maybe just first names? I so, that might jeopardise the gender masking.
And last, is there a possibility that we subconsciously pick up on gender in the way people talk? I’m totally going out on a limb here but if we want to get to the bottom of this we need to take all possible factors into account, right?

Having been heavily interested in gender differences for many years myself, I think this study might be interesting to you: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265

It took data from an earlier study that had found sex differences in personality to be very small. By evaluating the data differently (at the univariate level, rather than compiling the data into “the big five” multivariate categories), they found that men and women have about a 10% overlap in personality traits. When they removed the single biggest difference (sensitivity, higher in women), they were still left with only a 24% overlap.

If sensitivity is the largest single personality trait that differs between men and women, that might explain your attrition levels.

What the appropriate action to take is, to my mind, NOT to put X times as many women as men through the pipeline. This is actually counterproductive. You already have a talented pool of women. Plugging 10 times more women into the pipeline, only to have them keep on giving up at the first difficulty… well, if role models are valuable, that’s only going to create 10 times as many role models for failure, that other women are going to see.

What MIGHT just work (and no, I don’t think parity is a reasonable goal, but what might work for the industry and for talented women (and men)), is to just stop. Just stop with all the talk of possible bias in hiring. Stop with all the talk of the sexism in the industry. Just. Stop.

If women are more easily discouraged than men, then what message are they getting when so much time and attention is being given to convincing everyone that they’re being discriminated against? That not only do they have to deal with all the same difficulties of computer science (it’s not a cakewalk, ffs), but you can add systemic sexism and old boys’ clubs and bias in hiring on top of that.

You ever wonder if men are more confident (in part) because they’re constantly told they have male privilege? If you’ve been told all your life that you’re probably going to do fine because you’re a man, why would you quit after a first bad interview? For all you know, you could suck at the interview and still be hired into that privileged old boys’ club, just because you have an outie rather than an innie. Or maybe you stick it out because you’ve been told there’s no excuse for not succeeding–all that male privilege, yo. No one to blame there, and nothing to do but suck it up and get better.

You ever wonder if a woman might have absorbed all of these messages about systemic sexism and anti-woman bias and blah blah blah from the culture, and then the first bad thing happens, that she might think, “OMG, all this sexism. I know they didn’t hire me because I’m a woman, because EVERYONE KNOWS the industry is biased against women. Therefore, because I can’t change the fact that I’m a woman [you know, the way a man might work to change his interview skills], I might as well give up.”

Don’t you guys think that maybe, just maybe, the pervasive rhetoric around this issue might actually be contributing to it? I’m very pleased that you guys have published the results of this research. When my daughter graduated high school with a partial IB and A’s in almost everything, but with a particular gift for math, chemistry and physics, I TOLD her to get into those fields. The hiring bias is INSANE–in her favor. If she went into mechanical or chemical engineering, she could write her own paychecks. If she went into industrial radiography, she’d be pulling in obscene amounts of money a week out of school. Companies would be throwing offers at her 3 months before graduation.

Right now, the tech industry can’t get enough competent women. They’re falling over themselves and each other to hire competent women. They’re doing it for all the wrong reasons, in my opinion, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re doing it. It’s never been easier for a woman to get into a tech field.

And then a massive percentage of them just throw up their hands after one or two bad interviews? Well, maybe they’ve internalized the more pervasive message, which is the exact opposite of what I’ve told my daughter?

Did you do any checks to confirm the modulation worked well? It would be interesting to ask the interviewers afterwards what gender they thought the interviewee was. There may still be some bias based on what gender the interviewer thinks they are talking to.

You mean to tell me that women doubt themselves quicker than men… No, how could it be? Women have always been taught to not put themselves down… no, wait, just kidding. Well, look at it this way, at least they were not asked if they were planning to have a baby anytime soon. Always a win-win!

Nitpick:

“to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude.”

Your formulation makes it sound like you’re advocating for this as the solution to the problem. However, as you later mention, fixing the attrition issue is probably a more effective, more realistic solution.

As a transwoman who transitioned 20 years into her engineering career, I can fill in some anecdotal information on this (if not broad data.) I’d like to begin with saying that I love real data and analysis going into issues like this. I’m glad this experiment was performed and the data fully presented even though it conflicted with the original hypothesis. I learned a good bit reading this.

First, real data. There are studies that have found that resumes with female or black sounding names are rejected more frequently, anonymizing the name removes the bias. There is a gap at the very beginning of the pipeline even before interviews taken place.

Second, during the personal interactions before, during, and after interviewing I find that I am “talked down to” far more frequently. What I mean by that is simple concepts are being explained to me, often in painful detail, before the questions are fully asked. As one example, when someone takes the time to explain how sporting games work as a preamble to design discussions involving information about them, that’s pretty obviously biased, that had never occurred before.

Third, I have noticed that my appearance and how I dress influence how I am treated. If I wear a bit more makeup, wear nail polish, dress more fashionable, and curl my hair, I am treated far more patronizingly than if I wear the “standard geek wear” of jeans, t-shirt, hair in a ponytail, and virtually no makeup. I have heard the same feedback from all of the genetic woman I have asked about this, it is a common experience. Women know they need to dress down to be treated seriously.

Fourth, I have noticed that the results for me have dramatically changed. In the past when I interviewed, I received offers for nearly every interview I had, about 7 out of 8. Now, I receive offers in about 2 out of 8. My technical skills have not deteriorated that dramatically in just a couple of years between looking for a new position. I have now received feedback along the lines of, “While your communication skills are excellent, we feel that you aren’t very technical.” I have never received a single comment before even hinting that I’m “not very technical.” I have peer-reviewed technical publications that are referenced by others. I have been a senior principle engineer in the past and architected systems on very large scales (Amazon amongst them.) It is hard for me to reconcile that these differences have nothing to do with gender.

Fifth, the offers I have received are often for lower titles than I have had in the past, there is a well documented bias that men are promoted based on potential when they haven’t done the job and that women are promoted only after they have done the job for a time. In coming from a principle position, I have literally heard, “well, you haven’t been a principle here before, it’s much harder here, let’s try you out in a senior engineer position.” Seriously? A senior principle position at Amazon responsible for the design of a well known and publicly used product earning billions of dollars is literally much easier than a senior engineer position elsewhere? I doubt it.

Sixth, rejections based on “not a good culture fit” occur. I’ve never heard that before. Ever. When you hear that from a company with 60 male engineers and 2 female engineers, you know exactly what that means. There’s a wonderful article about Paypal that they had problems finding a woman with a good culture fit. Later in the article it mentioned that they frequently solved design discussions by wrestling in the aisles.

Seventh, woman are far more prominently represented in testing or quality assurance engineer roles, in full software engineer positions there are fewer women. Women tend to be shunted to the “less technical” positions.

Eight, I’d never met a female principle software engineer before being hired as one. Everyone around me says things like, “I knew one once. Hmm, I think the fact that I can remember the single one is the problem.”

Having literally been on both sides of this equation and speaking with other technical transwomen who have experienced the same differential treatment, appearance does matter. With voice only, the technical results may be the same, but the interviewer is free to imagine the appearance of the person being interviewed. It’s not just about perceived gender, it’s about the appearance of the specific person, body language, and other hard to quantify social cues. The treatment in a technical question completely divorced from the social interaction surrounding an interview does not necessarily reflect the questioning and results of real interviews. It also fails to reflect the pipeline, offers, and other aspects of the process.

It’s also amusing to hear long time male friends hear my experiences and try to mansplain to me how they haven’t happened or aren’t valid in some way.

This article in no way proves that we can all pat ourselves on the back because there is no bias. It proves that significant in-roads have been made into a single aspect of the process for which I am grateful and it shows that continually investigating the process does have positive results.

“Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance”

No, in fact, that’s exactly what I expected.

While it’s convenient to think of the world in black-and-white, that’s not often a true model of reality. To believe that voice tone matters is to believe that men are systematically hearing a female voice and ranking it less competent, i.e., that there are simply some significant number of people in this world who are unapologetic sexists.

The main problem with this is that most tech interviewers are young enough that they went through college with a lot of women. These days, women are significantly more likely to attend college than men, so for anyone under about 40, their entire career experience is evidence against the belief that women are fundamentally incompetent. Why would we believe they would rank a female voice as less competent?

That didn’t used to be true. The “blatant sexist” can be an accurate model when interviewers are much older. For example, orchestra auditions are infamously sexist in this way (hence why blind auditions have seen some success). Up until fairly recently, conductors tended to be older men, who went to college back when not many women did.