
Women candidates for tech jobs did worse when their voices were masked as men's - jackgavigan
http://fusion.net/story/320747/gender-masked-for-tech-job-interviews/
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mrrrgn
Have you heard a woman's voice in this "masked" state? It still sounds
extremely feminine because of the manner of speaking. It's very odd. You can
even hear it in this short clip:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFqRIvd9d5s)

That alone gives the observation questionable merit.

~~~
paperpunk
I was going to ask this. It's quite difficult to make male/female voices sound
like either with just audio filters/modulation, so I immediately wondered how
convincing the effect could really be.

I think that the clip you linked to sounds more like a stereotypical 'camp'
gay man accent if male at all, which is obviously testing for a different kind
of unconscious bias altogether.

~~~
GilbertErik
Exactly. Changing pitch or modulating doesn't change things like pacing and
diction and word choice.

It'd be like saying 'Men in pink jeans do worse in bars than women in camo
dresses'.

~~~
Avery3R
Besides the speaking patterns you mentioned, women's voices and men's voices
resonate in different areas of the vocal tract which you can also hear.
Women's voices tend to resonate near the nose and mouth while men's tend to
resonate in the chest.

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anotheryou
Bullshit title.

from the original blog post:

> masking gender had no effect on interview performance

> it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better
> than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did
> a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t
> statistically significant

~~~
kabouseng
Not statistically significant already says you cant say much about the
observation.

But here is a thought, what if woman already get preferential treatment
(contrary to what many feminist would have you believe), and when their voices
are masked as a mans, that preferential treatment falls away. And vica versa
for when mens voices are masked as a womans.

And this whole rickmarol is about achieving equal outcomes (even distribution
of women to men in tech), and not about equal opportunities or the removal of
bias / prejudice.

~~~
sambeau
'Not statistically significant' means you can and should say nothing about it
— it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you
should leave it that: it happened by chance.

In terms of analysis - it might as well not have happened at all and is only
worth mentioning if you had expected something significant to happen.

~~~
Bartweiss
> it just as likely happened by chance as any other theory and, as such, you
> should leave it that: it happened by chance.

That's wrong. That's _very_ wrong, and it reinforces the confusion already
surrounding 'significance'.

p=0.05 means that there was a 5% chance of obtaining results at least as
extreme as measured if the null hypothesis was true (i.e. there was no
difference to observe). p=.06 is a 6% chance, and p=.04 is a 4% chance.

None of those are "as likely as not", which would be 50%, or p=0.5. Nor is
p=.05 an inherently meaningful cutoff - it's an arbitrary threshold on a
continuum of possibilities, and indeed 'significance' is often set at p=.01
instead. Overemphasis of a cutoff leads to p-hacking, and treating
significance as binary promotes bad studies (p=.04 is _not_ as meaningful as
p=.00001).

This article is too credulous to an unproven result, but saying that all
results >.05 are "as likely by chance" or not worth discussing is intensely
wrong. The original blog post responded quite legitimately by indicating an
unexpected-but-unproven result, and suggesting further study.

------
mosselman
I can imagine that we do not just perceive someone's gender by the sound of
their voice, but the way in which they present their opinions and what they
say in general.

So lets assume we have a biased recruiter who secretly, perhaps unknowingly,
prefers to hire men. The recruiter subconsciously hears a women (man with
modulated voice) say things in a way that men would, he might actually prefer
this candidate over a 'real' woman. Another candidate, who sounds like a man,
but is a woman then says things that the recruiter's subconscious picks up as
female might then not be considered at all.

So what does this say? Nothing much I think.

~~~
rebeccaskinner
I think that's a lot of it; There are definitely masculine and feminine
communication styles, and I think that like a lot of other things, feminine
communication styles are devalued. The people doing it in most cases probably
aren't aware of it, but I'm sure it does happen.

It seems like even just this factor alone could be enough to account for the
other discrepancies- a man speaking with with a female-modulated voice may
fair better than men in general because, they benefit from having a masculine
(e.g. "good") communication style while also benefiting from any factors that
may work in favor of women during an interview.

On the other hand, women whose voices are modulated to sound like mens may
have it a lot worse, since they would be affected by both the fact that their
communication style would be worse, but also the fact that people tend to have
strong negative reactions toward men who are seen to be in any way feminine.

~~~
adrianratnapala
The thing is that communication style is not a mere decoration: it's an
important skill for an engineer.

And that's bad news for women if they really do speak less confidently than
men. I want a colleague who is confident in his or her own ideas and able to
pipe up and explain them to others. I think it is also easier to be clear if
you are first confindent.

Admitedly, some acquaintances (all of them men), take it to the opposite
extreme; they try to drown out everyone else, in a contest of nerd-machismo.

But in new hires -- of either sex, timidity is the more likely vice.

~~~
zepto
Why do you assume tre difference has anything to do with 'timidity'?

~~~
adrianratnapala
The original story talks about women being more easily discouraged than men --
this is in line with other new stories I have seen in the same genre. _If_ all
that is true, then one might suspect that men talk more confidently while
women talk more diffidently.

In my book both confidence and diffidence are virtues. But taken to extremes,
they become the vices of machismo and timidity. And in my experience, new
hires of both sexes are dangerously close to the timid end of the spectrum.

------
maxcan
tl;dr study shows, in a statistically insignificant way, that interviewing is
biased in favor of women. author manages to find a way to fit contradictory
results to her preexisting view that women are being treated unfairly.

------
jondubois
The reason why there are so few women in tech (particularly in computer
science) is because software engineering is still culturally seen like a
"Man's job" and fewer women enrol for IT or Computer Science degrees at
university.

Most of the computer science courses at my uni had only 1 female per 20+
males. Even among women who do want a career in engineering, many tend to
choose areas such as chemical or environmental engineering over software
engineering.

Unfortunately, most people make important life decisions based on social
imagery created by the media and society instead of doing what they really
want.

~~~
sevenless
I'm curious. Why is the lack of women in software development seen as a more
urgent issue than the lack of men in school teaching or nursing, or the lack
of women in blue collar work eg garbage collecting?

This _isn 't_ meant as 'whataboutery'; it's clear that talented women
programmers are being missed... but what are the reasons that tech is getting
the focus?

~~~
DanBC
> but what are the reasons that tech is getting the focus?

Because you're not looking for the projects in those other areas, and so you
don't find the projects, and so you think there's a focus on tech.

You follow tech news, you read HN, you see all these tech-related programmes.

It's a fairly simple cognitive bias.

~~~
ahartman00
I'm not sure about this. I read general purpose news(the us section of
csmonitor everyday, and google news almost everyday). I see stories about the
lack of tech diversity in regular news, but I haven't seen anything about
nursing or teaching.

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JulianMorrison
I have a feeling that speech styles matter. A style that comes from a male
socialization, sounds confident rather than self deprecating, and assertive
rather than conciliatory.

------
Jordrok
This is interesting and all...but wouldn't it have been easier all around to
just modulate the voices of both genders into a single, gender-neutral tone,
or even better yet, perform the interviews solely through text? Something
about the way the whole thing was implemented just feels...gimmicky to me.

~~~
swiftisthebest
There is no gender neutral tone.

------
alecco
The previous submission got removed from HN home page...

~~~
douche
There was a huge amount of discussion of the actual post yesterday - but I
dunno where it's gotten to. Somebody must have brigaded it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12002673)

~~~
raldi
It might have triggered the HN flamewar detector, which automatically pushes
things down the page.

------
mattnewton
If these results are being interpreting correctly, it could be that there are
just many more talented men being churned out of schools, and the problem is
the pipeline to the interview. This is consistent with my experiences hiring
software developers at a Fortune 500 where there is already tremendous
preference to hire women to overcome the typical ratio, but very few
applicants to choose from.

