[HN Gopher] We built voice modulator to mask gender in tech inte...
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We built voice modulator to mask gender in tech interviews. Here's
what happened
Author : dmitrygr
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-10-11 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.interviewing.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.interviewing.io)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "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?
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| There actually are plenty of cartoons and shows with female
| role models in positions where they have to overcome something
| big, much of which became more prominent since the 2000s.
| Specifically older shoujo anime feature female characters with
| arcs spanning more than a few episodes, akin to what most
| shounen anime is like. Even female characters in shounen tend
| to go through those arcs.
|
| The whole girlboss thing isn't that omnipresent, though there
| are still some leftovers of the whole Disney princess "just be
| as you are and it will be fine" era.
| rhino369 wrote:
| If there is a correlation, it's probably the opposite. That if
| women don't value grit, female writers aren't going to make it
| an important part of their story. But I'd guess its probably
| just more overcompensating for "damsel in distress" being the
| default narrative device for most of history.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > That if women don't value grit, female writers aren't going
| to make it an important part of their story.
|
| Then the ones who _are_ writing stories involving _physical_
| prowess don 't have business doing so if they are expecting a
| sizable audience. Some people just want the fantasy that
| femininity magically creates _masculine_ results. That 's
| fine. The rest of the world isn't going to take it any more
| seriously than they would a film about a chimp being elected
| president.
| tchaffee wrote:
| > The rest of the world isn't going to take it any more
| seriously...
|
| ... than super heroes. Which are a hugely successful genre.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Sure, with a data point of one. Now let's take Wonder Woman,
| who went through grueling training as a young girl. Needs far
| more data to stand up as a possible cause.
| llampx wrote:
| You can't be seriously saying that Hollywood plays such a big
| role in people's culture and upbringing the world over, that a
| few movies would lead to such a fundamental difference?
|
| That's giving the movie industry more credit than they give
| themselves with the Oscars.
| spoiler wrote:
| In a world where baby boomers (I forgot the politically
| neutral term, sorry) emotionally neglected their children,
| moist turned to various media such as tv and internet for
| their emotional management expectations, and role models.
| voxl wrote:
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Needs a [2016] tag on this one.
| impowski wrote:
| So there is no systemic sexism in Software Development?
|
| Can we do a study on brick laying, plumbing, garbage collecting
| and other similar industries? Maybe we will find it there?
|
| I'm just curious. (but I know the answer already)
| erehweb wrote:
| 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-t...
| poopnugget wrote:
| llampx wrote:
| Let's do one on systemic sexism in primary schools and
| Kindergartens as well, oh and nursing too.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| > 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-nur...
| Nesco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| crackercrews wrote:
| Same thing happened in Australia. [1]
|
| 1: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
| tri...
| [deleted]
| programmarchy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tchaffee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There was no difference between men and women's evaluations
| after controlling for attrition.
|
| It's literally the entire point of the article.
| tchaffee wrote:
| 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.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
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