Gender gap in tech

[Canarr]

Here is an interesting article on the subject of the gap between genders in technical jobs, built around the question whether or not anonymizing a job interviewee's gender will make interviewers treat them differently.

Quote:

One of the big motivators to think about voice masking was the increasingly uncomfortable disparity in interview performance on the platform between men and women1. At that time, we had amassed over a thousand interviews with enough data to do some comparisons and were surprised to discover that women really were doing worse. Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.

Despite these numbers, it was really difficult for me to believe that women were just somehow worse at computers, so when some of our customers asked us to build voice masking to see if that would make a difference in the conversion rates of female candidates, we didn’t need much convincing.

It's definitely an interesting read.

[mjr]

I'm going to have to read that article. But wouldn't a lot of that fall apart during an actual face-to-face interview?

I work with several highly skilled women who are software engineers and work in technical fields. I'm curious what they'd think of this.

But it'll definitely be worth reading.

[TheHuckster]

I'd like to know the experience-level of these interviewees. It's not a fair study if you're interviewing people with 10+ years of experience, because the males have had the benefit of having a better career experience, while the females have had the opposite.

Technical jobs require good experience. If a female has gotten the shaft her entire career, then of course she's not going to be as attractive to an employer versus a male who has gotten the experience he needs.

If you really want to gauge prejudice in tech employers, you'll want to use entry-level recent grads whose differences in skill-level should be more even.

[Canarr]

I have absolutely no knowledge of engineering that I could draw on here; however, I interpreted this part of the article

When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform, they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question. Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role, and interviewers typically come from a mix of large companies like Google, Facebook, Twitch, and Yelp, as well as engineering-focused startups like Asana, Mattermark, and others.

as stating that the interview in question deals with basic technical questions related to the job, intended to screen applicants before proceeding to interviews in person. So, this is not so much about previous experience, it's about technical knowledge and problem solving skills.

Of course, the study isn't perfect; the author admits that herself. But it does show that maybe bias isn't the (only) reason for the gender gap in tech.

[TheHuckster]

as stating that the interview in question deals with basic technical questions related to the job, intended to screen applicants before proceeding to interviews in person. So, this is not so much about previous experience, it's about technical knowledge and problem solving skills.

And where do you think they get technical knowledge from?

College provides a foundation on which you have a good fundamental understanding of computing concepts, but when it comes to practical use of that knowledge, nothing beats actual on-the-job experience.

Even with stuff any college grad should know, just compare the answers to those questions between an entry-level candidate and a seasoned vet, and you'll see a huge difference.

[Canarr]

And where do you think they get technical knowledge from?

College provides a foundation on which you have a good fundamental understanding of computing concepts, but when it comes to practical use of that knowledge, nothing beats actual on-the-job experience.

Even with stuff any college grad should know, just compare the answers to those questions between an entry-level candidate and a seasoned vet, and you'll see a huge difference.

Obviously, yes.

Did you read the article?

[TheHuckster]

Yes, I did. It concluded that the reason for this disparity is due to women giving up too easily. That's a rather weak conclusion, IMO.

It started out with a hypothesis that if you take away an employer's knowledge of a given candidate's gender, then the results of the interviews would be more or less even. It then discovers that this hypothesis was incorrect. They then find that women are more discouraged by bad interviews than men, and then blame the women for it, saying they're giving up too easily.

That, to me, is a vastly flawed conclusion. You have to dig deeper. Why are women more discouraged?

Some possibilities:

The interviews might be going worse for females than for males

It could be that females don't get as many interviews as males. If a male has 4 interviews lined up and bombs one or two, that's less discouraging than if a female gets only 2 interviews and then bombs both.

The males are getting more encouragement from family and friends to keep pushing harder whereas the females are getting told, in so many words, "Well, maybe this tech stuff just isn't for you."

Overall, I'm just not impressed with the way the study was carried out, or with the conclusions at the end.

[s_stabeler]

Actually, the study is fundamentally flawed. Why? because the employer almost certainly already KNOWS the candidate's gender, since most application forms ask. As such, the study doesn't even test the variable it is supposed to.

[Canarr]

Yes, I did. It concluded that the reason for this disparity is due to women giving up too easily. That's a rather weak conclusion, IMO.

It started out with a hypothesis that if you take away an employer's knowledge of a given candidate's gender, then the results of the interviews would be more or less even. It then discovers that this hypothesis was incorrect. They then find that women are more discouraged by bad interviews than men, and then blame the women for it, saying they're giving up too easily.

Well, they do acknowledge that this study is not the be-all and end-all of the issue, but I think it does give indications that maybe, just maybe, the oft-repeated claim of sexism in the tech industry is not the (only?) reason for the disparity between the numbers of men and women in tech.

And they do add this little piece at the end:

Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely.

Actually, the study is fundamentally flawed. Why? because the employer almost certainly already KNOWS the candidate's gender, since most application forms ask. As such, the study doesn't even test the variable it is supposed to.

Read carefully:

The setup for our experiment was simple. Every Tuesday evening at 7 PM Pacific, interviewing.io hosts what we call practice rounds. In these practice rounds, anyone with an account can show up, get matched with an interviewer, and go to town. And during a few of these rounds, we decided to see what would happen to interviewees’ performance when we started messing with their perceived genders.

They aren't looking at "real" interviews, where the interviewer has the candidate's CV and everything, and so knows their gender. They are looking at "practice rounds" done on their website.