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Comment by paperpunk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'.

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.

> which is obviously testing for a different kind of unconscious bias altogether.

No, the control group for that would be men who have, as you put it, "stereotypical 'camp' gay man accent", i.e. similarly qualified men who happen to naturally sound like this.

This makes me wonder why they tried to make the voices sound gender neutral/other gendered rather than say, somewhat non human like.

Would the supposed biases still be there if the voices were masked to sound like say, Darth Vader? Or maybe a Dalek from Doctor Who? Would there still be the same issues with speech patterns and what not if it sounded like the interviewee was speaking in robo speak?

I think the easiest solution would be to just conduct the interview via text only. You could even apply filters to transform some common grammatical structures or word choices with gender cues into a more neutral form.

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