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Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

There's a fascinating study on orchestra auditions, where it was found that performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation: https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac...

IMHO, if the tech industry wants to live up to its narrative of meritocracy, this is one obvious improvement over existing processes. No, it won't take care of pipeline problems; no, it won't solve the "tipping point" problem (i.e. where candidates of underrepresented groups are dissuaded by a lack of pre-existing representation, making it very hard to go from zero to one, so to speak). That said, we're uniquely positioned as an industry to do this - technical interviews are similar to auditions in that they hinge on skill-based performance - so why not? It can't be any less arbitrary than asking random questions about manhole covers and light bulbs.

I'd posit that even the "show your thinking process" parts could be done in this way - e.g. via text chat, or inline comments, or maybe even using voice obfuscation and/or neutral avatars.

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You may want to read https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...

“One of the more interesting findings of the study that I have not often seen reported: overall, women did worse in the blinded auditions.”

This happens all the time, the media will find one aspect of a study and blast it from on high while ignoring any parts that hurt their agenda.

A particularly infamous example of this is studies of drug use by race: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481...

You'll see news outlets claiming that black and white drug use rates are the same, but they're going off of the "Have use ever used X?" questions while completely ignoring the ones about how often they've used X, which shows a clear racial discrepancy. That's before you get into issues like the study being based on self reporting, or the vast majority of drug crimes that result in jail time being ones related to dealing and not mere use, etc.

> performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation

There has recently been quite a bit of pushback on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

> It can't be any less arbitrary than asking random questions about manhole covers and light bulbs.

Asking random questions about manhole covers and lightbulbs doesn't work very well! Don't take that as your comparison.

Well of course the people who want to hire by race want to get rid of blind auditions!

To believe that blind applications would help increase female representation presupposes that they're being discriminated against right now, when TFA shows that women are getting preferential callbacks. That completely jives with my experience: most female candidates are highly, highly sought-after, and are quickly hired by top tech companies (leaving smaller companies looking bad in the process, despire their equal desire for female candidates).

Blind applications would probably hurt female representation. It's possible it would help minority representation.

It seems to me that if you choose something that is completely equitable in who is able to participate, then the rest of it sounds like manufacturing dissent by companies or corporations that want a "leg up" on the competition in the D&I category, which is all the rage these days in terms of marketing. Maybe there are other reasons women don't want to enter these fields, but prefer to wholly dominate others, and maybe that we should turn the conversation to this being OK. We've spent so many cycles trying to "figure this out" when there is research after research that just shows women don't prefer the "rat race" as much as men, and gravitate towards roles that focus on helping, nurturing, and community, hence why they dominate roles where those are highlighted: teachers, administrators, nurses, psychologists, etc.

There's never going to be a feeling of "service" or caring when you are writing ad-tech for a FAANG. It's just not going to happen, no matter how many D&I articles you write.

I agree.

There has been research on demographics pertaining to college majors and their career opportunities in the context of why some demographics make less money than others after graduating with a 4 year degree. One of the main factors that came up in the interviews was, like you said, the lower earning demographics wanted to have a bigger community impact, but that those jobs simply paid less money (like social workers).

I once went to a members-only hackerspace that was very open and equitable, at least in theory. To join, you had to get a recommendation from another member and support from one more. They held regular open days and were very welcoming but definitely had an established subculture that didn't include much diversity. Joining really meant being the friend of a member or possibly a friend of a friend. If you were an outsider, you'd really need to show them you were already a part of their sub-culture before they'd consider you. Openness to diversity really meant openness to conforming to an existing culture before joining.

Diversity and inclusion is an extremely hard thing to get right or even to agree on what "right" means. I don't think anybody would agree that diversity issues are fixed now and so it can't be "time to turn the conversation to this being OK". As I pointed out in my story above, lots of people can't even see that there is a present and persistent problem despite the good intentions around fixing it. That's exactly why we need to pay more attention to studies like this.

You seem keen to switch to a conversation about nature instead of having one about nurture/culture (there were a few historical arguments about race that took a similar approach). Perhaps these two are so intimately bound that it's not helpful to make observations about one in the abstract. Instead, should we not simply focus on those things we can change and try our best to ensure the inequalities of the past aren't reflected in the culture of today? It's not about some set of absolute outcomes, its about the absence of bias - an outcome I'd hope we were all on-board with.

> Openness to diversity really meant openness to conforming to an existing culture before joining.

Why is this a problem? I've been progressing most of my life, but I came to software development relatively late in life. The culture was dramatically different from that of my prior profession.

> women don't prefer the "rat race" as much as men

It's not just that. Money is like make-up for men. It's obvious why men would put more effort (on average) in acquiring it.

> Blind applications would probably hurt female representation.

Isn't this good for gender equality?

Harvard's argument is that selecting candidates based on merit means we discriminate against those who had a harder time building merit and is therefore racist/sexist.

Some people believe girls don't study CS in large numbers because programming is "a boys' job" which is a self-perpetuating cycle; and a limited period of substantial positive discrimination could turn it into a gender-neutral job that appealed to men and women equally.

Other fields, like medicine, law and chemistry have radically changed gender composition since the 1940s so it's not unprecedented for an industry to lose its gender bias.

Personally I think it's far from certain such an effort would work - or that it wouldn't.

> most female candidates are highly, highly sought-after, and are quickly hired by top tech companies

Let's say we believe that women are on average equally as capable of men, and we know there are maybe 10-20% as many women in the industry.

Are those 10-20% women roughly as good as the average man, or are they roughly as good as the top 10-20% of men? Have they had the same experience as average men, or have they fought through and survived discriminatory barriers?

Even if we suppose the answer is somewhere in-between, it wouldn't be surprising that women are highly sought-after. Because with these assumptions, the women in the industry are generally likely to be better on average.

Maybe we don't observe discrimination against women in this specific context* (post-application and pre-salary negotiation), but that doesn't mean it isn't occurring elsewhere.

*The summary data includes non-technical hires at tech companies

Your assumption relies on the women getting into the field are the best women. I don't see why that would be true. The fields with many women like law, medicine or psychology are much harder to get into than computer science or engineering so most of the best women likely ends up there.

Given that as a woman you don’t benefit from the “competency bias” and constantly has to prove yourself (which is not necessarily bad), combined with the fact that many women simply walk out of careers in computer science and physics because of sexism/harassment, you could consider that the women left are indeed more competent than the average man in the industry.

Women do benefit from likeability bias though, and likeability is certainly a factor when hiring and firing.

As for fake resume studies, the problem with those is that male and female resumes are evaluated differently. If they made a male looking resume and sent it out with a female name it will do badly. But a female looking resume with a male name will also do badly.

What does a male/female looking resume mean? (Genuinely asking. I can't imagine that a female engineering accomplishment is vs a male engineering accomplishment.)

I'm curious also, but anecdotally, women were over-represented in my engineering school's societies and probably under-represented in design competitions.

There are plenty of research done on gendered words. Like highlighting your own personal excellence or skill is more masculine etc. There are also of course that men and women tend to have different hobbies and therefore spends their free time doing different things. So one new grad might have done some leadership roles in a horse club while the other maybe did some chess competitions.

https://www.idealrole.com/blog/gender-job-ads

Does this mean if you're a woman and you highlight your own personal excellent in your resume you're statistically likely to be treated worse? Similarly if you're a man and you have a leadership role at a horse club you're statistically likely to be treated worse?

Thought experiment: These biases are mostly shared among people so you got them in yourself. Instead of thinking "What is the ideal software engineer", think "what is the ideal feminine software engineer" and "what is the ideal masculine software engineer". The picture in your head will be very different. If you are a woman you will be compared to the ideal feminine engineer while as a man you get compared to the ideal male one.

The prime example is the term "bossy", women get called this since they are expected to be much more cooperative than men. I think a very big issue right now is that we use men as a standard and say "when women use male strategies they get pushback for being too masculine", instead to gain individual success they should try to be like successful women. In an ideal society this wouldn't be the case, but as is these biases exists and so you have to work with them.

And as a personal anecdote, when I looked for jobs as a new grad when I used more cooperative and less personal excellence I didn't get any callbacks. I got lots of callbacks when I focused on personal excellence though. Its as if companies assumed I was less competent just because I talk about teamwork, because their ideal masculine software engineer wouldn't talk like that. You can see here how it works:

https://hbr.org/2018/10/how-men-get-penalized-for-straying-f...

Edit: The moral of the story is that when we tell men to be more feminine and women to be more masculine we just hurt them. Men and women aren't evaluated by the same metrics. People told me "Companies expects you to be a teamplayer, try to highlight that!", but it was clearly wrong and didn't help me at all.

That's the opposite of what happens. My own experience has been that women benefit dramatically from a "being a woman" bias that makes them much more likely to be hired - exactly what this study now quantifies - and in addition be basically unfireable even if they have severe skills or attitude problems.

The whole idea that there's a competency bias towards men is false. What's actually being observed is that women are hired even when they aren't competent, to please feminists and diversity advocates, which then by definition would make men "appear" more competent even if they were of only average competency.

Wouldn't you need to have evidence of discrimination before you start to discriminate against other groups in the name of women? Women might actually get a backlash for that and you have the classic self-fullfilling prophecy. Why not try a revolutionary approach and treat people equally, everyone to their best ability as their conscience allows?

We would need to scrap esoteric models about bias and have very simple rules that everybody understands?

Do you mean evidence or indisputable proof?

The quality of evidence needs to be very, very high to justify discrimination in my opinion.

And if people responsible for awarding research grants within tech decide not to investigate whether there is discrimination against women, or tech companies decline to give full access to their data.

Then the quality of evidence that you demand can't exist - in that case, should nothing be done about it?

Maybe it is hard to generate, but without it you have no basis to justify your discrimination. I think that people specifically denied policies that allows it by intrinsic discrimination is a very good and sensible step and should continue to be regarded as the better approach.

If you want to discriminate without sufficient evidence, I am plainly not with you on this.

It is the simplest form of power play to treat people differently because it breeds jealousy. Jealously can lead to discrimination as well. You can do that as a team leader and be sure that people are more concerned with each other than holding you accountable. This is actually a common behavior in corporate office culture which had many tech flee the premises because they had a choice.

But there is quite simple and obvious evidence of discrimination: the percentage of technical jobs which go to women.

Not accepting this as evidence and demanding that your own standards for evidence are met (without saying exactly what that would involve, so you could later reject any other evidence that is provided) before allowing any corrective action, is yet another way that this discrimination is perpetuated.

When I studied CS and electrical engineering we started with 120 students. 5 were women. 15 students made it in regular time from which 1 was a women.

You conclusion isn't obvious, on the contrary, there are contradictions. Where should the women in tech have come from?

Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. That is sexism.

> allowing any corrective action

If the reasoning is already that bad, I have very little faith in this corrective action.

> Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men? No, you only think discrimination is an issue in spaces where men are overrepresented. That is sexism.

Ah yes, the hallmark of good faith discussion asking a question and answering it for them.

A rhetorical question is not a bad faith approach to discussions contrary to leveling the accusation itself. The argument is still there if you want to have a go at it.

> When I studied CS and electrical engineering we started with 120 students... 15 students made it in regular time

That sounds like a shockingly badly organised course with many barriers to success. Such barriers to success are likely to fall harder on women and minorities (who are more likely to have caring duties, less support in their social network, and will face general discrimination).

With even the facts you have given, it would be unsurprising to me that disproportionately few women bother to apply: even ridiculously fewer women start than on a typical course.

I would be embarrassed if I were an educator or organiser for that course.

> Would you also think that nurses discriminate against men?

No. Although this is not directly analogous to anything I have said, I am giving a good faith answer. I think that nursing is an underpaid profession because it is seen as women's work - just as caring work is often unpaid. I'm not aware that men face significant barriers when they choose to enter nursing.

The careers in which men are over-represented and women are under-represented tend to be highly-paid and/or prestige jobs. So, that's quite a different situation and points to societal discrimination by gender against women.

Computer Science as an industry is relevant here in that: women were initially over-represented, until it came to be seen as a prestige career and started garnering higher pay, and now they are increasingly under-represented.

I agree that it is undervalued and maybe because it is seen as a women's job, but that part is speculation. I live in a country with stronger social systems and there are countless interests that keep the pay as low as possible. You would not find a single person that says that nursing isn't important.

As I said, you if you want to have a tech job, you currently almost can choose where to work. Men and women alike, so I cannot see that many barriers.

I don't buy into the prestige argument at all, it feels far removed from reality. I didn't pick my profession because of prestige and I don't think many people do. This isn't the showbusiness. Do you know what people with strong affinity to tech were called? Nerds. The good payrate is very recent, as are the gender discussions btw.

Get on with the times friend, we need to eliminate blind auditions now.They discriminate:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

"Blind auditions are based on an appealing premise of pure meritocracy"

Damn, how did we get here?

By saying nothing years ago when "diversity" became popular and people started arguing there weren't enough women in computing. I'm as guilty as anyone, in the beginning it all seemed harmless enough. It wasn't, it was based on sexism from day one, and now we see the consequences: proven and massive bias towards women at an institutional level. And good luck trying to fix it.

Here's an article detailing an experiment with voice gender changers in online interviews:

https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

We talk a big game about merit, capability, qualifications and such.

Ultimately though, nearly all actual selection processes are are subjective or ilegible... depending on how you see these things. How an interviewer feels about you intuitively matters a lot, maybe the most. Actual tests of skill are usually intuitive as well. An interviewer tries to gauge your skills, but it's rarely designed to be an objective test of skill. If it is an objective test of skill, it's rarely the primary decision driver.

Blind auditions enforce a certain kind of objectivity. But, I think we can read into the fact that musicians "audition" while employees "interview." You perform an audition.

Blind auditions would be a radical change to hiring/selection. The big advantages/disadvantages of the approach are like those of standardised testing. They measure the easily measurable, and bury everything else.

> an objective test of skill

Other industries/careers have exactly this: a professional licensing exam. Most programmers vehemently oppose any sort of standardized testing.

I'm curious, what do you want to test? The classic "memorize how to bubblesort" interview questions which so many people complain about because they don't show anything except that someone has prepared? Isn't it better to just look over the code of applicants and check if they are aware of general structures etc?

Obviously some familiarity with algorithms etc is required and it should be checked if that's there, but with tests you can't really test if someone understands the bigger picture and did not just memorize the answer. I know more than enough people who can solve problems just fine but their code is absolutely atrocious and I'd never hire them. Interviews where one can ask them why they write code the way they do are probably far more effective.

> where candidates of underrepresented groups are dissuaded by a lack of pre-existing representation

I don't understand this persepective from candidates. The job market must be really good if they can use this as a metric for pursuing a job opportunity. I was the only person from my country when I joined my current employer. It never even crossed my mind that it could be an issue.

There was also a post on HN a few months ago that said asking minorities to attend things like recruiting fairs in order to show the diversity of the employer was unfair.

It's a chicken and egg situation for employers.

At my company, you have a leg up if you fit one of the diversity metrics and are applying for a job.

I've worked on teams where I'm the only one of my race. I've been on group projects where I'm the only one of my gender. Based on the conversations I've heard on some of the teams I've been on, I have a minority political view and culture/lifestyle as well. It's almost never a problem unless you believe or think it is a problem. There can be rare cases where you get someone who is actively trying to make it a problem, but that tends to be rare. So I don't see it as a chicken or egg issue, I see it as mindset problem.

By 'chicken and egg' I meant that employers can't really do much about minority candidates not accepting a job offer because there aren't any/enough of that candidate's gender/race already employed.

Thank you. Your experience in not suffering from discrimination clearly invalidates all of the millions of people who do. It's clearly all in their head.

It boggles my mind on people's basic inability to realize that not everyone has the same experiences in life as them. And rather than accept other peoples experiences as valid, it's always the same argument of "I haven't had to deal with this therfore they don't either."

Yes they want to be in a situation where they can just ignore it and it won't be an issue, the problem is they don't have that luxury. It's great that you do, but that doesn't change their circumstances.

I never said it doesn't exist. I'm sure there are people who are victims of discrimination. Where's your proof of the millions who do suffer from workplace discrimination in tech every year? More specifically, how do you see the chicken and egg problem posed in the parent comment not being a mindset issue?

I've actually seen women on twitter say something like "if your company doesn't already have women, we're not interested, stop your pretending to care about diversity and women's issues" or something to that effect. How will the situation ever change, then, though? Its most definitely a chicken and egg problem for employers.

California Prop 16 just attempted to overturn bans on racial/gender discrimination when hiring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_...

The people advocating for more representation almost invariably are not interested in removing discrimination on arbitrary characteristics, which is a near universally laudable objective, but rather work backwards from the demographic representation they'd like to see.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

If you think that the diversity and equity initiatives within companies are currently working towards anything resembling a blind hiring process, I get the impression that you're not particularly up to date on the objectives of the modern left.

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