Google used to do this - they worked very hard to remove all gender signals, and as a result, pay discrimination against women got worse. So now they no longer try to hide gender.
The reason is because the typical resume pipeline for an engineering position is roughly 90/10 male/female. If you take away anything indicating gender during the hiring process, in general you will end up with... a 90/10 mix. Which is decidedly worse than what these progressive companies are hoping for. The only real way to gain a more favorable ratio is to, well, introduce bias towards females in the hiring process (to overcome the pipeline factor). It’s why these blind hiring/review practices always fail — they don’t give the expected results.
What? That makes no sense. When I put up a job listing and I get 90% resumes of people who are under qualified, and 10% that are qualified, that doesn't skew my hire rate of under qualified people.
For example:
500 total resumes for one position. 90% are unqualified => 50 good ones. Assuming equal representation here, 45 of those resumes will be from men, 5 will be from women. You narrow it down to say 25 resumes for initial online screens (no voice chat so you can keep things gender-neutral!). Call it 22/3 male/female at this point. Second round, online again (there’s even been companies that have done voice changing during interviews so they can have real conversations!). Half get cut. Let’s call it 11/2 male/female now. How likely do you think it is that a man will get the position versus a woman? How likely do you think you’ll be to achieve a “good” gender balance in hiring over time using this strategy?