Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired | Hacker News Reader

Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

39 pointsAnechoic48 comments

I wish we had the actual paper, because the abstract and summary are odd:

We studied the effect of such stereotypes in an experimental market, where subjects were hired to perform an arithmetic task that, on average, both genders perform equally well.

If this is actually what they did, then it's a bit shady. Most of the data shows that men and women are the same on average, but men have a higher variance. So if managers are hiring the best, you'll get more men. Of course, the paper is paywalled, so who knows?

It is nice to know that objective measurements can reduce bias. Score 1 for hiring by github. I'd be curious to see what happens with incentives taken into account - make the employees do math problems and the manager gets $1 for every correct answer.

Here you go: https://mega.co.nz/#!6UxzVLIA!BVUOujU76VnhZM45QE4N2oFz0yLRTf...

Actually this paper is very interesting. So they did in fact reward employers for employee performance.

What I found the most interesting:

If, instead, we were to impose a random choice on employers, their earnings would drop by 11.4%, because employers do gain some relevant information from the appearance of the candidates, and this information allows them to make better-than-random choices (as can be seen in Fig. 1, which shows that employers in this condition choose the higher-performing candidate 55% of the time).

If we remove the anti-women bias in expectations [in the case of appearance only], employers would earn only 0.1% more in compensation.

So it turns out that anti-female bias is almost negligible when basing decisions entirely on candidate appearance. That's really surprising to me. I wish they included a table describing how much alpha could be gained by eliminating anti-female bias in all cases.

Also, it looks like the best (and least biased) predictor was Past Performance. Surprise surprise. Maybe people will now stop complaining about employers who ask for a github (aka "Past Performance") instead of a resume ("aka "Cheap Talk")?

In this experiment, the employers picked between two candidates, one male and one female. If you pick the male on the basis that men tend to have a higher variance of performance, you will end up with a significant underperformance as much as you end up with a significant overperformance. In any case, the task was not to achieve the highest absolute performance - it was to choose the better of two candidates.

In other words, although the variance explanation might give a rational reason for hiring men over women in the real world (although I am very skeptical) it certainly doesn't give a rational reason for hiring men over women in this experiment. Your criticism does not apply.

I'd be interested in seeing a meta-version of this: give two papers with identical methodologies, one showing that employers tend to hire women less because they are biased, and one showing that employers tend to hire women less because the women are less capable.

Then present them to reviewers and see which ones they would accept for publication.

I just did an Implicit Association Test, as suggested by the article, and got a result that was interesting in light of my views of myself.

http://implicit.harvard.edu/

Oh, wow, I highly suggest everyone try this. It really puts your subconscious bias into stark focus.

Hmm, I just get a java.lang.NullPointerException.

All the tests are highly political topics centered on identity politics & social justice topics. They also have weird American classifications of ethnicity being only "Hispanic vs non-hispanic" and "race" which seems more attached to skin color vs who the person is. I tapped around other countries and saw that they used some more or less classifiers of ethnicity & 'race' but the distinction are still there. It makes me put doubts about the testing itself and how much it would be used to advance political agendas.

I took it once and found out that as an Ashkenazi Jew I have a slight bias towards liking black people.

Bit of a "lolwut".

That is incredible and I completely agree with your statements.

These tests are amusing, but I wouldn't put too much weight onto them.

I randomly picked one about attitudes towards homosexuality. Then it showed I associated some negative things with that (like "homosexuals are more often depressed" or whatever). It was not clear to me that this indicates negative attitudes on my part. Rather, I have read a lot about homosexuals having problems, so when the test presented me with such issues, of course I thought about them. That doesn't imply I think every homosexual is depressed (or whatever).

Not saying the tests are not interesting, but I think they are biased in their interpretation. They don't necessarily show what the test designers think they show.

Reading the abstract, it is interesting that the gender of the manager do not effect the bias.

I did however not like the idea put forth by the paper that managers should assume that people lie about their performance. Doing so will only cause inflation in the lies, in which honest people will lie to balance it up and dishonest people will lie even further to get an advantage over honest people.

    > I did however not like the idea put forth by the
    > paper that managers should assume that people lie
    > about their performance

How about: people are generally poor at objective appraisals of themselves?

my resume is a little on the exageration side. mainly so that when hiring managers read my resume and assume i'm lying they'll hopefully end up with a picture of me thats about at the right place.

Also I think that appearing to be better than you really are is a skill that companies are interested in having on their work force. So being frank and transparent could possibly work against you, especially if the hiring manager knows youre being frank and transparent.

I think you are over thinking this. I interview a lot of people for engineering positions. If I think you're trying to deceive me, or I think you've lied on your CV, you're getting a much bigger black mark than if you struggle a bit on the technical tests.

An aside: if you consider a $30,000 wage bracket a senior developer might fall in to ($80k-$110k), I see little correlation between what people ask for and what they 'deserve' based on their technical skills (inside of that bracket)

> Reading the abstract, it is interesting that the gender of the manager do not effect the bias.

I don't think it was that interesting. There often seems to be an implicit assumption when these things come up that people can't or are less likely to be sexist against their own gender, but these kinds of assumptions are seldom given any good arguments. Maybe it has to do with viewing gender issues as a men-against-women, as if these two groups are united teams that uniformly benefit from either team "winning", without regard for their background (social class, race, culture etc.). I don't think that's the case. Nonetheless, in this case, it seems to be a subconscious bias that doesn't serve the employer.

Maybe some decades ago, male managers were likely to be sexist to women. But maybe that had more to do with the fact that most managers were men, rather than that women wouldn't also be sexist against other women in the same scenario.

This is a shame. My anecdotic experience is that 9 out of 10 female engineers are solid, productive members of society and 1 out of 10 is marginal. The male side is much worse. Yes there is 1 out of 10 who is really good, but 2 out of 10 are not worth their paycheck at all, 1 is marginal and 6 out of 10 are solid productive members of society.

Are you saying that there are no female engineers at either extreme ("really good" or "not worth their paycheck") at all?

Among the one petermonsson has met.

My experience is the opposite of yours (I wish it wasn't so). I've haven't worked with that many female engineers in 28 years as an engineer. There's been maybe 12 total as there are so few.

Of those 12 only 2 would I personally hire. That's under 20%. On the male side, depending on the company, it's between 95% at good companies and 50% at bad. In other words, 80% of the women I've worked with didn't seem like a peer (as in able to keep up) whereas less than 50% of the men couldn't keep up. In both camps, men and women, there were plenty of people I liked as people and would be happy to have as friends but I wouldn't hire them to work with.

I know that's just an anecdote

Maybe we're saying different things though. You're claiming in your experience 9 of 10 female engineers are productive members of society. I'm claiming in mine 10 of 12 female engineers are not productive engineers. They may be productive members of society but at work I need productive engineers.

It would really be nice if there was an objective way to measure and or fix this. I'd really like engineering more if there were more women and every time I interview a woman for a job position I hope she's going to pass but even that has been poor. Then again, so few women interview that I don't know what the hit vs miss ratio is there vs men. I'd say it's 1 of 6 or men at best. So far it's 1 of 5 for women meaning I've only interview 5 women since we get so few female applicants.

> I know that's just an anecdote

that's not just an anecdote, that's a disastrous sampling scheme.

> My anecdotic experience

HN has to stop complaining about people's experiences that they don't like by crying "anectdotes", or "anectdata is not data". If someone says that it is their experience then that's it, take it for what it is rather than demanding that they should start peer-reviewing their life.

Same goes for apologizing for sharing one's experiences...

It's not just math, you can put any traditionally male-dominated field in and it'll still work i.e. Study: Women Who Can Code Still Don't Get Hired; Study: Women Who Write Games Still Don't Get Hired etc etc

I call bs on this. Companies are desperate to hire programmers.

Depends on what type I think. I'm a front-end primarily, and it's not that bad (as a woman) but my friends who are back-end developers find it harder to get accepted at workplace. This is all anecdotal of course

Who is hiring game developers?

In New York, there's a relatively large indie game scene. They hire game developers, but usually for casual games i.e. iOS app games (think flappy bird) or indie games

Study: 90% deaths at workplace are men.

Study: most victims of violent rapes are men (prison)

Study: college hostile towards men, most graduates are woman.

> Study: most victims of violent rapes are men (prison)

But that's just funny! "Don't drop the soap!" haha...

What is funny about that? 20% of rape victims are totally ignored.

sarcasm

Edit: if you want to down-vote this, go ahead, but please tell me which one of the facts I have written is incorrect. I also welcome opposing viewpoints with explanations. I am merely providing some of the reasons that men are hired above women. This does not necessarily represent my personal viewpoints, I am playing devils advocate in some cases here.

>The economist Larry Summers famously suggested once that so few women become scientists and engineers because of discrimination, preference and even differences in innate ability.

Ability? There are many teenage prodigies who become homeless and total failures in life. Who ever thought that ability alone guarantees anything? This is a flawed and narrow minded mentality.

Does anyone ever stop and think that there may be more logical reasons than ability that men are hired above women?

There are probably thousands of reasons that men get hired in front of women. Here are some (many of which are not politically correct) facts. As derived by science, statistics, and surveys. I am only echoing information based on research and experience (as a HR specialist for 15 years). These are generalities and certainly don't apply to all women and all men.

Women are generally less ambitious (even if they had better grades). Less creative problem solvers, and less logical (more emotional) with their decisions. Most of them lack the strong drive that men have for career advancement and success. Many men relentlessly work toward advancement and achievement despite having to make sacrifices such as family time, and other obstacles. Much of this is because of the role of testosterone and the design of the male brain (for competition and dominance). I am not saying that there are no women who are ambitions. I am just saying that the ratio is highly in favor of men here. I mentioned the testosterone part because many of you will respond that it is only that women have not been given the proper chance and thus the difference. This has been dis-proven by science and statistical studies.

Most women at some point get pregnant and have kids. This (moderately to severely depending on the person) affects their productivity and mood while pregnant (9 months). Afterward they are off work for 4-6 months (or potentially much longer if the newborn has health problems). The women cannot be legally replaced during this time. Her job has to be waiting there for her when (and if) she eventually comes back. When she does come back, women miss far more work than men to take care of sick kids. This all puts a company in a difficult position (financially and otherwise) that does not exist for men.

Women miss work more often than men because of personal illness and depression.

Women are far less amenable to overtime and don't perform well in crunch situations. They do not cope with stress as well as men, and emotionally degrade with fatigue at a far faster rate than males. When distressed, they become irritable, combative and irrational more often than men when in high stress situations (their emotions escalate more quickly).

Women's hormones fluctuate at a far higher rate and frequency, often affecting their moods, concentration, and productivity. Estrogen causes emotional instability and fluctuation. Men have little estrogen and don't experience the peaks and valleys that women do. Women are more likely to form clicks and ostracize, other women among other social problems. Women just don't get along with women quite often. It causes a real distraction for everyone and hurts workplace morale.

Women (attractive ones) are a distraction to many men. I am generally not blaming women for this, but it is a fact. Men will spend time talking to a pretty female employee just because. Workplace relationship that may form are often disastrous. When the relationship ends, a real mess ensues.

Men can and do occasionally (some men more than occasionally) talk dirty when women aren't around. You have a women around and men have to watch everything they say. They can't say t__s or b__bs out loud. That could land them in the unemployment line because of a sexual harassment complaint.

Men have been in charge since the beginning of time. They have leadership built into their DNA. They see women as trying to encroach on that and being the competitors that they are - don't want extra competition. This is natural.

Political correctness and "equality". Wither you are are for or against them, are not natural, logical or intuitive. Men thinking that men should be selected above women in tech/science because as a whole, they posses more natural skills and posses less natural challenges is logically the best bet. There are instances where a women will outperform a man, but statistically the odds are against this happening by a large scale.

Edit: here are a couple more statistics: Women are more likely to quit a job. Women are more likely to exit the workforce altogether.

There are a number of books rationalizing gender based wage and hiring inequality that point out far more statistics and logical (cause and effect) reasoning than I have mentioned here. I will try to dig up a couple.

The fact that you felt you had to create a fake username for this crap should speak volumes about whether it worth posting.

Fake? You mean yours is real?

You should know (since you are a veteran here) that you cannot post on a thread that was created before your account.

Guess not...

> You should know (since you are a veteran here) that you cannot post on a thread that was created before your account.

If that is the case it is a new rule - I know for certain that I created my account to respond to a specific thread.

I understood there to be a tolerance on that, as the sibling said, for those who register an account to respond to a topic. I know that was what happened when I registered here.

I have created accounts to respond to particular comments. It works (worked?) fine.

Well in any case, check my account age before accusing me of creating an account to post on a thread weeks in the future.

I think the issue is more of just the wrong connection that good schooling = good job. schooling just gives you a certificate of completion. job skills are something you do on your own time.

If you give a girl out of highschool a scholarship and say "hey go get some As then youll get a great job in an otherwise male dominated field" you have then just then totally misguided them.

The major factors in landing a job are 1- actual skills (which you cant learn in school) 2- personal connections in the field youre interested in.

Women who break "the barrier" and get a job in a male dominated field are the ones who are actually in the field and have an actual interest in it. rather than just "well i went to school and majored in X".

Univsersities really need to stop trying to sell themselves as the first step of your career or your entry way in to the work force. thats what a trade school does for you. a university is just a most expensive form of browsing google or wikipedia and getting a general idea of a bunch of stuff.

So none of these other things mean anything to a potential employer then? Connections to get a tech job necessary? Sure, maybe if you want to work at Google or Microsoft straight out of college. Otherwise, no (startups anyone?).

Women miss work more often than men because of personal illness and depression. Women are far less amenable to overtime and don't perform well in crunch situations. They do not cope with stress as well as men, and emotionally degrade with fatigue at a far faster rate than males. When distressed, they become irritable, combative and irrational more often than men when in high stress situations (their emotions escalate more quickly).

I disagree with both of those claims. They are not true in my experience, and generalising all women like that is nonsense.

Show us peer reviewed research to back that up, or take it down.

When I was in the military, we had decades of compiled data to reflect this (from internal and external sources). I will look around the web (much like you can). I do not have access to this data anymore, but I saw the same type of data during my 15 years as a HR specialist. There have been several prominent women who have come out after finishing their terms as CEO, Governor ETC. who said things to the same effect. This is just my personal experience, but when we had new HR staff (new to HR and new to our company) they thought much the same as you. They were surprised to see the data and real world difference. The educational system, govt, and media have been conditioning us to ignore the differences between men and women for so long, many people can no longer see the obvious.

This is not popular, but I believe people should know when they are being brainwashed.

OK, I spent a few minutes Googling and came up with some stuff. Probably not near the quality of what I used to have access too, but...

>Women miss work more often than men because of personal illness and depression. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/sickness-absence-in-the-l...

>Women are far less amenable to overtime http://qz.com/149428/mens-overtime-hours-are-keeping-the-gen...

>don't perform well in crunch situations http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mangeluc/ChoiceUnderStress.pd...

>They do not cope with stress as well as men (specifically time constraint) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.364...

>emotionally degrade with fatigue at a far faster rate than male http://www.wpafb.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090611-105...

More to come. I am going to bed for now.

With the exception of pregnancy, most of the points you raise are symptoms of inequality rather than causes:

- Women are "less ambitious" because they perceive, often rightly, that their path up the ladder is blocked.

- Women miss more work due to illness and depression because they aren't treated fairly and are put under more pressure to get the rewards their male counterparts get easily.

- Women are less amenable to overtime because men are less amenable to doing housework.

- Women can, and do, cope with "hormone fluctuation" very well. They're quite used to it.

- Attractive women in the workplace are only a distraction to unprofessional, easily distracted men.

Your two final points are plain wrong:

- Men talking dirty in the workplace just shouldn't. Regardless of the (imaginary) sensibilities of women, what about the men who don't like that?

- Men haven't been in charge since the beginning of time. History has had plenty of matriarchal societies.

The simple fact is, any business that doesn't select the best possible candidate regardless of gender, is failing their duty to their shareholders/investors/employees to build a secure, stable, profitable and growing company. If I knew that a company I owned part of was recruiting men over women even when the woman is the better candidate I would call for the CEO to be fired.

Thank you for posting this. I'd just like to also add that the "best possible candidate regardless of gender" clause does not run orthogonal to having ratio targets.

Firstly, they act to overcome the biases mentioned in the OP. Secondly, rarely do employees operate in a vacuum, and the benefits brought to teamwork by having mixed genders is important and valuable. The office I work in is infinitely richer for having moved towards having more equal (albeit still terribly inequal) gender balance by recruiting female Engineers. This shines through in group work where a diverse range of perspectives is important at achieving a robust outcome, e.g.: risk assessments, etc.

>- Women are "less ambitious" because they perceive, often rightly, that their path up the ladder is blocked.

What evidence is there to support this? There are biological differences (I am talking brain structure and chemistry here) that make men competitive, leaders, and providers. IT feels like you are ignoring nature here.

Your argument reminds me of "racial inequality". Blacks in America are not hired and paid as much as Asians. Is this because of racism, unequal opportunity? If we look at history, we see that Asians generally invented more and modernized their societies (writing, language, arts) far more than Africans living in similar conditions and with similar opportunity (natural resources, friendly weather ETC.). Who can explain this? Is there a biological reason these pattern repeats themselves in all races throughout known history? Is it because of some influence? or just differences in DNA? Clearly in America, despite all our efforts, racial inequality has done nothing but grow. Is it because of reasons beyond our understanding? People claim that it is this reason or that reason, but History does not agree with them.

>- Women miss more work due to illness and depression because they aren't treated fairly and are put under more pressure to get the rewards their male counterparts get easily.

This is your opinion (which should be stated). This is pretty subjective and I have never seen nor could I find any evidence to support it. It is true that women who do not work get sick less, bit the same is true for men. Workplace illnesses certainly account for some of this. Even if it were provable, what difference does it make. The problem is perpetuated by the problem that exists (cycle).

>- Women are less amenable to overtime because men are less amenable to doing housework.

This only partially accounts for the difference. Where comparing single men and women, there is still a difference. You may say that the difference still exists and that men just live like slobs, but I doubt you will find much evidence to support that.

>- Women can, and do, cope with "hormone fluctuation" very well. They're quite used to it.

Opinion again. You are probably correct with some women, and not so correct with others. This is probably an unknown variable at hire time, thus a risk. In any case, it is an extra thing that most women must deal with. Men with 4 or more kids at home are very rarely hired as CEO's. It is partly because they have a known distraction (such as a women's hormonal swings). I realize that this is an apples to oranges comparison, but any known detractor for any job translates to points against the applicant.

>- Attractive women in the workplace are only a distraction to unprofessional, easily distracted men.

It feels like you are arguing with me here. I am not disagreeing, I am just saying that many workplaces have very valuable and productive men who fall into this category. All boys/girls schools philosophy is to get rid of possible distractions. This segregation is age old in the workplace as well.

>- Men talking dirty in the workplace just shouldn't. Regardless of the (imaginary) sensibilities of women, what about the men who don't like that?

Shouldn't I agree, but if you don't think that this doesn't play a factor, I have to question your grounding in reality.

>- Men haven't been in charge since the beginning of time. History has had plenty of matriarchal societies.

I said that I was talking in generalities. I am not pointing out minority exceptions like you are. These societies represent such a small percentage of recorded humans existence that they are actually considered statistically insignificant.

>The simple fact is, any business that doesn't select the best possible candidate regardless of gender, is failing their duty to their shareholders/investors/employees to build a secure, stable, profitable and growing company. If I knew that a company I owned part of was recruiting men over women even when the woman is the better candidate I would call for the CEO to be fired.

It comes down to risk. The things that I have mentioned all play a factor in that risk. All non gender related things being equal, the higher risk would be the female. You can argue with this all day, but you are arguing with nature. Maybe this "inequality" is not "fair", but trying to force everything to be "fair" and everyone to be "equal" has never worked and never will. Standards are lowered, gags are placed on dissidents, people start hating each other and their government, things decline. Making everything "equal" and "fair" equates to oppression, unfairness in other places and theft. In the end it always ends up bad. See the history of known civilizations for reference.

> Men talking dirty in the workplace just shouldn't.

There is a difference between shouldn't and are not allowed to - one is a cultural thing, the other is a legal position. Personally, I prefer a relaxed environment, and I don't mind dick/tits/porn/offensive jokes, however if there are women in the room, you never know when you'll be sued...

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