They could have said what happens next in just as many characters, but chose not to. I assume the reason is because fewer people would read the article in that case.
If you'd like to clearly differentiate it from a more stringent definition of clickbait, I guess one could call it clickbait by omission.
It's like when you pretend to have thrown a nut to a squirrel, but in reality you just made a gesture. The squirrel will go look for the nut regardless. You not throwing a 'decoy' nut isn't the important part w.r.t. the desired outcome. You still 'baited' them.
tbh i got to the point of just assuming that unless someone intentionally writes a descriptive title it's clickbait. they could have put "masking voice gender in interviews showed no significant outcome change". if you aren't intentionally making the title maximally descriptive and information packed, just like any other good writing should be, i'm gonna say it's clickbait.
> they could have put "masking voice gender in interviews showed no significant outcome change"
They could have, but that’s background information supporting the article’s topic, not its findings. You and several others will walk away with that finding from their research, and I will walk away having read and understood the interest in better understanding how attrition affects outcomes. I wouldn’t have any clue that I could learn that from the title you suggest. If they’d tried to cram the point of interest I found into the title, it would be derided as editorializing. The title is probably the best they could do: we had a hypothesis. Implicit in that is some findings and some further line of questioning. Sure that’s “clickbait” in a literal sense, but it’s a title. If you could fit the article in the title you wouldn’t have a distinction between articles and titles. You’d have tweet. Just one. Choose your wording carefully!
i wonder if voice masking is actually enough. i (zoomer) know my voice is significantly different from most of my female peers.
idk if this makes sense but i have a more stereotypically "confident" inflection, like my phrases don't rise in pitch at the end, i don't have the "creaky voice" thing etc. i also notice women tend to use more superlative optimistic phrasing ("perfect" vs "good" in response to something) and less definite language (prefacing more often with "i feel" or "maybe").
this is all obv anecdotal but i'm guessing i could guess male vs. female even if the pitches were modulated to be equal. shame there's no example of how male voices sounded modulated.
These things might be in theory possible but I wonder if any interviewer would watch out for such little things just to identify if the interviewee is a man or woman. Maybe we should get some more example modulated voices so we know for ourself.
i agree but there are people who argue "unconscious bias" is at play and interviewers could unconsciously recognize the voice.
like the female example they gave it's still extremely apart from how normal men talk, i didn't have to focus at all. though tbh my first thought was it sounded like a gay male so maybe it sort of works?
They show a huge difference in attrition rates after bad interviews in the first two interviews (I might be missing nuance here). They speculate it could be related to other studies in self perception with huge caveats and ample marking of the speculation.
I remember getting pulled over for speeding with a female in the passenger seat. Afterwards, she was quite adept at pointing out exactly when he made up his mind and the outcome could not be changed.
Did you later call and ask the officer if that was the exact second he decided you will get a ticket? Or were you merely persuaded by her saying that was what happened?
The intersectionality hypothesis is just constantly destroyed by evidence like that, and this voice modulator experiment. And yet it seems to be evangelized more fervently than ever in academic institutions, governments, journalism, etc.
It's really a weird, strange kind of twilight zone. Alleged experts are just spouting totally unfounded (and even contradicted by evidence) assertions and stating them as fact. Some of them really hurtful and hateful even. And few dare to call them out, demand evidence for their unproven claims, or demand metrics and results of improvements they claim their policies would result in. It's like a nutty cult that's being ruled by fear.
In my opinion it is also profoundly damaging to the cause of actually improving inequality and reducing discrimination and reducing division.
>Alleged experts are just spouting totally unfounded (and even contradicted by evidence) assertions and stating them as fact.
This is because their principal theory of demographics — that all group differences are entirely due to one group's use of power to undermine the other — is wrong. There are many factors involved in group differences, and they are all being completley ignored because of political correctness. Even to say that sexism sometimes only indirectly causes disparity in enmplpyment - as an example, teachers/mentors investing more time in boys - is becoming problematic because it posits that interviewers themselves may possibly not be overtly or implicitly sexist. The idea that not only the "system," but each member in the powerful group is out to get all minorities/women, is ridiculous and, as you say, hateful.
> The idea that not only the "system," but each member in the powerful group is out to get all minorities/women, is ridiculous and, as you say, hateful.
It is, and you see it in this person's comment. It was actually surprising to them that they did not observe discrimination. They have been indoctrinated to believe without evidence that the society they live in is a sea of hateful and/or ignorant bigots who oppress and discriminate. The oppressed classes are indoctrinated to believe they are under constant attack and oppression by their neighbors and friends and colleagues. And the oppressor classes believe they hold some responsibility and shame for these real or imagined atrocities. It's just a hell of a way to go through life, and I can't see anything much good coming from it.
I'm not saying for a minute that discrimination does not exist, that it should not be addressed and reduced, or that it can not concentrate in organizations and positions of power, before people start accusing and denouncing me.
What is the “intersectionality” hypothesis? I felt intersectionality was a concept so obvious, that intersecting identities create unique experiences that might not be shared by other members of the constituent identities, as to be unremarkable.
The example frequently given is the proverbial workplace that in order to hire enough black people and women, hires many black men on the factory floor and white women in the offices while black women don’t get hired and despite this people declare that equity has been accomplished. People paid attention to women’s issues and black issues, but not the INTERSECTION of those issues.
My criticism is that intersectionality is that it’s
blindingly obvious and there is limited value in literally deviding up identity groups into an exponentially expanding amount of subgroups. Once you start exploring the intersection of 3 identities you’ve already kind of lost the plot and may as well start talking about issues on the personal/individual level.
I have no idea what people THINK intersectionality means. I think people who know what that word means keep using it without explaining it and people get really confused and think it’s just a general term for woke ideology and never stop to think what the “intersection” they’re referring to is.
> Once you start exploring the intersection of 3 identities you’ve already kind of lost the plot and may as well start talking about issues on the personal/individual level.
At the limit, intersectionality approaches individualism.
Most people in my circles understand "intersectionality" to refer to exactly the claim you're disputing, that it's good to identify and focus on an exponentially expanding amount of subgroups. I don't think this is an unreasonable interpretation - the Center for Intersectional Justice, a large nonprofit in the area, says one example of intersectionality (https://www.intersectionaljustice.org/what-is-intersectional...) is that you shouldn't attempt to address the gender pay gap without also thinking about race, socioeconomic status, and immigration status.
I mean it’s cool to propose that and all but how does that work in practice? At some point you need to be a “big tent” to get things done.
How do trans immigrant women feel about the gender wage gap? How do male Irish steelworkers feel about it? So on and so forth… and don’t you dare tell anybody their identity group and their unique intersection of those identities isn’t important.
It’s an ideology I would try to convince my enemies to adopt to encumber them with endless amounts of petty political bickering so they never got anything done.
This last paragraph is totally a conspiracy theory I believe.
This whole intersectionality business is spreading way too fast, being too prominent in the media and front and center everywhere to not be at least encouraged by an hostile nation.
The use of propaganda and indoctrination to play sub-factions against each other in order to keep the larger group at a disadvantage is a tried and true tactic used by those with power since the beginning of recorded history. This specific implementation may or may not be true, but it’s hardly irrational to suspect.
Either a hostile nation, or economic elite trying to turn people’s attention away from the real issues of income inequality and taxation. Race, gender, whatever, in the end money is what primarily makes things right.
There are experiments in the opposite direction too if you are feeling really upset. The claims are not unproven and this was not a properly randomized experiment unlike the far more extensive one I cite below
The claim is not that discrimination exists. Of course it does.
The claims basically amount to any inequity between groups is due to discrimination, except in the cases where the inequity "favors" the oppressed class (and where oppressed and oppressor classes have no real objective criteria or definitions, aside from what intersectionality experts claim them to be).
And that institutional policies of discrimination are an the acceptable and effective way to deal with this inequity, but also you must not refer to them as systemic or institutional discrimination.
I think the person you're responding to is referencing intersectional feminism (more recently mainstream in social justice and feminism discussions), which is perhaps somewhat related to what's being discussed, but really not the topic at hand.
What is relevant is that the general discourse focuses more on systemic differences in opportunity to disadvantaged groups. In this case, we're talking about women as the ostensibly disadvantaged group.
I think what people fail to understand though, is that marginalization can take many forms. If women are less likely to continue interviewing after rejection, this doesn't mean that they have the same opportunity; instead, it suggests that systemic factors play into this. The "intersectional" take on this is really focused on how different components of identity work together to shape an individual's experience, in subtle ways that compound. Hence, just growing up in a society where young women and men have even mildly different attitudes impressed upon them from a young age, can have more noticeable effects on their outcomes much later in life
No it doesn't. This is a false dichotomy. It can be any number of things, including something systemic, but only one explanation of many is eliminated. All that it suggests is that interviewers don't discriminate (against women).
That's not at all what intersectionality is. It's just a name for the fact that the hardships you face as, say, a black woman isn't the union of the hardships of women and the hardships of black folks. They don't exist independently. This was an important idea because feminist movements focused almost exclusively on white women and it assumed this was fine because "rising tide raises all ships" and that white women had a better chance of having their voices heard -- but it didn't shake out that way and this was the reason.
That's the reason today there's a lot of focus on black trans women because activists are trying not to repeat this mistake.
> any disparity between any demographic groups is wholly attributable to bias
Unless you're literally arguing that some groups are genetically superior or inferior, or that something in the Y chromosome just really draws you to programming this statement is true by definition -- that's what bias means.
If you’re like oh well part of the wage gap is explained by women not being as aggressive in salary negotiations your options are either that there is a bias somewhere or resorting to gender essentialism.
I haven't heard of it either, but "intersectionality" means (according to Google, but in my experience, sounds accurate.)
> Intersectionality is a theoretical framework rooted in the premise that human experience is jointly shaped by multiple social positions (e.g. race, gender), and cannot be adequately understood by considering social positions independently.
This feels like saying that (generalized) linear regressions without interactions are inadequate. And criticisms of intersectionality seem to be that (a) high order interactions are statistically volatile and (b) multivariate averages miss important information.
If you're a member of two different minority groups, your experience is not described by taking a union of the bad things from each. Eg. If being black results in 3% less <> and being a woman results in 5% less <>, then being a black woman does not result in 8% less <>.
The point is that Obama is the child of a rich Kenyan international student and a rich American white woman.
He's had none of the experiences an African American (defined as the black skinned descendants of US slaves) has had and there was no one in either of his families who would have.
Calling that African American is a bit like calling a chihuahua a wolf.
Its weird that you inadvertently acknowledge the effect of slavery in this country on black americans by using Barack Obama as an example of affirmative action gone awry(?)
Those experiences of the descendants of slaves you mentioned are the reasons why race is so important when it comes to building wealth and prosperity in your community.
>He's had none of the experiences an African American (defined as the black skinned descendants of US slaves) has had
Just reel yourself back in right there... Even after achieving high levels of political status he was mocked and harrassed by millions... solely based on his skin color. anyone can look them up.
> And yet it seems to be evangelized more fervently than ever in academic institutions, governments, journalism, etc.
When you know the agendas and world views of those same people, everything starts to make sense. It's quite unfortunate to say the least, but hopefully more people wake up.
3% more/less likely is a tiny effect. What is the power of this result? Isn't there always noise in this type of thing?
I bet the normal variation in responses for the same group submitted to separate groups of companies exceeds 3%. That is, I could send 1,000 resumes to one batch of companies and 10.0% would get interviews. I could send the same 1,000 resumes to a different batch, and 10.3% would get interviews. Boom 3% difference for the same candidates.
> 3% more/less likely is a tiny effect. What is the power of this result? Isn't there always noise in this type of thing?
A result does not have "power". An experiment has power -- the ability to detect a a given effect size a certain percentage of the time -- but a result is either statistically significant, or it is not.
As for "noise", statistical significance takes random noise into account. That is the point of the calculation -- it asks if a given result exceeds the threshold of what you'd expect to find at random some percentage of the time. If it does, the result is deemed significant.
A 3% difference could be enormous, or it could be miniscule. We can't say anything based on this information alone, and certainly can't say it's "likely a tiny effect". On a sample of thousands, a 3% difference is big. On a sample of tens, a 3% difference is small.
>On a sample of thousands, a 3% difference is big.
Not really. Only if it is many, many thousands. Assuming a totally random acceptance rate of 1/5:
a = 0;
b = 0;
for (c of Array(1000)) {
if (Math.random() > .8)
a++;
if (Math.random() > .8)
b++;
}
console.log(`a=${a}, b=${b}, a is ${(a/b - 1)*100}% more likely than b`)
> a=209, b=201, a is 3.9800995024875663% more likely than b
literally the first run. And even in absolute terms, I got this on the third run:
>a=192, b=219, a is -12.328767123287676% more likely than b
That's an absolute difference of 2.7%. Again, 100% random data.
> That's an absolute difference of 2.7%. Again, 100% random data.
I think I get what you're going for here -- you're trying to simulate a coin flip? -- but what you've actually done is made successive draws from a uniform random number generator. The software is designed to return numbers that fall along the interval [0,1) with equal probability. Thresholding the numbers and dividing their counts is not a meaningful transformation; the result is still just a uniformly distributed random number. It's like...the ratio of heads in two identical, unfair coins or something.
If all "random numbers" were uniform like this, then no, we wouldn't expect an X% difference to be any more or less likely based on the magnitude of the underlying sample. But when we're talking about something like a a population mean, then the behavior of the errors on estimates is very different indeed, and most estimates cluster around the true (aka population) value:
As the sample size for an experiment of this sort gets larger, the bell curve of expected errors gets sharper and sharper, and it becomes increasingly less likely to see errors >= X, for any value X. In the limit of large N, the distribution of sample errors around a known mean approach a normal distribution:
For what it's worth, the expected proportion of N heads in M coin flips is modeled using the binomial distribution, which is also bell-shaped and illustrates the same idea:
> I think I get what you're going for here -- you're trying to simulate a coin flip? -- but what you've actually done is made successive draws from a uniform random number generator. The software is designed to return numbers that fall along the interval [0,1) with equal probability. Thresholding the numbers and dividing their counts is not a meaningful transformation;
This is wrong. That is a very meaningful transformation. It is the standard way (https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240338) to turn a uniform distribution into a Bernoulli distribution.
Getting a single value with Bernoulli distribution is called a Bernoulli trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_trial). Repeating this gives you a Binomial distribution (see your own wikipedia link).
Long story short: GPs code is a perfectly valid way of sampling the Bernoulli distribution. It is inefficient because it needs so many random values, but it mimics the actual process happening in real life making it easier to understand than generating a Binomial sample from the Binomial distribution's CDF.
> This is wrong. That is a very meaningful transformation. It is the standard way (https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240338) to turn a uniform distribution into a Bernoulli distribution.
The OP didn't do what was described in the SO post. They did something else -- they calculated the ratio of two binomial random variables, and presented that as a percentage.
Also, no, the SO comment you've cited doesn't describe how to generate a "Bernoulli distribution" (not a thing, btw; it's called a binomial distribution) from a uniform distribution. It tells how to make a single Bernoulli trial...but even that isn't what OP did.
This is how you actually do what you're discussing (draw from the Binomial CDF given a uniform RNG, via a table):
> they calculated the ratio of two binomial random variables, and presented that as a percentage.
Ok, now I'm confused. I 100% agree with that statement. I thought your whole point was that OPs code was not a valid way to sample from a binomial distribution?
But then what is your criticism? Are you arguing that the Binomial distribution does not model the original experiment correctly?
OK, if what you were doing there was using "bernoulli distribution" to mean "bernoulli trial", then I stand corrected. But that's different than the binomial distribution, which is the more common thing to discuss, and what I was assuming you were talking about.
> I thought your whole point was that OPs code was not a valid way to sample from a binomial distribution?
The code OP posted was just taking the ratio of two binomial random variables. It's not "sampling from a binomial", except (perhaps) in the sense that each of those random variables was the result of independent coin flips.
We really need to be more precise in our terminology here. "Sampling from a distribution" can mean a lot of things. Based on the sibling comments, it seems like they were trying (?) to sample from the binomial CDF.
Setting this aside, my high-level point was OPs calculation doesn't have anything to do with error distributions.
> We really need to be more precise in our terminology here. "Sampling from a distribution" can mean a lot of things.
I know it to mean only one thing: Generating a value in such a way, so that if that process were to be repeated, the generated values follow the given distribution. How exactly this is done is irrelevant, as long as the distribution is correct. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-random_number_sampling.
> [...] it seems like they were trying (?) to sample from the binomial CDF.
This is technically unclear usage of terminology. You can not actually sample from a CDF. But it is clear that you are referring to Inverse transform sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling) – where you sample from a Uniform distribution and use that sample to generate a sample form a non-uniform distribution using that distribution's CDF.
> The code OP posted was just taking the ratio of two binomial random variables. It's not "sampling from a binomial", except (perhaps) in the sense that each of those random variables was the result of independent coin flips.
Once again: Since the Binomial distribution is the distribution of a series of independent coin flips, doing a series of independent coin flips is a perfectly valid way of sampling the binomial distribution.
> Based on the sibling comments, it seems like they were trying (?) to sample from the binomial CDF.
As they explain in the sibling comment, they generate two samples from the binomial distribution and compare them to each other the same way the original authors did. What they achieve by this is sampling from the same random variable that the original authors were implicitly sampling from. They then took multiple samples from that variable in order to get a feel for its distribution, to confirm their original point: That 3% is not an uncommonly big value under that distribution.
> Setting this aside, my high-level point was OPs calculation doesn't have anything to do with error distributions.
So I don't quite now what you mean by "error distribution". I assume you mean the distribution of the random variable that had the value of 3% in the article? If so, then OPs calculation does – as explained – have a lot to do with that distribution. It does not calculate that distribution, but it samples from it, which is a useful way to get a feel for a distribution without having to do any fancy mathematics or research.
That's precisely what this is trying to model, yes. The standard computational way to simulate a binary event with probability p is to call rand() and check if rand(0,1) < p (or > 1-p, what I did). Or as you called it, an unfair coin flip.
This model is built on the assumptions that if candidates are actually totally equally likely to be picked (the null hypothesis for the experiment above), any given candidate has a p=.2 chance of being hired (given an arbitrary but reasonable hire vs interview ratio of 1:5). Which is just a weighted coin flip. This is indeed a binomial distribution, and my point is that results ±3% of the mean (p*M), even at M=1000, are still fairly probable. When comparing two such results, it's almost expected.
The part where you did rand() < 0.8 ? 1 : 0 is fine. That's a Bernoulli trial with p=0.8
The part where you did this in a loop, with two calls per iteration, and then divided the counts and called it a percentage is wrong. It's certainly not a Binomial distribution. It's just the ratio of two binomial random variables.
My HR department has started blacking out identifying resume details - including dates and durations of employment, so for all I know, I could be looking at somebody with one year of experience who changes jobs every two months.
This is quite dangerous, because it creates bias against people whose CV is not a traditional CV, but more like a portfolio, with works that uniquely identify the author. My own CV would be way too gray if one excludes my contributions to various open-source projects and articles that I have written - all of which would be identifying.
Another class of extreme examples would be public political figures. There is only one person who has successfully implemented a city-wide smoking ban. There is only one person who was a minister of finance, and then worked on in-game economics.
Easier said than done, but you are welcome to try fuzzing my CV. As I mentioned, this would likely erase half of the CV. https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=wT8otalK (outdated for legal reasons - the current employer does not permit mentioning them, due to social engineering concerns, while I still work for them)
I wondered if it was this, or a difference of expectation.
If you have an expectation that someone won't interview well and they surprise you, you'll be more likely to note their positive characteristics and move them forward.
Likewise, if you expect someone to interview well and they disappoint you, you'll be more likely to note their negative characteristics and won't move them forward.
This will be true even if the interviewees give nearly identical interviews.
Does that explain this? If a woman finds herself being compared to an interviewer's expectations for men instead of the interviewer's expectations for women, she does worse, and vice versa.
As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.
Makes sense. Men are conditioned to experience rejection more than women. Considering reproductive dynamics, men may even be biologically adapted to rejection to a greater degree than women. I'll bet there's some interesting studies out there on, for example, sexually dimorphic cortisol levels/activity.
This seems to be very much a factor in the gender gaps that exist today.
This gap manifests itself in women applying for less-senior positions than men (on average), and more specific applications being biased in favor of men. It also manifests in promotion cases at big companies: men are more likely to ask, but women are a lot more likely to succeed. Women who would be qualified are less likely to try if they think they might fail. At a previous place where I worked, we had many initiatives to help women on these factors: using broad job applications for specific positions and encouraging attempts at promotions, for example. These initiatives actually worked.
My wife and I experience this in terms of writing. She has an MFA and is an incredible writer, but she rarely submits or publishes her work because she is afraid that people will reject it. I am an average writer (maybe above average, but not near her skill level), and I try to blog approximately monthly and regularly post my work in various online forums. She once tried to console me when one of my blog posts got a few hundred readers, and I didn't realize what she was doing. I was happy to have a few hundred, but she told me that if it were her, she would have been very upset at the reception.
I don't know what women experience, or men in other places, but I would say that many American males, in my generation (Gen-X), experienced frequent rejection, from about 12 until their early 20's.
Then, once women became interested in them, there was often constant pressure to get a better job, in order to move through the expected life stages.
I think that this regular rejection, plus the pressure to fight upward, is what trains and motivates men to keep going.
I was told as a young man that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I was going to have to learn to thrive on rejection. Experience has proved it true many times over.
The key of course is framing your experience. I think the submission’s parallel between interviewing and dating is a good observation. In both cases you need to be willing to realize that rejection can be because of something you can control, but it also can be because of something you can’t. Another thing is once you experience it enough rejection loses its sting. The handful of hours you spend pursuing a job or a date just isn’t a serious cost, especially if you learn something from the experience.
Funny you say that - the article concludes with the author noting her community feedback often mentioned the same idea, though she gives it less credibility than you did; to note, I'm also convinced by this idea.
While it can be quite difficult to disentangle it from political biases and bad-faith arguments, there is evidence the possibility of men to "win big" in evolutionary terms by having a large number of children has led to males being prone to more extremes of both behavior and aptitude than females. That is to say, while men and women average out the same, you'll find more men at both the top and the bottom of many measurements. More geniuses and more fools, more heroes and more villains, more big winners and more terminal losers. Though to be perfectly honest, the field is so riddled with people with an axe to grind I suspect it may be decades before we know anything definitive on the subject.
"it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing"
I believe this might be a direct result of presentation in movies. For example, She-Hulk had a scene where I'm quite convinced that it's hurting women, despite contrary intentions. The male Hulk had to overcome plenty of challenges to become halfway stable. The female Hulk skipped all that. But then, how do girls learn the value of grit if their role models don't need it?
Wow, I never thought of that, i think it's even worse then you're letting on. She Hulk didn't need to because, by suggestion of the dialogue, women already have to control their internal anger to survive in the world we live in.
It's a proclamation that you should already have everything figured out, because you're dealing with it every day. Yet, what if you don't have shit figured out? What if your confidence is cratered? What if you have crippling anxiety?
These are not women specific issues, and the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others. However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to.
> the male role model "grit and hard work" model doesn't convey to men that you can lean on others.
Perhaps that hasn't been portrayed in a while, but then again, when was the last time men and boys actually had a role model and one with actual "grit"? Yes, we have male protagonists, and ones with substantial authority and muscle growth, but it's been a long time since I've actually seen a legit role model.
The reason you can't easily convey a value about depending on others is that modern storytelling requires that every character must be significantly flawed. Having one character lean on others only is called for if that creates an opportunity where said character can be betrayed, which is useful for dramatic purposes.
Look at any plot from a movie before the 2000's that's focused on a strong male character. Usually there's a subplot where he's got to rely on some other guy or inspire other men to take action when they otherwise wouldn't.
> However, there are so many more male role models with different ways to grow and improve, whereas women are really treated as not needing to.
This is reality. You are describing the quintessential male experience. Having to start with nothing and work your way up (or fail) is what it is to be a man. We are not told we are handsome or attractive by anyone but our mother unless we find a partner who can express that or if we are a 9 or above on the decile scale. Women aren't as greatly valued for their problem solving capability as they are for their beauty and reproductive capability. That's just how it is based on how the sexes differ, and it isn't even something that necessarily has to be fixed. People who deviate from the norm shouldn't be forced into roles that don't suit them as individuals, and those who it a norm shouldn't have to give up who they are in order to satisfy the minority.
Just the other day I rewatched Fast and Furious 9, with an ensemble cast containing 4 male role models with "grit" who frequently rely on and inspire each other. Before that I watched Dune which has a couple, Shang-Chi which has one, and Doctor Strange which has two. It seems to me that male role models are as common as ever, and it's just become unfashionable in some circles to acknowledge them.
I'd argue that we're in a golden age of role models. There's no longer just Rambo McBiceps, but also kind and sensitive male characters. The sitcom dad is slowly dying off, and we get to see competent, loving fathers. Gay characters are treated with more respect and nuance; they're no longer a punchline.
Thank goodness. Hopefully the commercial break dad will die off next, though I see that caricature having more staying power.
> Gay characters are treated with more respect and nuance; they're no longer a punchline.
They are treated with more respect, yes, but I wouldn't say they are no longer a punchline entirely. They're still very much present in many current storylines because of how different they're perceived to be. Homosexual interaction on-screen is and probably always will be a sort of spectacle for the general audience. It's an improvement over gay character merely being present to be flamboyant, but I don't think their current inception in entertainment is totally flattering.
> There's no longer just Rambo McBiceps
There's no longer "Rambo McBiceps" at all, and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. A variety of role models would be better than only having role models that are of no threat to the establishment.
There is still Rambo McBiceps. It's the character who literally punches through every problem.
Baaghi 1, 2, and 3 have pushed this character trope to the breaking point, and it's hilarious.
I'm happy that we now have male lead who are weak, yet still win. Emmett in the Lego movie, Rango, the guy from Fantastic Beasts. They don't win by becoming more violent, but by providing an alternative to violence.
Lord of the Rings is also a treasure trove of great male role models.
> Yes, we have male protagonists, and ones with substantial authority and muscle growth, but it's been a long time since I've actually seen a legit role model.
What qualities do you consider "legit" in this regard?
Indeed and it goes further than mere compliments. Women actually don't need to be successful at a career or be resilient to failures or "strong" - they can still have a good life with a family and be wealthy by being supported by a successful man. Men typically can't do that so they need all this grit and self-determination.
All that role model and life advice stuff isn't just made up for no reason, it's there to help people get a good life for themselves in the world that they exist in.
It depends on the individual and what one defines as a "career". Being an excellent spouse, mother, and homemaker are a form of career. It's a career that countless women over millennia gravitated to because they are the bearers of children, have less body strength on average, are vulnerable for 9 months at a time, and have far fewer ovum than there are available sperm. Some women will be on either end of the bell curve, but to be closer to the middle of the bell curve is nothing to be ashamed of. Instructing women to emulate everything typical of men is to indoctrinate them into self denial. Bearing and raising children and being a supportive spouse takes a form of grit all of its own. It's just a type of grit where the building of self-worth isn't required.
I'm reminded of a time I was in a circle of people from various backgrounds, and the person in the middle of the circle asked the women to raise their hands if they've ever been told they are pretty by anyone besides their mother. Every single one of them raised their hands, even the ones who weren't conventionally attractive. The men were then asked to raise their hands if they've ever been told they are handsome by anyone besides their mother. Not a single man in the circle raised his hand, and this group included a few particularly popular individuals with the women in this cohort. That experience isn't representative of everyone, but it told me a lot.
> All that role model and life advice stuff isn't just made up for no reason, it's there to help people get a good life for themselves in the world that they exist in.
Choosing a role in life is efficient. Spending one's entire life without learning the role one is suited for usually means a lot of wasted time and effort. Yet this is antithetical to what we tell young people today, which is that what is most important is who they are in the present as individuals. The individual is important, but individuality is overrated because everyone is an individual, more or less, and individuality provides no structure or framework.
Past societies figured this out because life is simply too short to blow a bunch of time figuring things out from scratch. Today, we have longer life expectency and automation has made everyday life very easy, so we've fooled ourselves into thinking that it is our individuality that we should be exploring to the exclusion of selecting roles that take the greater society into consideration.
I think the major problem with the show is that it doesn't follow the Hero's Journey that well[0]. The first few episodes feel forced because we don't really see Jennifer struggling and so we don't get that real call to action. We skip the call to adventure and jump right to supernatural aid and then skip the mentor and helper aspects. There's also problems that feel forced like the alien ship that just showed up for no reason, went away, and Bruce is on it 2 episodes later. But I think this is more of a problem of a show finding itself than anything else. As the series has continued I think it has gotten better. I don't think this is uncommon in a series and we find many very popular series which had very rough starts (Parks and Rec is a great example). Breaking the 4th wall is also quite difficult to pull off.
But I do agree that this scene you're talking about doesn't make much sense at that point in the plot (probably would have been better latter). It felt more like a lecture to the audience (these jabs have improved but can still be cringy). Audiences like demonstration instead of instruction. But I think later episodes are better demonstrating instead of lecturing.
I do want to point out that the adversities that men and women face are different. I can say that the first 3 episodes, as a man, I didn't really connect with Jennifer as a character. She seemed like a caricature (maybe women view this differently?). As the show progressed this changed though and it was easier to build attachment. I mean it is a superhero show, everyone is a bit of a caricature anyways, but it definitely had a rough start in hooking me.
[0] One could argue that the show is following the hero's journey. From this perspective, getting super powers is the call to adventure. Her not wanting to be a Hulk is the refusal of the call. I'm not sure what the supernatural aid is. But crossing the first threshold would probably be her first case with Abomination.
There actually are plenty of cartoons and shows with female role models in positions where they have to overcome something big, much of which became more prominent since the 2000s. Specifically older shoujo anime feature female characters with arcs spanning more than a few episodes, akin to what most shounen anime is like. Even female characters in shounen tend to go through those arcs.
The whole girlboss thing isn't that omnipresent, though there are still some leftovers of the whole Disney princess "just be as you are and it will be fine" era.
You can't be seriously saying that Hollywood plays such a big role in people's culture and upbringing the world over, that a few movies would lead to such a fundamental difference?
That's giving the movie industry more credit than they give themselves with the Oscars.
Yes, it's why people like Jordan Peterson are so popular, with profound advice like "Clean your room", "Eat healthy", and "Stand up straight with your shoulders back".
It's obvious advice but so many people had absent parenting and ended up as failures and need to be told the absolute basics. If they get this advice from social media or corporate media, they are being led in the wrong direction.
Peterson's advice isn't undisputable, absolute basics. There is no shortage of parenting advice, much of it specific to their own kids and not backed by reproducible research.
Obviously some parents are undeniably negligent, but let's take care not to blame them as a homogenous cohort.
I’m not sure what the point of this comment is or how it relates to the topic.
My point is that yes, there are a lot of people out there searching for life advice and self improvement. They suck it up from books, movies, social media, the news. Some of that advice is absolute crap and some of it is beneficial.
There are absolutely people who will see personalities in movies and try to take something from that. In fact I’d say none of us are immune from doing it.
In a world where baby boomers (I forgot the politically neutral term, sorry) emotionally neglected their children, most turned to various media such as tv and internet (or other media) for their emotional management expectations, and role models.
It's a tradition that's continued with YouTube replacing tv and Netflix with movies.
My sister has 3 kids under 10. Every day they watch at least 3 movies, some of them atleast presentable as childlike learning, the others are just "whatever Netflix puts on"
Perhaps some of issues with emotional management expectations, roles models, etc. can be placed on baby boomers, but not solely for their parenting style. From what I have gathered over my life, it seems like many of the parents of baby boomers were far worse parents than the parents many baby boomers eventually became.
I would argue the most damage has come from the near complete and utter erosion of social communities. As the saying goes, "It takes a village [community] to raise a child." I can't name a role model in my community. In fact, I have no community that I can access without the Internet.
We went from "Survive together; thrive together" to "every man for himself" way too rapidly.
Better answer: “I think it’s obvious to everyone but it still can’t be said enough: the stories we learn, especially as children, define our social reality as adults in ways we often don’t even realize. It’s not just that our desires are shaped by what others desire, though that’s true, also, it’s that the stories we learn become normative, they become our models for how we interact with other people. Ask any parent and they’ll tell you, after your kids watch cartoons, they imitate what they’ve seen. That doesn’t stop happening when you grow up, just all the seams and the hard edges get smoothed over, and the stories you learn as a kid count for triple at least.” — https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-por... via https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn
dude what are you talking about? I didn't realize it until I was older but my dad essentially modeled his entire personality off Hawkeye Pierce when he was in college and then all manner of sitcom dads once he was older. this is not uncommon at all. humans model roles based upon the roles they see modeled. film & television (& now tiktok et al.) give people an unrealistic view into a fake world that our minds are not fully evolutionarily equipped to grapple with.
Children learn implicitly from the behaviours they see - mostly mimicking others.
Adults do the same thing. However most adults think they make conscious/rational choices, and they think they are not driven by subconscious behaviours.
I am not saying we learn to be killers by watching murder mysteries. I am saying we subconsciously learn some behaviours from the media we watch.
Sure, with a data point of one. Now let's take Wonder Woman, who went through grueling training as a young girl. Needs far more data to stand up as a possible cause.
But then, how do girls learn the value of grit if their role models don't need it?
I learned the value of a friendly demeanor and a permanent smile from SpongeBob and I’m not even a sponge. You don’t have to resemble a fictional character in any way for you to be able to idolize them.
I don't think a movie has this much influence, but yeah, role models have more influence on character than genetics, obviously.
My father is parenting like his own father was. And with his wife than my grandfather did with my grandmother (and hopefully i'll manage to act the same). Also have the same politics and the same engagement my grandmother had (and same character, so he does has some flaws :) ). My father was adopted. As he isn't a hippie living in the middle of nowhere or a trophy wife living in a top10 US city in an affluent area thank to the money his partner earned, i'd say genetics have really little influence on your character.
I mean, if you met old ladies from brittany, or from Ireland (and probably any rural area that din't get TV until the 70s), and compare them to those you met in CA or WA, it would be obvious than culture is the primary influence over genetics.
Yeah, i met my genetic grandparents (and grandaunt), they are... American, both differently and in their own specific ways, but clearly Americans. We are very clearly not.
I guess my sister have my genetic grandmother hair? But rather than being meek and subordinate to her husband, my sister is a hard-headed britton who doesn't let anyone step on her toes, so she clearly takes from our non-genetic grandmother (and btw, our genetic grandaunt, despite being more liberal and feminist than our genetic grandmother, act basically the same with her husband, so i can confidently state that this particular character trait is not from any genetic material on our father side).
Twin studies with twins in different countries? Because my guess is that culture permeate everything.
For example, She-Hulk had a scene where I'm quite convinced that it's hurting women, despite contrary intentions. The male Hulk had to overcome plenty of challenges to become halfway stable. The female Hulk skipped all that.
But that is the plot of pretty much every story about a woman in a role traditionally held by men, see for example Captain Marvel.
She-Hulk skips that part because that's not what the show is about; there are literally hundreds of shows or movies you can watch if that's the plot line you're looking for.
If there is a correlation, it's probably the opposite. That if women don't value grit, female writers aren't going to make it an important part of their story. But I'd guess its probably just more overcompensating for "damsel in distress" being the default narrative device for most of history.
> That if women don't value grit, female writers aren't going to make it an important part of their story.
Then the ones who are writing stories involving physical prowess don't have business doing so if they are expecting a sizable audience. Some people just want the fantasy that femininity magically creates masculine results. That's fine. The rest of the world isn't going to take it any more seriously than they would a film about a chimp being elected president.
Super heroes only work if the rules of their fictional universe are believable enough that suspension of disbelief can work. Iron Man was (is?) hugely popular because it remains connected to reality enough that people can buy it.
A film about chimp being elected president can be a smash hit, if not a classic masterpiece, as can most silly ideas. That doesn't mean it has the same chance to do so as a super hero flick. My point still stands. People might watch the chimp film out of morbid curiosity, and the might find it funny, but it would be unlikely to be considered "great" or even "good". Nobody seriously buys that there would be any circumstance that a non-human would be elected president. People can buy a world where, if a super power was obtainable, that those powers would be used for good and evil. It's a fundamental type of fantasy. Nobody fantasizes about being President Chimp. Yet even children fantasize of flying, shooting fireballs, being invincible, having gigantic muscles, and any number of things you'll find super heroes doing.
> Super heroes only work if the rules of their fictional universe are believable enough that suspension of disbelief can work.
Not really. Perhaps that was true in 2008 when the MCU started, but as the years go on, it gets less and less serious, yet continues to rake in more and more money. Turns out, people just like big action set pieces with large CGI budgets. Compare that to a movie like The Northman which is all about the hero's journey yet was a commercial failure, in part because it wasn't flashy enough to capture the general public's attention.
People are more simple-minded than you give them credit for.
> A film about chimp being elected president can be a smash hit, if not a classic masterpiece, as can most silly ideas. That doesn't mean it has the same chance to do so as a super hero flick.
Switch out President with freedom fighter, and the reboot/prequel Planet of the Apes trilogy certainly fits as a modern semi-believable sci-fi hit.
Interesting that what the author found contrer-intuitive correspond in my case to my prior. It’s well known in France for the competitive exams that in domains with gender imbalance interviewers tend to help a bit the minority gender, I would guess it’s the same for tech interview.
As for the difference of observed performance some explanations can be easily found (even if it doesn’t mean they are true). Men are far likelier to be on the autistic spectrum than women and CS is may be the most suited domain for people on the spectrum
I don’t think that “autistic spectrum” only applies for CS it happens for any field. We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming. Because there are masculine men working as manicurists or like in beauty and there are women who are working in construction. And in terms of predominately men or women industries it’s not that we cannot switch or cannot figure it out it’s just differences in our interests and biology. We just have to embrace it like they did it in Sweden (as I remember)
> We just need to let women do what they are good at and men what they are good at without any blame or shaming
This would be great, but the question remains what to do if the jobs men prefer are being paid more than jobs women prefer. Is sexism why that's the case, or is there some other driving factor why society is valuing male preferred jobs higher?
Another factor is that men have an incentive to seek higher paying jobs because some significant fraction of women want a partner who earns as much or more than they do.
This is the reason I joined tech. I could’ve done other careers but I wanted a job that could support a family and allow me to still be present with them. (And offer really good growth in income if family didn’t work out)
> This would be great, but the question remains what to do if the jobs men prefer are being paid more than jobs women prefer. Is sexism why that's the case, or is there some other driving factor why society is valuing male preferred jobs higher?
Yes, supply and demand is generally the driving factor for how things are priced.
So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection. This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting. See also this Harvard Business Review article.[1] Not clear why this is.
I saw a study a few years back where someone was looking at number of applications required to get a job vs number of tries made by applicants. They reported a similar result.
Could this be helped simply by coaching? Just knowing that on average it takes N tries is useful.
> So women are much more likely than men to give up job hunting after rejection.
> This may not apply to other areas in life, but it does seem to apply to job hunting.
I think that those who are more resilient of rejection end up producing children more often.
I also believe men are more conditioned to accept rejection from potential sexual partners, so the job knockbacks are not taken personally.
is this really a bad strategy though? Assuming we have enough jobs to apply to (in tech),
why not walk away once you feel your counterpart is not excited, and switch to the next one?
Yes, we could flip this around and say that men are more likely to bash their head against a wall. Women say “hmm, clearly I’m not getting anywhere with this, I’ll go try something else.” Which is better? Both strategies probably work out fine, but you’ll end up with fewer women in jobs which involve a lot of head-wall-bashing and a lot of evaluations without much support/guidance/encouragement (and surely programming is one of those jobs).
Their "surprising" result could be interpreted to mean that employers are eager to hire women, but ultimately are hiring the best candidate regardless of gender so that when they interview a qualified man who's using a woman's voice, they're even more excited about hiring them than they are about hiring a person with equivalent skill who appears to be/sounds like a man.
I was the lead engineer and was hiring for my team in a fortune 100 company. I got told to hire the worse candidate for the role because we needed more diversity. Anyone who still calls it 'reverse' sexism/racism/ageism really hasn't worked in corporate America in the last 10 years.
This effect also comes into play re: firing. Any fortune 100 EM who's had an extremely under-performing female report knows the pressure to find a way, any way, to sweep that under the rug.
The standard operating procedure when your company is going into controlled decline and you want to soften the landing: put women in leadership positions. Less likely to be under fire, unless critics want to be branded womenhaters.
That's only one data point, and I'm sure plenty of people could say the opposite about their companies.
In my case, I've been involved in tons of engineering hiring meetings at my company and diversity has never swayed things in one direction or the other when evaluating candidate performance.
> Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability).
Or here's another hot take: the masking did not work. What if there is more gender signal in speech than just in voice pitch?
I don't see any mention of explicitly asking interviewers what gender they perceived the interviewee to be, and with what confidence.
> You might ask why we included the second condition, i.e. modulated interviews that didn’t change the interviewee’s pitch. As you probably noticed, if you played the videos above, the modulated one sounds fairly processed. The last thing we wanted was for interviewers to assume that any processed-sounding interviewee must summarily have been the opposite gender of what they sounded like. So we threw that condition in as a further control.
It wouldn't affect things like cadence, but they did include a modulated (but not cross gender) control group.
Here's another hot take: no amount of evidence will dissuade someone from believing a narrative they want to believe, no matter how compelling the evidence
i agree the masking was not sufficient. there's no sample of how a masked man's voice sounds but tbh i'd have guessed stereotypical gay male for the masked woman.
like when i talk vs. my female peers i notice my voice doesn't rise in pitch at the end of a phrase, or go creaky. i also notice differences in word choice: it's crazy the number of people i hear saying "perfect" instead of just "thanks" when i send over a document, and definitely more women doing that than men. they also seem to qualify their words more with "i think" or "maybe" preceding a statement.
anyway i'm guessing i could do an ok job of guessing male vs female with them modulated like this.
In the second video, the modulated voice didn't sound very masculine, which makes me wonder how accurate the results of this experiment would be. The video in the FastCompany article did sound more masculine, though, so maybe it's fine.
If you want a voice modulator to improve your odds in an interview, then have it filter out uptalk.
Anecdotally, the biggest piece of advice when I mentor friends in the earlier stages of their career is to fake it till they make it, as no one has the answers to anything and in this field everything is learnable given enough time and research.
Surely enough, men seem to take the advice to heart much more, with women questioning their abilities and feeling something morally off about the advice.
I have no suggestions on how this gets fixed; there's evidently something wrong in hiring when young people need to "fake" their credentials and still do very well while people who to try to be honest and humble but of objectively similar performance get rejected.
Hiring and performance in our field is still very much in the pre-science stage where we mostly do with ancient incantations and magical beliefs and vibes.
We had one developer woman in our 200 people team, we all respected. She quit "because she didnt feel as good as the rest" she said (ofc, one says what one wants in these circumstances).
It felt weird, if I see someone better than me, I ask him to teach me. If he s an ass, he becomes my worst enemy and I wont sleep until I beat him.
Objectively she was above the average dude we had, to top all...
Overall, I get the feeling that women have far more confidence issues than men do, sadly.
Women aren't being systematically oppressed ~ but confidence issues might lead them to believe that they are, even if they can't identify any actual causes.
The real systematic issue seems to me to be that women aren't getting help in the confidence apartment, hence they can't easily stay standing in the face of something that may well crush one's self-confidence.
And there may be many, many things in workplace, not just interviews, that can feel defeating... interviewers are there to filter out those who can't handle the strain of the job, those who don't have the qualifications, etc. And even if that's overcome, then the job itself may overtime wear one down.
Burnout and imposter syndrome aren't nice to run into... :/
> Women aren't being systematically oppressed ~ but confidence issues might lead them to believe that they are, even if they can't identify any actual causes.
I'm not sure how you can come to that conclusion.
Most women do not have career role models in our profession, or even most positions of power. Young women don't have examples of successful female computer scientists or engineers they can relate to.
And many women still come from households where their grandparents or parents told them that their main purpose in life is to be submissive and supportive of a breadwinner husband and anything else is degenerate deviation.
What's more, too many men discriminate against confident women; there's several studies that show that confident men are perceived as strong but confident women are perceived and oppressive or difficult to work with.
> Young women don't have examples of successful female computer scientists or engineers they can relate to.
Why not? It feels like there's a movie made about them every other year. They also cannot go into politics, because ... women chancellors don't count, apparently.
> And many women still come from households where their grandparents or parents told them that their main purpose in life is to be submissive and supportive of a breadwinner husband and anything else is degenerate deviation.
"Many"? Granted, self-selection and all that, but zero of my female friends have said that this was a thing. I'm sure it's "many" in absolute terms, but relative to the whole population ... are you sure it's "many"?
> Why not? It feels like there's a movie made about them every other year.
Hmm, no? Aside from Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace there aren't many female computer scientists who are well known and shown to be exemplary. Historic figures and people you know firsthand impact much more than fictional characters.
> They also cannot go into politics, because ... women chancellors don't count, apparently.
Who said this? An important phenomenon is that we've seen a wave of increased female participation into politics and those figures have certainly helped young women find role models.
The premise of the experiment is that the only clue interviewers have about gender in an interview is voice. You'd need to establish that fact in a prior experiment. Far too many assumptions and guessing for me to take anything useful away from this article.
Can you quote the part of the article where they say there was no difference in evaluations after controlling for attrition? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I do not see that claim anywhere in the article. What I see are claims that:
1. There is no interviewer bias: because women performed exactly the same even with voices that sound like men's voices. Which has the serious flaw I pointed out. I.e "we made women sound like men but they still under-performed in interviews compared to men" so therefor interviewers must not be biased. Ugh. That's terrible science. Because if interviewers can still detect gender after voice modulation then the voice modulation accomplished nothing.
2. Since the interviewers could no longer be biased, the gender gap in performance must come from something else. Oops, the experiment never proved that the interviewers couldn't detect gender. The writer goes on to talk about how bad the problem of attrition is, but I see nowhere that the writer claims performance differences disappear after controlling for attrition. And there is no proof that the attrition wasn't caused by....... women leaving after interviews they felt were sexist.
This is just piss poor science. Which explains why it's an only article and not a peer-reviewed study. And why it got no attention after it was published in 2016.
Thanks. That still doesn't prove interviewers have no bias. Biased interviewers could play a significant role in why women quit the platform at a higher rate.
And it definitely does not prove that the voice masking worked to hide gender.
And I've heard interviewers say that they've decided a priori to hire a woman because they need to hit their diversity target otherwise they won't get their end of year bonus. I don't doubt lived experiences that some interviews are biased against women, the question is whether there's bias in aggregate.
I listened to the examples and I don't find them convincing at all at masking gender, which is the first thing that would explain to me why they don't find any difference in their outcomes. Unless I missed something they didn't even ask the interviewers to take a guess after the interviews to get an indication of whether their pitch changing is sufficient to throw them off.
In general I'd say voice modulation isn't even remotely enough to mask someone's gender. In particular people who interview for a living can probably tell from the tone of the conversation.
"Women quitting more quickly than men" could be partially explained by women having more job opportunities than men.
Who is more likely to be more persistent to get a *specific* job: person A who has 10 other opportunities, or person B who doesn't have any other opportunities?
It is a shame the study did not attempt to quantify this aspect by asking a question post-interview ("How many other opportunities did you have?")
A while back there was something from I think LinkedIn that looked at things like length of job search by sex. All my search attempts now come back with a flood of bs listicles, but IIRC it claimed that women tended to have slightly (but not hugely) shorter searches. Nowhere near as much of a difference as the 7x bounce rate here would lead to without a good chunk of it being people switching to continue looking elsewhere.
It's also plausible that women are taking negative feedback/rejection more personally is another factor for giving up early. Or women being more skewed toward negative emotion in general, which is a well-documented trait in behavioral psychology. Or being more "agreeable", i.e. being less likely to "bother" the interviewer by challenging their negative assessment.
The authors of this "study" (if we can even call it that) didn't bother to ask, so we won't know.
I don’t believe a voice modulator alone would be effective in the gender “equalization“ of speech. It would act as a form of distortion, not equalization, and cannot mask differences in usage, pauses, emotional messages like giggles, breath intake, etc. I can even envisions situations where, regarding the hypothesis, it makes things “worse.”
Masking a woman into a male voice created a slight disadvantage, the other way a slight advantage.
Also, women underperformed men by about 0.5 on the scoring metric before the modulation.
After interviewing 100's of candidates, I realized women are more easily intimidated on average and also need to be much more careful in how they present themselves in interviews. (Some non-trivial percent of interviewers think aggressive males are confident, but aggressive women are combative. The candidate doesn't know if I am such a person when they come into the interview.)
I noticed that, on average, women with scores that match those of men (on my own scoring) significantly outperformed the men when hired.
I settled on adding 0.5 points to the score of every woman I interview (then rounding to a whole number). Also, I champion them if they are borderline in the panel discussion.
Based on the gender ratio and performance of the team I recently helped hire, this works great (when I am the interviewer).
Edit: There was a wonderful article by a VC along these lines. Some other VC bragged that their female founders were all way more competent than their average successful male founders. The first VC pointed out that this was as close as possible to incontrovertible proof that they were holding women to a higher bar before funding them. I can't find a link...
> I settled on adding 0.5 points to the score of every woman I interview (then rounding to a whole number). Also, I champion them if they are borderline in the panel discussion.
So you deliberately engage in gender discrimination? You just straight up give women a bonus, across the board, explicitly on account of their gender?
Imagine someone saying the inverse, "I find that men outperform women on average, so I settled on adding 0.5 points to the score of every man I interview."
I'd be fine handicapping in the other direction if the raw scores empirically favored women.
There is nothing sacred about my personal opinion on how people do in interviews. I judge as objectively as I can, and that leads me to unfairly score women 0.5 points too low (based on hindsight and hired candidates' job performance).
There is plenty of scientific evidence saying that coding interviews are way more stressful for women, causing them to underperform on average. Not correcting for that would be sexist.
You are publicly bragging about using sexism as part of your hiring criteria. You are adding points to women, or inversely taking away points from men, by pure nature of them being men or women. You are then hiring based on that.
You understand that if your information got out, its likely to result in you being unemployable right?
"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?"
"They arn't confessing, they are bragging."
0.0-0.5 depending on how they do. A solid "meh" is still a no hire.
A "they almost got it, and are obviously intelligent" turns into "they froze up, but would have gotten it otherwise".
(To be clear: I've recommended hiring men that obviously froze up. I don't care how programmers perform in high stress environments. We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park, FFS.)
We're not trying to reboot the computer in Jurassic Park
That would be stressful, but not only that. Stress may come from pretty “calm” sides, like the lack of task explanation or illogical authoritative statements, indecision due to vague constraints, unreasonable time pressure, monotonous grind, working hard weeks right into the trash without any explanation (to name a few just from the top of my personal experience). Stress is something that bothers you so much for months or years but you can do nothing about it.
"[...] we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women."
Another data point that suggests that instead of suffering from systemic negative bias, women are really enjoying systemic positive bias.
It’s so silly that you’re prevented from hiring whatever gender you want. A bunch of guys want to start a video game company and now they are forced to hire a woman which throws the whole vibe of the company off.
The reason it's illegal is because it wouldn't just be companies like the one you are outlining that would discriminate, it would spread to all companies, because women are given special considerations like maternity leave. Hence, a company that discriminated against them would be avoiding, in essence, a tax that would then fall on others and thus lead to others deciding to avoid that competitive disadvantage even if they had found women applicants and workers to be perfectly suited to the work at hand.
If there were no unintended consequences (I hope that you do not intend this widespread discrimination) then I would be fine with you running your company that way as I would be happy with there being less competition for all the excellent women applicants, and I believe that a mixed sex workplace will outperform a solely male one. A belief I find much easier to hold than dudes prefer working with dudes or some such nonsense.
You cannot rebuild the traditional family, or a normal society with these laws in place. They’re evil as they’ve traded the family for more GDP.
I know you probably think you’re doing a good thing by championing these laws, but in reality, your support is aiding the degredation of the natural family.
It’s a terrible tradeoff we’ve made, but it can be reversed.
I haven’t championed anything, I’ve stated a fact. There do exist family subsidies, there do exist laws that protect against discrimination. The principle that these should apply fairly is one that doesn’t always make it into law, legislators being the easily corrupted we know them to be, but in this case every business needs to comply.
On top of that fact I’ve given my own opinion - that I would be happy to employ women and that I believe a mixed workplace can outcompete ones wholly made up of men. Nowhere did I mention rebuilding the traditional family nor any other corollary.
I think you should stick to the arguments presented to you instead of inferring too much, much like the inference that because a guy might prefer working with other men that he’d prefer to work solely with other men. If you want to know my intentions it’s best you ask but I can tell you that they go as far as “I can outcompete you” and “I think you’re wrong” but no further.
Maybe the "bunch of guys" ought to reconsider why they will or do reproduce this "vibe" which is so inapplicable to the opposite sex, to what effect, and for what purpose.
I only skimmed the article, but I didn’t see one measure that I was looking for: the performance of women who participated in the study but were unmodulated compared to the performance of women who were not participants of the study.
My (completely instinctual, and explicitly not fact-based) theory is that perhaps women expect to do less well because they expect that women do less well. This should cause women who believed they were modulated (or that they could be) to be more likely to continue with the process because they believe that they are more likely to make it through than they otherwise would be.
It is buried, but they say that women that were modulated to male did slightly worse than unmodulated women. Men modulated to female did slightly better than unmodulated men. Men did better than women on average, regardless of modulation.
To me, this suggests the interviewers are slightly biased toward women, but the interview process is strongly biased toward men.
In a throwaway comment, they say that ignoring people that dropped out after 1-2 failed interviews eliminated the gender gap. To me, that suggests there are confounding factors at play.
More data or access to the data would be nice but I believe this was addressed:
> In the spirit of not giving away what we were doing and potentially compromising the experiment, we told both interviewees and interviewers that we were slowly rolling out our new voice masking feature and that they could opt in or out of helping us test it out. Most people opted in, and we informed interviewees that their voice might be masked during a given round and asked them to refrain from sharing their gender with their interviewers.
Women couldn’t be sure they would sound like women and thus be judged as women.
My thought behind this is that if women believe that being a woman negatively impacts their employability, and their behavior changes as a result of that belief in a way that negatively impacts their employability - it would be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Maybe interviewers picked up language/behavioral/cultural cues? Gender identification is such a basic brain function, trained on countless examples, very crucial for species survival too. I expect that it cannot be fooled easily.
I wonder if there is a bias at play here in the interviewers -- those who are willing to step in and do mock interviews for people might be people who are more empathetic or sympathetic to systemic biases and therefore try to adjust more than the general population of people giving tech interviews out in the wild?
The hypothesis is that gender bias could be driven by a population of interviewers who don't tremendously like interviewing, meaning both that they don't care to correct for their biases and they aren't likely to sign up for interviewing.io.
Isn't this kind of missing the forest for the trees? Why would you want to interview or be interviewed anonymously? Perhaps whatever biases may exist should be addressed in all of the outcomes along the way that lead to that unfavorable situation...
Notice how "unconscious bias" is no longer in vogue when it comes to interviewer training or best practice. HR has skipped that, because it doesn't translate to more DEI hires, so now they just openly discriminate.
> Can we do a study on brick laying, plumbing, garbage collecting and other similar industries? Maybe we will find it there?
I doubt you'd find anything statistically significant. The reality is different categories of people have different job and life preferences.
Take nursing for example, it's an in demand, relatively high paying job and yet the Intelligentsia doesn't seem to mind women out numbering men 10 to 1 in that field.
Nursing is not relatively high paying. The opposite. When you look at the training required and the hours you have to put in, it's underpaid compared to male dominated professions that require similar training and hours.
Researchers analyzed 50 years of U.S. Census data and found that pay drops when professions move from predominantly male to female – in short, if women do a job, it’s likely to be low-paid, for no other reason than that women’s work is undervalued.
Nursing only requires a 2 year degree in the US and hardly any ongoing training apart from paid training provided by the hospital. There might be some additional certifications for certain fields, but that's it.
Most nurses are paid hourly, so the "long hours" is a moot point.
My nurse friends all make around 100,000 per year after overtime, which they're eager to get. The average full time salary without overtime is ~80,000.
For a 2 year degree, this is very decent money in most states and I think we'd struggle to name a career with such low education requirements and high salary.
I really appreciate the work of medical professionals and don't want to belittle their work. But I think nursing does standout as a counterexample to the point you're making.
It also requires passing a licensing test. Passing the licensing test requires self-study. You need to include this time in the training requirements for the profession.
Most jobs do not require a licensing test. So when comparing you need to find similar jobs with 2 year degree + licensing requirements.
> The average full time salary without overtime is ~80,000.
That's exaggerated. The median pay is $77,600. Or a better measure is the $37.31 per hour. That is not a high hourly rate by any measure. [1]
> I think we'd struggle to name a career with such low education requirements and high salary.
No we wouldn't. Large numbers of programmers don't even have a degree - it's not required for sure - and earn way more than nurses. Licensing is not required. Mandatory overtime is not rampant. Programming being a male dominated field.
> Most nurses are paid hourly, so the "long hours" is a moot point.
It's not moot at all. In many cases it is a job requirement, not optional. NY for example only passed a law in 2009 making mandatory overtime illegal for nurses. It was so rampant that states have passed laws about it. That makes the career far harder than most jobs where overtime is often optional. And to date, only 18 states have laws against mandatory overtime for nurses.
> Neither of your links mention nursing.
That's wrong. The 1st link shows a chart with a comparison of careers with similar training and the chart shows nursing in that comparison.
This source shows the IQ range of nurses and computer programmers as very similar. With programmers going both slightly lower and slightly higher than nurses. Meaning there are no nurses that have as low an IQ as the lowest IQ programmer. Proving your claim definitely wrong.
The jobs require different types of cognitive ability and I'd guess the average programmer would fail miserably at being a nurse due to not having the right type of cognitive ability.
I'm pretty skeptical - that's 30 year old data and I doubt the programmer category corresponds closely with the profession today.
What kind of intellectual capacity would the average programmer lack compared to an RN? Physical/energy/personality demands I could see being a barrier, but not cognition.
Feel free to provide an better source. You made a claim that looked like a bad guess and it was pretty easy to find a source showing that you were wrong. What data is your claim based on?
> What kind of intellectual capacity would the average programmer lack compared to an RN?
The ability to pick up on social queues for example. The cognitive ability to recognize when logic isn't appropriate and empathy is more appropriate. The cognitive ability to read between the lines about what someone is really saying about what they need instead of taking their requirements literally. Software developers are nearly four times more likely to have autism than the general population. So you could start there. To be clear, I'm not saying all programmers or even the majority of programmers are bad at all of the above. But claiming that it's all raw IQ and there is no difference in cognitive skills between jobs is disingenuous. I certainly don't want a math genius with poor proprioception as my nurse.
> that's 30 year old data and I doubt the programmer category corresponds closely with the profession today.
As someone who has been programming for more than 30 years, I can assure you that you are wrong about that guess. In fact there are so many more programmers today and the demand is so high, that it would be a far safer bet that the low end of the IQ range is lower today. At bigger companies especially, some programmers barely contribute and still manage to keep their job for years.
I admit, I didn't read all 92 pages of that doc, I just skimmed to the chart at the bottom. I guess you are using "computer occ" value for programmer? If so, there's a lot more interesting things in there than what you pointed out. For example, the lowest scoring "computer occs" on chart 7 are way below that of "administrative occs", as well as high school teachers, service managers, social workers and clergy. Hard to tell, but looks like clerical-other also has higher minimal requirements. Am I missing the real data or misunderstanding that chart? Because frankly, it looks pretty implausible.
The average programmer fails miserably at being a programmer. Most of the value in the industry is generated at the top.
I'd guess the average nurse is pretty good at their job. I've only been in a hospital once so tiny sample size, but everyone looking after me there was great. I can't imagine it's an industry with boatloads of cash floating around that lets people cruise by with mediocrity.
I think there are salary differences across careers for a variety of complex market reasons. If I had understood the degree to which money would dictate the security of my family, I'd have spent my years as a lowly paid graduate student and post-doc becoming a surgeon or working in finance instead of becoming a mathematician. My bay area salary is much better than my tenure track salary but still a fraction of what I could actually be making. Nurses, too, are free to retrain.
I will concede that this issue is not personally important to me.
The claim is that compared to jobs with similar training requirements and similar job demands.
Comparing to all occupations is a useless comparison if you want to stay on topic. There should be no need to repeat the entire context of the conversation. That's your responsibility as the reader.
It’s more than a bubble. The ideology you are arguing against is so elemental to those who hold it that, to have any distance from it, they would first have to process a full-blown existential crisis.
Fastest growing has nothing to do with the link I posted. What is relevant is they were the highest paying jobs on that list. Compared to all wage jobs, nursing pays relatively high. Just take the L and move on.
> What is relevant is they were the highest paying jobs on that list.
It's not relevant. We aren't talking about comparing salaries of the fastest growing jobs. We are comparing jobs that require similar training.
> Compared to all wage jobs,
No. Compared to other fastest growing jobs. Your list is fastest growing jobs. Not all wage jobs.
> they were the highest paying jobs on that list
Even that's wrong. If you click the buttons on the salary column to sort by salary, you'll see that "Physician assistants" get paid more.
And you got even more wrong...
Nurse PRACTITIONERS were on the top of your list. That requires a Master's degree. That's a much higher paying job than registered nurses. Registered nurses being the vast majority of jobs with the title of nurse.
From your own source, the pay for licensed nurses is $48,070 per year or $23.11 per hour. You must complete a state-approved educational program, which typically takes about 1 year to complete.
For comparison, you can get paid $24.87 per hour delivering mail for the US post office. Only a high school diploma is required.
Registered nurses, which require a 2 year degree, and licensing, do make more ($77,600 per year or $37.31 per hour) than vocational nurses, but nowhere near what nurse practitioners make. And many registered nurses have a four year degree. That's a pretty low hourly wage for a four year degree in a science-based profession.
It is relatively high paying where I live (Hong Kong) and just like where I was born (France) or where you stand (US I guess), the 10 to 1 ratio stays.
Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise.
Not that I have any conclusion lol I have a 4 yo daughter I try to raise like a boy and her fav color is still pink, to my utter rage lol
> Men of similar social upbringing to these women are stuck to being dockers, fishermen, movers or otherwise.
What docker or fishermen are required to have a minimum of a 2 year degree and a difficult licensing test? A test that some states require you to re-take at regular intervals?
A better comparison would be programmers. Although there is no minimum degree, no licensing test, and the pay is quite a bit higher than nursing. Significantly the pay was much lower when it was a female dominated profession.
But isn’t it a discrimination towards men too when companies hire men for low paying and hard or dangerous jobs presumably that they’ll do it better?
EEOC says “33 qualified women” but did they check how they would perform after a week, a month, a year. Just how they exactly understood that they are qualified?
There is no answer to the root question “why?”. Why it’s a male only position? Did they hired before and had a bad experience? Is just easier for them so that males feel more comfortable connecting? There is no clear dialog about it maybe it’s in the lawsuit but not there.
I see nothing bad in terms of “male only” or “female only” in terms of business. Because why they have to hide it? It’s honest and people don’t have to lose time applying for it because they are not meeting a requirement for that specific company. If I’m a “female only” company and hiring only females because I believe that they are better than men for me and my company then it’s fine but at the same time if I’m a “male only” company it’s they can put a lot of labels on you for that.
interviewing.io runs an interviewing platform.
They noticed women were performing worse than men.
They built a voice modulator to mask the gender of candidates.
Masking had no effect on interview performance for any scoring criteria.
They speculate that gender differences in outcomes are caused by women quitting more quickly in response to negative feedback.