It made things worse for the women.
It is well-trod territory at this point that biases against women’s technological abilities hold women in technology back. Study after study has shown bias persists at every point of the employment process. So the start-up interviewing.io decided to try and do something about it. It masked women’s voices to sound like men’s and vice versa during online interviews to see if interviewers would like them better.
It was inspired to do the experiment because it was seeing some alarming data. Interviewing.io is a platform that allows people to practice technical interviewing anonymously and, hopefully, get a job in the process. After amassing data from more than a thousand technical interviews, the company noticed a troubling trend, writes founder Aline Lerner in a blog post:
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People interviewing for a tech job had their genders masked. It made things worse for the women. | Fusion
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It is well-trod territory at this point that biases against women’s technological abilities hold women in technology back. Study after study has shown bias persists at every point of the employment process. So the start-up interviewing.io decided to try and do something about it. It masked women’s voices to sound like men’s and vice versa during online interviews to see if interviewers would like them better.
It was inspired to do the experiment because it was seeing some alarming data. Interviewing.io is a platform that allows people to practice technical interviewing anonymously and, hopefully, get a job in the process. After amassing data from more than a thousand technical interviews, the company noticed a troubling trend, writes founder Aline Lerner in a blog post:
“Men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either—men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.”
The company decided to build a voice-masking tool to see if that made a difference in how candidates fared. They developed a few different types of voice modulations, and tested them out on 234 different interviews. They were surprised to find, however, that the gender swapping had no significant effect, and actually achieved the opposite of what they had hoped. Here’s Lerner:
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People interviewing for a tech job had their genders masked. It made things worse for the women. | Fusion
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