I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise, it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even make technical arguments.

Once you're listening to real voices, it's difficult to pretend that the hiring is blind.

The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra worked really well because you could hide the person behind a screen and judge an entire work product without knowing anything about the instrumentalist.

Now, if most software jobs include a heavy remote work component some day, it might be more reasonable to throw a somewhat detailed spec at a candidate, have them code up a solution, then show the code (and only the code) to people evaluating the work product. But most devs don't have a day-to-day that looks like implementing textual programming problems for strangers.

You can setup interviews with text chat and screen shares at a large company without including someones voice or picture. Some places also remove names and other details from resumes.

Most companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

> Companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

Mostly likely it is because it doesn't mirror how they work. (Text chat is SoP for remote-first work, but remote-first is far from the norm.)

> Once you're listening to real voices,

Use a voice scrambler.

thats what i was thinking. Everyone should be made to sound like darth vader and now we've an interview process to die for :P

Maybe Donald Duck

Double blind. We do it in science, then do it hiring.

People have tried that... specifically to show that women were being discriminated against, but guess what happened when it was implemented?

They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

One very interesting finding of the study is that woman and men are faring equally once the attrition is removed.

It seemed to me that the natural conclusion was that woman have lower confidence and thus performed worse at interviews.

And this is a deep realization for me, because it pushes me in the direction of current diversity policies. You see, if there is perceived bias against you, then you lose confidence. So we must, for a while, try our best to remove that perfection. That might mean hiring more woman even if they don't seem to perform as well as men, because, once we have done that for a while, woman will feel more confident and the good candidates will appear.

In any case - whether my last paragraph makes sense or not - the conclusion of the experiment interviewing.io did is that only removing gender perception during the interview process isn't enough, for woman may already have been affected by the bias and thus will perform worse than men during the interview.

So we come back to the conclusion that we must invest to bring woman to tech early - during college or even high school - and fight biases there.

It's a long road anyway, isn't it?

> The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra

And even there they had to put carpet down / remove shoes to hide the difference in shoe sounds when they walked to the performance area.

https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

"the telltale sounds of a woman's shoes allegedly influenced some jury members such that aspiring musicians were instructed to remove their footwear"

Double blind hiring famously does not result in gender balance (and even less in ethnic balance). This is called the funnel problem.

So that wouldn't solve matters.