Cultural Blind Spots

This excellent article puts into perspective how 'geek culture' can exclude otherwise very capable individuals who do not fit neatly in its bounds. This is one of the forms of subtle bias I commonly refer to - it's not that someone makes a conscious decision to hire only young white men for their tech startup, but it tends to happen anyway.  It's difficult in an interview to identify the kind of spark that makes someone a good engineer - you want to find people with the right mix of technical know-how, creativity, problem-solving skills, and dedication to make great things.  You can test for technical know-how, and references can help determine dedication, but creativity and problem-solving skills are a lot harder to identify.  So it's no surprise that companies come up with questions about superpowers and surviving a zombie apocalypse because they are fun scenarios that can demonstrate creativity and problem-solving skills.  However, these scenarios play off of fiction genres that tend to appeal much more to men than women.  These scenarios aren't relevant to the work in the company (unless the product is related to zombies or superpowers in some way), so tying hiring decisions to these kinds of questions unnecessarily biases hiring against women.

Many women who succeed in heavily male dominated tech fields have adopted the culture - whether out of genuine interest, feigned interest in an attempt to fit in, or cultivating an actual interest upon making an attempt to fit in.  But for many others who have the aptitude and interest in the science and technology of it all, but are unable or unwilling to adapt to the culture, the existence of this culture serves as a barrier to entry.

This is the kind of thing that all of us need to be conscious of - on the hiring side to reflect whether we are inadvertently missing great candidates and on the job-seeking side to make sure we don't get caught in someone else's cultural blind spot.