Blind Auditions

Is this how we should conduct interviews?

SFGate's recent article, Gender gap? Tech could take a cue from orchestras, highlights parallels between orchestras in the 1970s and the tech industry.  The similarities are eerie.  In the 1970s, women were widely considered unsuited to performance at the top levels of orchestra.  Women just didn't get music, or didn't want to devote their lives to it, or something....  It was rare to see a woman in an orchestra playing anything but a harp.  In fact, only 5% of the top symphonies' performers were female.  But now the gender gap has shrunk substantially - those orchestras are now 40% female.

How did they do it?  Blind auditions.  Candidates were behind a screen while demonstrating their skills, such that the judging panel had no idea who the candidate was or what they looked like.  Can the tech industry accomplish the same thing with gender-blind interviews?  Sounds simple enough.  Would that work for tech?  Probably not, for two reasons.

1) Interviews tend to be less of a technical exam and more of a real-time interaction between interviewer and interviewee to get a sense of the applicant's problem-solving and communication skills.  To truly mask the candidates gender, you'd have to prohibit the candidate from speaking, which would make communication much more difficult.  At least until we have surrogates or scramble suits that mask our true identity in the workplace while allowing us to communicate and interact naturally, we won't be able to judge a candidates aptitude without learning their gender.

2) It seems that candidates are getting excluded before the interview stage.  Based on my experience and that of many of my friends throughout the industry, we rarely see women interviewing, even adjusting for the gender imbalance in STEM education.  So we probably need to address whatever is blocking the pipeline before radically reforming the hiring process.

So what can we do?  I have a few thoughts:

Mask applicants' gender where we can.  There's no reason to see gender-identifying information at the initial resume screen, nor when looking at writing or code samples.  An organization committed to leveling the playing field should consider masking names and other information that would tend to reveal gender, race, ethnicity, or national origin in the early stages of review.

Convince women to apply. Studies show that women don't apply for jobs at the rate that men do.  Women tend to select out of the application process unless they meet nearly 100% of the job criteria, while men are willing to apply with only 60% of the criteria.  This fact needs to be repeated over and over again until women (myself included) actually come to terms with the fact that we don't need to reject ourselves before we apply.

Bridge the confidence gap in resume writing. Women's resumes tend to be substantially less strong than men's.  That's because we tend to claim less of the credit for our accomplishments and use less-active verbs to describe our roles.  We "help" or "work with" or "assist."  Men "develop" and "lead" and "direct."  This is even true when describing the exact same task.

Ensure interviewers are aware of their own cultural blind spots.  When we do get to the non-gender-blind interview, we need to be aware of the subtle biases we all have. Cultural blind spots inadvertently exclude excellent candidates because they don't have the same hobbies, interests, and backgrounds as the main team.  This excludes not only women, but men who don't fit the exact image of the team - too old, from a different socioeconomic background, of a different race or national origin than the more common in the field.  Companies should take care to train those who play a role in selected candidates to be aware of their own biases.

Those are my thoughts - but I'd love to read yours in the comments.

Science is Natural for Everyone

Someone's been reading this blog.

Well maybe not, but Girls Love Science. We Tell Them Not To. from The Daily Beast echoes the points I've been trying to make - that so many of the attempts to get girls interested in STEM start from a premise that science is unnatural.  The article quotes astrophysicist Katie Mack who says "Gender-based socialization, and messages [ ] that tell girls that science is an unnatural thing for them to do, are incredibly pervasive in our culture."

The article is a spectacular take-down of the idea that science has to be made "girly" to be appealing to girls.  It tells us to toss aside the notion that "[g]irls will love science, [as] the EU has suggested, because Bunsen burners look like lipstick and fiber-optic cables are sort of like powder brushes."

Finally, the article quotes another female astrophysicist, Meg Urry, who notes "Discrimination isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success."

A+++++ would read again!

Boosting CS Enrollment With Separate Pitches for Boys and Girls

An article I read on Slashdot a little while back points out that Georgia Tech is sending targeted letters to parents of high school students who score well on the PSAT to encourage those students to take Advanced Placement Computer Science.  These letters, as well as other materials are available on Georgia Tech's Institute for Computer Education website.

Great, right?  Kids often need extra encouragement to get the confidence to try something new.  These letters send a strong positive message.  But, there's a twist... they send out two very different letters - one for parents of girls and one for parents of boys.

I love that they're doing this outreach, but I'm always skeptical when people use gender-based stereotypes to attempt to improve the gender balance in STEM.  These efforts can end up fueling the problem they are attempting to extinguish.  Below I step through all of the differences and offer suggestions to improve the letters.

This is how you profile a woman in tech

A different security princess...

Meet Google's Security Princess, profiling Parisa Tabriz, is probably the most amazing article about a woman in tech that I've ever read.  I'm astonished that this piece of journalistic perfection came from Elle, a fashion magazine.  By the end of the first page of this five-page article, you almost forget that there's something weird about the fact that Google's top security person is a woman.  You get a real three-dimensional look at someone in the tech field, what motivates her, what she does in her spare time, lessons she has for developers to put them into the security mindset.  It's refreshing.