Orchestras the world over have changed their mix of men and women by using blind auditions: the candidates play from behind a curtain. Suddenly many more women were hired. Now most hiring interviews cannot be held behind a curtain, unless they were carried out using a computer just as in a Turing test.
Do you think you could tell a man from a woman that you communicate with only by computer? Do you think most people could? One thing I do know is that unless a Doper makes it clear by choice of UID or by the personal nature of his/her posts, I do not know the sex of many Dopers.
Even if the woman is hidden behind a curtain during the interview (and that would feel creepy,) the interviewer can still tell by her voice that she’s a woman.
Can’t speak for the OP, but I think his / her point was that hiring interviews, unlike orchestra auditions, can’t easily be conducted in a manner that obscures the sex of the applicant.
Carrie Bradshaw is a character in Sex in the City. That’s a question that women might be more likely to know the answer to.
In most contexts, it won’t be possible to distinguish a woman’s responses from a man’s. And it would never be possible to distinguish them 100%. However, there may be question on which women’s responses will differ on average from a man’s. Like, how many pairs of shoes do you own?
Sometimes when I am reading a newspaper article (especially on say, travel, or a book or restaurant review) a turn of phrase will indicate that it was written by a woman.
Most people who’ve only communicated with me via computer (including in World of Warcraft) think I’m a guy unless I tell them. I don’t make any effort to mislead them–I just tend to have a fairly direct style of writing.
Now here’s a usage I haven’t seen or heard of before. Is this a thing, or did you just make it up?
A quick googlizing shows that “es” is German for “it”, a non-gendered pronoun. But I didn’t see anything about it being used as a possessive pronoun as Chronos is doing here.
(Es is also a form of the Spanish “ser” which I suppose isn’t relevant here.)
Back in the days of AOL messenger, I once had a long conversation with my father over messenger. When I later referred to the conversation in a telephone call with him, he had no idea what I was talking about. It turned out that the messenger conversation was with my mother. If I can’t even tell my parents apart in a text-only environment, I doubt if I could reliably identify anyone’s gender.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if a company conducted interviews through text messaging. You would lose the ability to judge subtle personal interactions, but probably gain a lot in diversity and lack of bias.
There was a test done using voice modulation to mask the gender of candidates for tech interviews. Contrary to the experimenters’ expectations, the outcome was that there was mostly no significant effect on the interviewers’ decisions, but men whose voices were changed to sound like women did slightly better than unmodulated men, and women whose voices were changed to sound like men did slightly worse.
Not quite what the OP is looking for, since it’s about the resume evaluation stage rather than the actual interview, but there was a very large experiment with gender- and race-blinded resumes done in Australia just a few months ago. The purpose of the experiment was to see if the race or gender of a candidate would influence their chance of getting shortlisted for a senior position.
The outcome was that this was indeed the case: removing that information from the resumes resulted in more white males getting shortlisted, and fewer women and minorities. A large French study a few years ago found similar effects, but it only looked at ethnicity, not gender.
None of these is exactly what the OP proposes: a final interview for a white-collar job application, performed entirely via text. I couldn’t find any cases of that being tried. However, based on the above, I would not be too confident in trying to predict in advance what the effect on “diversity and lack of bias” would be.
I wonder if you could come up with a question that wouldn’t have a gender bias in who was most likely to answer correctly. It’s like that logic puzzle where you’re on an island where half the people lie and half tell the truth.
How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit, divided by the number of times Liz Taylor was married?
Yes, we know. The point is that in most job interviews that will not be a relevant or proper question to ask.
The questions need to be directed that the requirements/specifications for the post. Unless knowledge of the character of Carrie Bradshaw and her footwear preferences is relevant to the job requirements, the question seems to be put for the purpose of eliciting the gender of the interviewee (based on stereotypes about topics that interest women but not men) and the interviewee can properly object to the question (and, when not offered the job, bring an action alleging employment discrimination on the grounds of sex).
You wouldn’t ask that in a job interview. And if an interviewer agrees not to try to determine the sex of an interviewee, then that’s fine.
But the thread also posits the possibility of a Turing test to distinguish women from men. That’s an interesting idea. What questions could someone ask (apart from “are you female?”) that give hints to someone’s sex? Take away someone’s appearance, and the sound of their voice, and what else is there that might reveal their gender?
