So I clicked on this report on this Australian study, and while it says
the statistical significance level of this is impossible to judge without a summary of the original data, but it does say
So he “oversaw” the trial, but at the same time is claiming it was not rigorous or properly randomised? Sounds like an experiment from which we can conclude nothing except the incompetence of those running it.
A link from the BBC that I found quite interesting regarding the question of social biases. It’s only a tidbit, but maybe we can set our UKDopers the homework to watch the full documentary and report back 
Specially this bit:
“Men hugely dominate careers prizing maths, spatial awareness and physical confidence.”
“When children play spatial awareness games frequently their brains change physically within just three months.”
Maybe one of the biggest reasons I’m an engineer is that the toys at Abuelita’s included a lot more board games, puzzles and construction games than fluffy dolls.
That could be! There are often anecdotes about female children naturally going to more domestic or traditionally feminine toys in these discussions, but I think that’s relative and varies depending on individuals too. Obviously you really enjoyed those games and puzzles, and probably benefited. I also played a lot with such toys as a child, which may have made me more inclined to taking advanced computer classes and programing classes in university, even if I didn’t pursue it as a career.
Thank you for the link to that BBC clip! Too bad the entire documentary doesn’t seem available. I posted an overview of how women do in school from elementary to university, but I didn’t even think about the cultural bias I was showing by using a study of US girls and women alone… I have to admit I don’t really think any absolute test would be possible, especially when we’re considering not just personal but cultural differences affecting answers.
If you were allowed to ask very personal questions, you can tell the gender to a fairly high accuracy. You could ask about their spouse/SO, or thoughts about being a parent. The answers can be revealing, unless they were actively trying to hide their gender or mislead. (And yes, can be misleading if candidate is gay.) Of course, questions like these would (should) never be allowed in a job interview.
But as others said/implied, addressing gender bias at the hiring stage is a bit late. As this NPR story showed, there % of women in computer science was improving along with other “traditionally male” fields until home computers became common, and they were almost always marketed towards men/boys. Same type of social bias exists for girls who show interest in science & math.
(By the way, I seem to recall Carrie’s favorite brand was Manolo Blahnik, though I did have to look up the spelling. I have at least 15 pairs of shoes+boots. Many of them are nice Allen Edmonds shoes.)
It is worth repeating that in a job interview, unlike the Imitation Game, the interviewer presumably is not trying to ferret out the candidate’s gender. Ideally the setup is just used to eliminate (some) unconscious biases.
On the Australian government’s official publication about the trial, which I linked to, Professor Hiscox is listed as the lead author, and the study is very explicitly described as a randomized controlled trial. See pages 1 and 11 in particular. (Page 1 is the third page of the PDF document.)
Reading the whole document, it sure looks like a pretty formal and rigorous scientific study to me. Of course, no study is perfect, and on page 16 the authors list some potential confounders which they were unable to eliminate, and the steps they took to control for them as best they could.
Reading the ABC article you linked to, it’s a bit confusingly written, but I think his comment refers to another blind recruiting trial which the ABS had performed earlier (mentioned in the paragraph right before the line you quoted), and not to his own study.
Anyway, I am not claiming that this study (or, for that matter, the other two I mentioned) represents the final word on the matter. But I find it interesting that it is often assumed as a self-evident fact that blind hiring practices would increase the number of women and minorities hired, whereas when the experiment is actually tried in practice, it happens quite frequently that the opposite result comes out. The oft-cited orchestra example from the OP might be more the exception than the rule in that regard.
Ask them for directions? I remember reading a study that said that men tended to use more cardinal directions, distances and street names when giving directions - “Go south on Main Street for three miles, then turn left on Park Drive…” Whereas women tended to use more landmarks - “Go down Main Street towards midtown, and turn right when you come to the Kroger…” These were, of course, tendencies, not absolutes, so this might not be an effective test.
I always assumed you to be male, as well. That speaks to my unconscious sexism, that I take male as the default sex.
Sorry, my bad. The “now” was intended as contrastive. Orchestras (or at least many) still use blink interviews. Many musicians were astonished at the results and came to realize their biases. They would say thinks like, “Women don’t have the power to play strong pieces” or similar put-downs. Well they have discovered that women play just as well as men. The violin sections of the Montreal Symphony are probably 3/4 women now. Even the Vienna orchestra that even ten years was all male now has a few women musicians. I wonder what would happen if there could be blind interviews for programmers. Maybe it would be an eye-opener.
Just yesterday there was an op-ed piece in the NY Times by a woman who runs a business to improve diversity in the workplace. A company will come to her and say they want to diversify their workplace. She told the story of one such company who wanted to hire programmers. The first person she sent them was a black woman. Halfway through the interview, before they had asked any technical questions, the all white male committee ended the interview saying that she would not be a good fit for their corporate culture. Of course not; the company was trying to change its corporate culture. Why else come to this woman’s company?
There’s been research in the US on the effect of having recently banned the once-common practice of doing credit checks on prospective pre-hires and pre-screening for interviews on that basis. It was banned on the assumption that credit checks tended to paint lower income and particularly minority applicants in an especially adverse light, so banning this would improve their prospects.
The early returns are the opposite. Instead of using credit scores to separate the reliable good minority workers from the useless flakes, the hiring folks simply assume all minority workers are useless flakes and refuse to hire any of them.
The desire to discriminate seems the most deep seated desire of all. Until and unless we implement a union hiring hall approach where businesses have almost no choice in who they hire, they’ll always choose to pick the wrong people for the wrong reasons given even half a chance.
A similar ban was placed on asking about criminal records until after a job offer was made. Likewise it was found that statistically speaking, businesses will avoid interviewing or hiring any minority folks rather than run the risk of getting to a job offer then discovering that brown applicant X has a criminal record. Easier for them to simply refuse to interview anyone not looking / sounding / appearing white.
Remember people, Humanity is God’s idea of a practical joke. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. :smack:
If the hiring were blind then they would not know the applicant’s name/sex/ethnic group/credit history, at all or at least until the very final stage, and then they would not be able to screen them in that manner.
As in the study cited above, it does not necessarily follow that more non-whites/whatever will be hired, but at least it would be fair. The orchestra example remains a desirable ideal.
There is the separate non-trivial problem of exactly how to evaluate the candidates, which is not always as obvious as for an orchestra.
Ironically, it appears that the study’s authors would not agree with you. In the “policy lessons” section of their report, they write:
In other words, “we assumed that our hiring managers were discriminating against women/minorities, so we wanted to introduce blind hiring to stop them doing that. But now that we know they were actually biased in favor of women/minorities already, we recommend to continue letting them have the information they need to keep discriminating.”
Which is not an absurd position, although even if you agree that affirmative action is a good thing, maybe relying on the (perhaps subconscious) biases of individual recruiting managers is not the best way to implement it. You could have a situation where some managers are slightly biased against women, others are strongly biased in favor of women, and even if the outcome is favorable to women on average, it still doesn’t seem like a very good system.
So maybe better to start with blind evaluations, let every recruitment manager give the candidate an unbiased score, and then give the female/minority candidates however many bonus points you need to give them in order to meet your diversity target?
I read the same piece, and I got the very strong impression that there was a part of the story missing. It would have been interesting (and good journalistic practice) if they had contacted the members of the hiring committee to ask what exactly they meant by “bad fit for the corporate culture” in this specific case, but the writer attempts to have made no attempts to do so.
At the (European) companies which I’ve worked for, “poor cultural fit” was usually a euphemism for “total weirdo who seems to have a few screws loose, even by computer nerd standards / incredibly arrogant bastard who thinks he’s God’s gift to software development”.
And cultural bias again. In most European countries, nobody uses cardinal directions. Even when “headings” are given, they are not cardinals but local landmarks (for Barcelona: sea, mountain, right and left; City Hall insists on using rivers Besós and Llobregat instead of right and left). So a candidate could be female or just European.
I remember reading a study from London, I think by Riach & Rich, 2006, which sent out duplicate CVs and found that there was a slight bias in favour of men in male-dominated fields of employment and a considerably larger bias in favour of women in three other fields which they defined as either female dominated or gender neutral (determined by the percentage of the current workforce in that trade). There was a follow-up study from Australia which found the same in female-dominated professions in Australia. I also recall an Israeli study publicised as showing discrimination against ugly women, but the numbers showed that the CVs of women in general were more likely to be progressed to interview.
This videoalso questions the effectiveness of the behind-a-curtain technique for auditioning musicians. Basically the study it’s all based on was done from 1970 to 1996, has a rather small sample size and shows the blind audition process only making a small contribution to the change in sex-balance in orchestra performers, and some parts of the data show it benefiting male applicants.
So would someone consider making a poll to determine if more women than men know who this Carrie person is? It was new information to me, a female person who has never watched Sex in the City…
I’m still stuck on Carrie’s favorite shoe. I thought they were Jimmie Choo’s (sp?).
The number of female Dopers I have assumed were male (and male Dopers I have assumed were female) is somewhat startling. And definitely has shown me my own bias.
Manolos. And I have never watched an episode of Sex in the City. I do, however, read the internet.
I knew about it mainly because of its cultural significance. I may have watched one episode out of curiosity. (I’m male.)
It is widely recognized that the show was of particular importance for women.
I haven’t watched it and didn’t know the name of the protagonist (I’m sure I’ve heard it before, but I wouldn’t have been able to recall it). But I did guess the question was about her because “protagonist of Sex and the City*” and “obsession with shoes” are two things that get put together a lot.