By far the better approach than removing information by having blind / limited information applications is to have MORE information, e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/re...
> We conduct four randomized field experiments among 1,801 hosts on Airbnb by creating fictitious guest accounts and sending accommodation requests to them. We find that requests from guests with African American-sounding names are 19.2 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those with white-sounding names. However, a positive review posted on a guest’s page significantly reduces discrimination: When guest accounts receive a positive review, the acceptance rates of guest accounts with white-sounding and African American-sounding names are statistically indistinguishable.
But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc. I always found system theory to be a useful abstraction when thinking about this. System theory asks the question which function a member of the system (the team) will take, given their personality etc. You cannot decide this from top down, it will just happen. Like in a family, where you can visit after 10 years and instantly, without beeing aware of it you put yourself into a certain position.
The question is: which function does a team/family member fulfill for the system?
A systemic view means the answer to this question depends on the constellation of the whole team and not just on individual members.
So my answer would be: make a team where everybody gets to align their personality with the function they will have within that social construct, make everybody a valuable part to the whole and make everybody realize, they are better off as a whole.
A good experienced team is like magic just because everybody precisely knows what their function within it is, and having a different background is part of these functions as well.
To my mind, this is the key point. It may be likely that a team with e.g. diverse skills/personalities will end up being gender diverse. But to assume that it has to be gender diverse, or that you can achieve a diversely skilled team by enforcing gender diversity seems to lapse into lazy gender stereotyping about how e.g. women's skills/perspectives are limited by their gender.
That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers.
>considering diversity needs //
What are these needs?
I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against.
My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me.
To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit.
tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.
Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.
I have heard from multiple women, that they will absolutely not join a team if they are the only woman on it.
You would miss out on a lot of talent that way.
Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
Following from that, it may be in your interest as a hiring person to bootstrap some diversity to remove that "unhealthy" idea early on.
Run a company that women see as a good place to work, where they won't be harassed and where they're treated fairly. Once the company gets a reputation for being a good place for women to work you'll get a lot more applications from women, and the problem of balance will resolve itself because you can hire on merit if you have a good selection of candidates.
The hard part will be firing people who do things that give the company a bad reputation even if they're great workers.
Just imagine a 20 person company with 5 women who are being fairly treated: how do they get better gender balance? Even if these five persons were outspoken, how many people could they reach? Not to mention that a true character of a company is only revealed in a crisis (harrasment, known unequal pay, role progression...). This company will never get the breadth of candidates Facebook might to be able to rely on statistics. Without actively pursuing that as a goal, balance never happens.
Positive gender discrimination is a societal tool, a tool to fix unfair social treatment of genders at an early age ("here are pink dolls for you dear, your brother can go play games on the computer" just as a blunt example, but it's a lot more subtle in general).
Of course the justification fits to the sex differences as well. You should hire the gender that makes music performance more enjoyable for your audience.
In fact, maybe the goal should be to find how much gender bias is customer preference try to achieve that.
In theory, such a person should be better suited to such evaluation too: it's not uncommon to have psychology majors in HR departments, for instance.
And finally, once you find someone is detrimenal to the team (the orchestra), you can still fire them (I know it might be harder).
The more I do interviews and get assigned the "culture & fit" asessment role, the more depressed I get. It's really just code for the bias "looks and acts like me => good"
One such comment: "Table 4 presents the first results comparing success in blind auditions vs non-blind auditions. . . . this table unambigiously shows that men are doing comparatively better in blind auditions than in non-blind auditions. The exact opposite of what is claimed."
I had a look at the linked paper. And it is true that the table shows that women perform worse in blind auditions. However, the paper does not claim that this table shows that women perform better. Instead the paper elaborates on the options of why women perform worse by arguing the following:
"One interpretation of this result is that the adoption of the screen lowered the average quality of female auditionees in the blind auditions. Only if we can hold quality constant can we identify the true impact of the screen."
The paper goes on to explain how they discovered that during blind auditions there were a lot more under-qualified women and that this was skewing the data. They discovered this because they had the names of all the participants and saw that some women would participate in both blind and non-blind auditions while others would only participate in blind ones.
The following was the papers conclusion on this matter: "When we limit the sample to those who auditioned both with and without a screen, the success rate for women competing in blind auditions is almost always higher than in those that were not blind."
Worse, the authors acknowledge that blind auditions were part of a larger effort to recruit more women, but fail to account for other aspects of that effort. They simply attribute the entire effect to the blind auditions. But it seems likely that orchestras that were actively trying to recruit more women (like the NYPhil, which the paper claims increased the percentage of women in the orchestra from least in the nation to most) would have hired more women with or without blind auditions.
Original paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903.pdf
There's something of a repeating theme lately. Study of blind interviews/tests in various fields => women found to underperform despite experimental controls and expectations => commentary and authors grasp at straws to explain the result with anything but the fact that perhaps men and women don't have the same performance envelope in every walk of life.
How many more of such studies and straw-grasping explanations will we have to go through before someone considers occam's razor?
I don't follow. If GP's comment had ended with the bit you quoted then it might just be a straw-grasping explanation, but the rest of the comment says the study authors tested whether the explanation was true, and found that it was. That is, they suspected their result was due to sampling bias, found a bias in the data, and found that removing the bias reversed the result. If that's an accurate description of what happened, it doesn't sound much like grasping at straws.
It seems to me that tenure was meant to solve this, but it doesn’t. Academics are groomed and selected to be career climbers, willing to sacrifice anything to please the gods of their establishment. 1000 years later, still a monastery.
