And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect.
What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
I could be going too far, though. Maybe the kind of dumb lockerroom overshare bluster amongst the employees and managers of sexually harassing companies and departments lends itself to admitting incriminating things like that to other men with a wink wink nudge nudge.
Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot).
That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an intentional signal that mangers were meant to interpret as such. Since the applicants gender was misread, the signal was read as they wanted flexible hours, not that they were stable. Sure, dad's could ask for flexible hours, but that is on the whole a less frequent occurrence.
This is an even stronger single because asking if I have kids in an interview is in fact not legal in most places in the US, so including it your self is making a huge point.
Oh, there's also the fact that if you did interview them and not hire, the fact that it was in their resume might give the grounds for sueing you for gender discrimination.
It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.
Schools like to separate girls from boys, and points towards improved and safer environment. Conferences like to create women only sections, in the idea (with some irony) that it would improve gender equality, and like schools, make a better environment for teaching out technology.
I call it stupid because it fail some basic common sense. A mixed classroom, work space, or conference room is better because it increase cooperation, make society better, and switch the focus on the individual skill level rather than their sex. Schools have almost gone through this stage and fully gone over to mixed classrooms. The work space is learning the same lesson, but slower. As to conferences, I can only assume that they are looking at the workplace and fail to connect the dots.
Why is it bigot to think that? Seems like a valid concern, can't really blame companies for worrying about that?
It's of course a problem, but what is the proper solution?
There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people.
The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change.
I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone interested in the topic of gender discrimination. Jackson writes well, he's a man, and he brings a mans perspective to the issues. There is no demonization or undue blame assigned to men in the book. It's a powerful read.
Most HR departments are staffed by women for example, they would be the ones that saw a "Mr." in the resume.
Are you suggesting that as a hobby, a career, or?
Who has the time or inclination to do that?
"It can definitely be done"
As a practical matter I would personally worry more about other things than spending time reversing established thought process and bias.
Now of course if someone wants to start a movement or a non-profit toward this cause (and somehow be able to earn a living from that) that's fine. Or if they decide this is a cause they believe in and instead of spending leisure time on something else that's fine as well.
I will try to find the citation.
(Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent is also excellent - one woman's experiences disguised as a man. Sounds potentially lightweight or biased, is neither.)
The first step is to get the candidates CV and work history, and then re-enter that information into a generic form. Only crucial information should be entered in this step, leave out the candidates gender, marital status, age, the name of their school(s), the names of previous employers, etc. The second step is to pass this "sanitized" information on to someone else to make the actual decision as to whether or not the candidate should be interviewed.
The two step process is repeated in the interview process. Only objective information is taken down by the interviewer, and again this is passed on to someone else, who can make a value judgement about the candidate without their judgement being colored by the candidates gender, race, looks, height, perfume or whatever else is considered to be extraneous information.
There are studies showing that the unconscious effect exists. But it's definitely conscious at times.
I know a few people in HR in Silicon Valley, and here are a few things they've heard from actual hiring managers:
"You don't have any kids? Great, we can work you harder!"
"If he had to reschedule the phone interview because his kid is sick, I don't want to move forward hiring him. He obviously has his priorities wrong."
"I don't know, she's at just about the age most women get pregnant. Don't we have a guy we could interview?"
:-(
I work at a company notorious for poor work\life balance, and nobody has ever said to me 'we can work <person> harder' in any context.
They say things like 'We value people who are commited to growing the company. If a candidate shows us he's willing to go the extra mile to finish the project he's working on, that's a definite positive indicator."
The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination.
I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why.
[1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...
Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant.
Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social biases, those biases still are real and business value can be extracted from them).
Also, once a shop commits to a particular gender choice, it might be inclined to stick to it exclusively. For instance, I heard a first-hand story from a local grocery store about why exactly it avoids hiring men (especially attractive ones) for clerks - because it leads to relationships forming between co-workers, which usually end with people left jealous and/or angry at each other. I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one.
I'm not responsible for hiring decisions right now, but if I were then one thing I wouldn't want to be anonymized are names. I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;).
The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start?
This was an issue with many orchestras - they ultimately made the auditions physically blind. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf
Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).
My company, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history.
They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profiles. Should the candidate accept, we reveal contact information to both parties and help schedule the interview.
While we're still fairly early stage, we're aiming to expose bias at different points in the hiring process using this approach, and at the very least help employers understand their own biases. Acceptance is the first step to a solution, no?
Unfortunately there are many ways in which a person may be unfairly discriminated when looking for a job, than there are protected classes in the law.
In particular, I wouldn't necessarily expect that line to imply anything about a male candidate's commitment to the work/job, but just write it off as a misguided attempt to look "well rounded." So, shit, I'm worse than I thought.
If a man is married with kids - then he's got more commitment to work because he's got the responsibility of a family depending on his income.
If a woman is married with kids - the she's got less commitment to work because she's got the responsibility for the well-being of a family depending on her attention.
We were specifically looking at hiring-related gender bias among different education levels. Our study showed non-statistically significant bias among those without a bachelor's degree, and statistically significant at a moderate correlation level among bachelor's degree holders. The worst were the subjects with graduate degrees; not only was it a strong relationship at a statistically significant level, it was as extreme as our methodology could detect. And it went both ways (e.g., a female identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a mechanic position, but a male identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a nursing position either).
Respondents weren't supposed to put specific information on their responses, but one prominent individual did. Our curiosity got the best of us, so after we input and calculated our metrics, we looked at the identifiable subject's responses. This individual was in charge of EEO and non-discrimination policies at a research 1 institution, and she was the most gender discriminatory individual in the study!!!
Or, if that's too much work, just use affirmative action.
I don't think that would be enough, but we'd be far better off if we could get to that point.
The best solution typically wins. There is no way to fake talent when an actual job-related problem needs to be solved and then a solution sold to a team of folks.
There are issues with this approach too: somebody else could help the candidate, the presentation style, etc. Picking the right problem to solve is important, as is deciding ahead of time what is the criteria for selection.
Some companies like Google do this (link: http://www.google.com/jobs/students/joining/)
and then there are languages, like Nordics and Slavic, where the last name reveals your gender - Sigmundsdottir (daughter of Sigmund), Politkowskaja (f) vs. Politkowski (m), etc.
Some of the best developers and managers I had the luck to work with were women.
Quotas.
Don't give me guff about "the best person for the job". You've been picking the best man for the job.
"The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student."
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...
How on earth is this kind of discrimination not conscious, when the only difference in a written resume is the assumption that the person is female?
Sadly it's not just the gender thing that's going on here as well, I'm thinking of some study they did where they attached photos with the resumes - the "attractive" people (both men and women) were rated as better skilled than the "normal" and "ugly" people that had the same resume. Although, I think that if I took some fancy photos of myself and primped myself up, I don't think it would do me any favors and I'd get some unwanted attention!
My name isn't even gender neutral, very feminine...I think I once was on some board online using my real name and people were still assuming I was a guy. When I asked how they could possibly think it was a male name, they replied, "I dunno, I was thinking it was like one of those fancy Italian names, like Fabio or whatever..Fabia..yeah, same thing...they always sound like girls names."
I've now started picking the most ridiculously cutsie usernames possible, like this one, to keep people guessing. Sometimes it backfires still and people just get homophobic, but I generally stick with it anyway for fun :)
I think it is a good thing it is harder to discriminate people on names, colors, etc. They are all superficial and have nothing to do with sexuality anyway. I think in the end just too many people care what chemical is more prominent in your body between testosterone and estrogen.
I would personally find it offending that someone would hire me on the basis of my gender to become a "token" person.
In my experience it hasn't really been 100% about "just being the token woman" but I feel like I have gotten interviews and jobs that I wouldn't have otherwise.
I've certainly been someone who has looked to hire more women in my engineering departments over the years, but I can't imagine why someone would do it for token reasons. For me it was about increasing diversity of opinion and balancing out the culture so we didn't hire misogynist assholes in the future.
My brain lit up on that sentence and I clicked on your profile to see what you looked like. (Happily married and all of that but men are visual)
What does that even mean?
My wife noticed that too. She has basically the exact opposite experience as the author. Her name is also gender neutral, but more commonly male. As soon as she added "Ms." she started getting interviews. Comments like "it will be so nice having another woman around here", and "we have too many men in the IT department and 99% of the applicants are just more men" are apparently normal, even from men.
I do know I have felt somewhat embarrassed when I had to reply an email to people with a gender-neutral name. Although maybe that's because there are no such names in my country, so I find the situation odder than most people. But I can picture a HR person wondering about the gender of the applicant and just skipping to the next CV to avoid the uncomfortable moment, especially if there are many similar CVs to choose from.
Reasons for this could be: 1. I'm 25 so I wonder if I haven't experienced enough to bias me one way or another (what that experience would be I've no idea)? (don't claim I'm being ageist, I'm not it's just one possibility) 2. My fiancé is an excellent engineer so I might have had the male dominated field bias squashed by that.
Anybody claiming to be unbiased (color, race, sexuality, etc.) should take several Implicit Association Tests - https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
Maybe the solution to this problem is to have recruiters and HR departments redact the name of someone and replace with a number.
In the UK it's not a requirement to ask for someones age on their CV so maybe internal processes could be implemented to further reduce the likelihood of subconscious, or conscious, bias.
I don't understand. Are you a gay male? How does that change your perception of the male dominated field bias?
3. You didn't factor in an increased risk of sexual harassment problems
4. You didn't factor in an increased risk of getting pregnant
Did you ever follow up on any of those offers via the fake profile? I'm curious to know the reaction. I know I'd look at it favorably. But I might be in the minority. Don't know.
But that does bring up an interesting point - it could be they find me unattractive and thus having a photo is the negative factor (which is still gendered, but in a different way). If this were a true psych study and not one person's curiosity the fake profile should have a photo of a man of a similar age and attractiveness (as judged by a previous study)
It's blatant confirmation bias. Nothing more.
Allow me to state, once again, there is absolutely no denying that sexism exists and that it's an issue that needs to (and eventually will) change however this article adds absolutely nothing new to the debate.
It's not news and it's not providing any objective data, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value.
But men are affected as well. Older men take longer to report symptoms of serious disease to doctors because they are taught that they should be able to handle it. Men are deprived of emotional outlet and expected to live up to impossible standards, foregoing friendships with women in the process. You see all these young men with unrequited love ("friend-zoned") who can't accept friendship with female people and thus must invent strategy to solve the woman-puzzle-box or justification for harassment.
Questioning gender itself is the best solution, logically.
[1] Rough examples for "girl-things" as a phenomenon: A girl can wear blue or pink, but a boy wearing pink is doing a "girl-thing" (I've read that the color scheme was reversed a under a century ago). A young woman can watch an action movie or a romantic comedy, but when a young man watches a chick-flick what is he, gay?
To me, another interesting experiment would be changing the first name of the resume to something that's nearly unambiguously male, say instead of Kim O'Grady to just Robert O'Grady, and seeing if that has the same effect.
Another interesting experiment would be adding "Mrs." in front of the name Kim and seeing if that has the same effect.
Personally speaking, I believe that technical people are sick and tired of the sausage fests at most technical companies and all other things being equal would go out of their way to hire more women.
What is the motivation for someone to be biased against women, seems counterintuitive.
This may sound reasonable, but this is actually the opposite of what happens. In terms of hiring, people tend to leverage existing social networks and look for people that are similar to themselves. This generally puts a bias in favor of candidates who are not women, esp. when hiring for positions that are higher up in a company or business, as men generally outnumber women in higher level positions.
> What is the motivation for someone to be biased against women, seems counterintuitive.
Bias against women can take many forms and it may not be overt. Attitudes and basic opinions on women often form the basis for a actions that are micro aggressions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression
To that end, some people (men or women) may see women as not fit to do a task, not fit with a particular culture or set of workers, not able to interact with other depts. or businesses as a representative of a company, etc. Of course, there may be overt sexist discrimination as well.
I'm not making a moral judgment, just describing what I've seen over the years as to one explanation of how men can have a subconscious bias that prefers hiring men.
That said, gender bias a real thing in hiring and faculty practices in the US.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...
http://www.upenn.edu/provost/images/uploads/Gender.Racial_.B... (pdf warning)
All genders face gender discrimination. For example, the country I live in is a Nordic country often hailed for equality, but the state forces all men to do slave-labour for the government. Men and women face about the same amount of gender discrimination in Western nations. Men's problems include more severe jail sentences, forced labour, lack of father's rights and so on. Interesting fact: majority of rape victims in USA are male.[1]
1. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/men-outnumber-women-among-a...
This is true, but it should be noted that gender discrimination is fundamentally related to patriarchy and misogyny.
> For example, the country I live in is a Nordic country often hailed for equality, but the state forces all men to do slave-labour for the government.
I don't know anything about this so I can't really comment.
> Men and women face about the same amount of gender discrimination in Western nations.
I'm from the US, so I can't speak for every place, but that is most certainly not true here. Women and trans* folks are far more likely to experience sexual assault and violence compared to men and generally women face systemic issues revolving around family and work that men do not.
> Men's problems include more severe jail sentences, forced labour, lack of father's rights and so on.
In the US, its not just men that are more likely to receive jail time, but esp. black and hispanic men. There are systemic issues with racism that perpetuate this problem and this is intersectional with systemic issues with gender. All prisoners suffer from work programs that are essentially indentured servitude and forced work (not sure if that is what you were getting at).
In the US lack of "father's rights" is a red herring. Men have a high success rate in getting custody in family court when they pursue custody, however men do not pursue custody nearly as often. Also, any kind of bias or discrimination in favor of women in family court is rooted in misogyny in the first place.
> Interesting fact: majority of rape victims in USA are male.
This because the rates of rape for men overwhelmingly come from prisons and being incarcerated. Further more, this isn't really that useful of a thing to say anyway outside of the context of prisoners rights and prison abolition, as women do face high rates of sexual assault and rape and most perpetrators of rape are never convicted.
This has been addressed a couple of times. Note that 1) the 216,000 number is for victims of "sexual abuse" which doesn't necessarily mean "rape" and 2) not all inmates of penitentiaries are male.
I suffered more age discrimination after a certain point in my career than gender discrimination.
And he does mention he went over the top crafting his resume...
This was supposed to be data, in the sense that it was supposed to provide you with the sense that, empirically, gender has a huge effect.
If you subtract this from the story, what do you have left? A personal account of how having difficulty finding a job shakes your confidence, forming maybe 3 or 4 sentences? Were you unaware that getting rejections is hard?
It may have been a lesser factor in this case, but I would guess hardly anyone does this today, and I had thought it was no longer considered OK even before the 90s.
Regardless of what you can ask you can always ping people and find out answers.
You can discuss your own situation and see a reaction on the part of the person you are speaking with. Takes a bit of creativity.
I know of someone who wanted to hire only puerto ricans for his bricks and mortar store (forgetting the reason). So you can't advertise for "puerto ricans" but you can say "knowledge of spanish a plus".
So no, that's not "all the reason any intelligent person needs", you have to give an actual reason.
On the other hand some people on HN find it odd to have a picture of you on your CV - which is the norm here.
In other words, no one was looking at that information when looking at your resume. Someone in HR was looking at aggregate data at the end of the year to say "Hey, we're hiring group X at above/below average" or in the event of a lawsuit to prove they don't discriminate.
The male profile always gets far more views and recruiter messages.
The finance industry has a terrible reputation for blatant sexism for example however it's been proven categorically by the world largest finance recruitment firm that over the last 70 years the number of females in executive positions in finance is steadily and blatantly improving.
Their studies also prove that there is still a gender issue in finance but claiming that not much has changed is categorically wrong.
Then, it hit me. As a male engineer, manager, etc... I just got a very small taste of the less than subtle gender biases that exist all around us. That made me appreciate my wife more (who is also an engineer), and all the others who put up with that crap even in this modern day.
This is the only forum I've complained about "Parent's Magazine"'s female gender bias. And, I only do so within a context that shows it's just a lesson in empathy for a much more severe bias in the other direction.
No, both biases are in the same direction - "women stay home and parent" and "men go out and work" are two sides of the same coin.
By choosing not to fight the stereotype that those parenting are women, you are implicitly shoring up the stereotype that those working are men.
Mind blown yet?
Another addition for my "don't waste my time" domain block list.
The whole content of the post is "I got rejected many times. I added a Mr. before my name. I got accepted many times."
Ratio of females to males is low in computer programming courses, but 100% of females were interviewed for an IBM position, and 0% of males were interviewed (approx. 6 females and 16 males). This happened twice in back-to-back years.
It seems the whole gender discrimination has taken a swing in the opposite direction for this small office - work hard to find female workers over male workers. But I haven't figured if they are doing this because they care about female workers, or they want to boost their public image? Are they giving females a chance to prove themselves to work for IBM, or are they just filling the most menial jobs with females to balance out their gender ratio?
This doesn't seem like the "give the job to the person best fit for it" mentality, but maybe to them the "first glance" isn't enough to make that decision. Plus, this was just a co-op, almost anyone in the class could perform the position. I decided to view IBM's actions as a form of tactic to develop female presence in IT industry rather than gender discrimination.
Could someone explain why one was flagged and the other not? I am honestly just curious.
There are many other kinds of uncertainty present in a resume; and its always a risky factor because folks like to understand context.
Have an ethnic name? Assume people might think you're an immigrant. If you don't want them to assume that: emphasize where you're from, etc. This is good personal branding. Is it unfortunate that you might feel a liability here? yes
For example, in my office when someone doesn't show their picture in our email system: I feel negative about them. When they don't show a picture and have a name that makes it difficult to know how to refer to them, I'm doubly-frustrated.
Much of this frustration is subconscious but people need to be congnicent of how they come across to others in many contexts.
here I choose to be 100% identity neutral, because I can be. But in work this is a big mistake, because formal expectations are applied in correspondence and you need to feel you're meeting those expectations with a job applicant.
If you're in this position, you've done yourself a disservice: "Dear Sir or Madam, We are sorry to inform you that we cannot offer you a position"
Is this a problem with our society? yes.
This feels a lot like a sensationalized modern day witch hunt, "Burn the misoginists! Burn the sexists!"
Also, for whatever it's worth, never have I heard "Kim" considered anything but a woman's name.
I'll just wait and read it on my laptop, but this does look like a sign of Webkit bringing back the days of sites "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6".
