[turtleofdeath]

This was posted the other day: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight:

> Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.

To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."

[burkaman]

It's also not just about self confidence and "dusting yourself off", but about being immersed in the field and understanding how the process works. If you're a CS major, and all your friends are CS majors, you've heard everything there is to know about the interview process, you know it's normal to bomb one or two, it takes some practice, maybe you borrow someone's copy of Cracking the Coding Interview to get better, etc.

But if you come from outside that culture, and you don't have many friends in the industry, you might bomb one algorithms and data structures interview and think "wow I guess I'm not cut out for this". The only reason I didn't think that after my first interview was because I knew so many people who had been through it before me.

It might be easier to frame the problem as "how can we reach people outside our circle" rather than "how can we reach more women", even if it amounts to the same thing.