[odajay]

On the importance of de-gendering the recruitment process, I have a parallel to submit with a discipline I know well, the professional classical music industry.

A few decades ago, it was commonly thought that the brain of women couldn't understand music. "Women have other preferences," "Their brains are not made for that." If it reminds you of some rhetoric seen here and there, trust your instincts.

Here is what happened in the 70s, using extracts from the book "Blindspot":

"In 1970, fewer than 10 percent of the instrumentalists in America's major symphony orchestras were women, and women made up less than 20 percent of new hires."

"Starting in the 1970s, several major American symphony orchestras experimented with a new procedure that involved interposing a screen between the auditioning instrumentalists and the committee, leaving the applicants audible but not visible to the judges."

"The next twenty years provided interesting evidence. After the adoption of blind auditions, the proportion of women hired by major symphony orchestras doubled—from 20 percent to 40 percent."

Fun fact: those blind auditions didn't start because of gender ethics; they began because the classical music industry was rife with clannishness and nepotism at all levels, which gave the incitive for orchestras to limit the impact from influential professors.

[raxxorrax]

But that does not mean we have the same situation here. We are living 50 years later and the pipeline for IT looks different than the pipeline for music.

Also:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...

[odajay]

Thank you, you are totally correct; we are living 50 years after, and those pipelines are different. I tried, without great success, to create perspective in a very one-sided thread.

This link is interesting indeed. While there was some fair criticism of this study, I do agree with the conclusion:

"I agree that blind auditions can make sense—even if they do not have the large effects claimed in that 2000 paper, or indeed even if they have no aggregate relative effects on men and women at all."