| I agree there is a problem, but is it ever frustrating having to tolerate completely fallacious statistics and bogus metrics every time someone talks about this. That sets the conversation back. There is no such thing as equally qualified for a promotion. To pretend that performance is a simple formula with two inputs is being disingenuous. It is a pipeline problem, because I have interviewed zero females and 100 males. I've never even received a woman's resume. Any study related to people being more likely to hire, or pay more, involving names being switched on a resume, doesn't make sense. Nobody hires a resume, they call you in for an interview. VCs investing disproportionately in male CEOs is hardly surprising because even if they have no bias, they know their money is on the line for someone who will be up against the rest of the tech and business world, with all of its bias. Diversity quotas are harmful. Great, now nobody takes you seriously not just because they're biased to begin with but also because you only got the job over more qualified applicants to fill a quota. That isn't helping anybody. A much better option is to get more women to apply. I have actually taken bias training and yes, I'm biased as hell. I don't like this fact and try to correct it. I also point it out to my male peers. But it's really hard to overcome when nobody has non-junk data and nobody is showing up to interview. And are we allowed to be open to the fact that maybe, on average, women are weaker performers in tech? It seems like that is not allowed to be an option. It should also be a possibility that they're actually stronger performers in tech (I bet you reached for the down arrow before getting to that sentence). Pretending everyone must have equal ability and 50% of executives and 50% of programmers should be women doesn't get us anywhere. |
The study ( http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html ), asked interviewers to rank how "hireable" the candidate was, and what they would offer the candidate.
Yes, the resume gets you the interview, not the job. But without the interview, you definitly don't get the job. If changing the apparent gender of the resume gets you better odds of getting the interview, then the gender gets your more/better jobs!
This is science. Creationists are invested in believing the earth is 6,000 years old and don't like evidence that contradicts that. Antivaxxers don't like evidence that shows vaccines are safe. Homeopaths don't like evidence that shows that it's just as good as water. And here we have evidence that men get more interviews.
> you only got the job over more qualified applicants to fill a quota
To quote the article: "These biases occur unconsciously and without intention or malice". You (and I) have a bug in our brains. We are not actually able to correctly deduce with 100% accuracy whether someone is more qualified than other.
Yes a female quota might mean that there's a woman who's being hired when you would have given that job to a man, but how do you know the man is definitly more qualified? The function in your brain that calculates "qualified" has a bug and isn't always accurate about "most qualified".