[devalier]

If those studies are true, then the correct solution would be to:

1) ask people not include their names on their resume. Or don't use resumes at all. Create a web form application that does not require a name and only asks about the crucial skills you actually need.

2) Create a highly objective hiring process, such as this: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I don't really buy that subconscious bias is the problem in tech. I've been part of a lot of hiring, we were actually consciously biased toward hiring women since we wanted better numbers. I had an objective interview process, always giving the same questions, and the hiring was still very disproportionately male whasian (the applicant pool was also very disproportionately male whasian, despite doing active reach out to woman-in-tech events).

[mklim]

1. I agree, this would be preferable and a great step for the initial screener. But that leaves the problem of the actual interview—the studies that I've seen test written resumes, because it's possible to ensure that two resumes are identical except for one variable in ways that you can't ensure that two interviews are identical. But it's highly likely that the bias would carry over to any interaction with the candidates, though I don't have any studies on hand that prove it.

2. Also agree that an objective method would be preferable, thanks for the link. Great read. IIRC, in the study I link in the third bullet point, forcing the person reviewing the resume to create a rubric before reading any of them greatly reduced the biased results. Having an objective process goes a long way. The point in the link about confident interviewers performing better in the traditional hiring process is definitely true, and also tied in a roundabout way to gender, funnily enough (women tend to be less confident than men: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-conf...).

It's definitely not the only problem—the pipeline is obviously skewed dramatically—but I don't see any reason why tech workers would be exempt from the biases of the general population as they've been studied. Maybe the drive to hire more women would counteract it, like in your example—that's the reasoning under which minority quotas are implemented, after all. The problem of subconscious bias is that it's not consciously recognizable by its very nature. It's just gut feeling. I know a site that uses association to try to test it for you, if you're interested: http://implicit.harvard.edu/.

[ksenzee]

It sounds like you were trying to correct for an assumed subconscious bias of "deep down, we really want to hire men." In my experience, though, decent people like you don't have that bias. What they do have is a subconscious idea that "good candidates will look like X," where X is a mental image of a male candidate. Both women and men are subject to this bias, and it's a lot harder to correct for. Simply asking the same set of questions to all candidates won't fix it, if the questions themselves have the effect of weeding out women.

[devalier]

Simply asking the same set of questions to all candidates won't fix it, if the questions themselves have the effect of weeding out women.

The questions I asked were representative of things we actually had to do on the job, for instance: "write code to spider a web site." Does that unfairly weed out woman?