[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/.