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FYI, when orchestras started doing blind auditions, the numbers of women hired skyrocketed. Even though you'd think music would be the one area where what a person looked like & whether they were male or female would be irrelevant.

I think this is a great idea.

discuss

legostormtroopr|7 years ago

Except sometimes blind hiring doesn't go the direction you are hoping.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

mpweiher|7 years ago

Yep. Also, the orchestra thing was 1952.

tdb7893|7 years ago

Yeah, doing blind hiring won't fix most biases. People's careers are reflective of the oppourtunites that they have had and blind hiring seems like it has the potential to just reinforce existing societal biases instead of eliminating them.

nerdponx|7 years ago

Article didn't stop to get into why that happened. Were there just more qualified men in the applicant pool than women?

ubernostrum|7 years ago

This article is relevant for the discussion:

https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

They explored a lot of factors to do with gender in a data set of several years' worth of public pull requests on GitHub. One of the more interesting findings was that women's pull requests get accepted more often, but that a couple factors can strongly affect that, including whether the person reviewing the PR knows the author of the PR is a woman:

For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates drop by 12.0% when their gender is identifiable, compared to when it is not (χ2(df = 1, n = 16, 258) = 158, p < .001). There is a smaller 3.8% drop for men (χ2(df = 1, n = 608,764) = 39, p < .001). Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall (as we reported earlier), but when they are outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.

legostormtroopr|7 years ago

This doesn't necessarily imply causation - that being a woman causes people to accept your pull requests.

Identification online is totally voluntary, so perhaps there is something about people who feel the need to specify their gender online, when it isn't necessary (such as when coding) that causes their pull requests to be rejected more.