Comment by thijson
3 months ago
Your mention of blind reviews reminds me of a social experiment I read about several years ago. All of this is anecdotal though. The article was written by someone that administered a web site that paired candidates with employers. Employers would conduct a phone screen via the web site to choose candidates. The web site saw that females had a lower chance of being selected, and based on the assumption that it was their gender being the reason, decided change the pitch of voices to mask their gender. This experiment actually backfired and lowered the chance of women being hired though. The author's conclusion in the end was that women had a lower chance of being hired because they gave up too easily, they couldn't handle rejection as well as men.
Simply pitch shifting somebody doesn't make them sound like a normal male/female speaker. There's a lot more to it, including musicality of speech, word choice, resonant frequencies, etc.
If you pitch shifted the average American woman, you'd probably get a voice that sounded like a gay (camp) man.
I like this method of interviewing. If it results in more men initially then that's fine. As long as the mechanism for hiring is such that it reduces discrimination for everyone, then it's one worth pushing. If there are traits employers reject candidates on en-masse, then at least this data would help us analyze what these traits are.
Once we know what the determining traits for hiring are, we can either debate whether their importance in the job at hand (if there are doubts) or find ways to encourage these traits in underrepresented communities.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/06/30/2035225/women-inter...