"Since we started working on interviewing.io, in order to achieve true interviewee anonymity, we knew that hiding gender would be something we’d have to deal with eventually but put it off for a while because it wasn’t technically trivial to build a real-time voice modulator. Some early ideas included sending female users a Bane mask.
When the Bane mask thing didn’t work out, we decided we ought to build something within the app... during a few of these rounds, we decided to see what would happen to interviewees’ performance when we started messing with their perceived genders...
After the experiment was over, I was left scratching my head. If the issue wasn’t interviewer bias, what could it be?...
What I learned was pretty shocking. As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. And the numbers for two bad interviews aren’t much better. You can see the breakdown of attrition by gender below (the differences between men and women are indeed statistically significant with P < 0.00001)...
Since gathering these findings and starting to talk about them a bit in the community, I began to realize that there was some supremely interesting academic work being done on gender differences around self-perception, confidence, and performance. Some of the work below found slightly different trends than we did, but it’s clear that anyone attempting to answer the question of the gender gap in tech would be remiss in not considering the effects of confidence and self-perception in addition to the more salient matter of bias."
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