Hacker Bits, August 2016

they could opt in or out of helping
us test it out. Most people
opted in, and we informed interviewees
that their voice might
be masked during a given round
and asked them to refrain from
sharing their gender with their
interviewers. For interviewers,
we simply told them that interviewee
voices might sound a bit
processed.
We ended up with 234 total
interviews (roughly 2/3 male
and 1/3 female interviewees),
which fell into one of three categories:
• Completely unmodulated
(useful as a baseline)
• Modulated without pitch
change
• Modulated with pitch change
You might ask why we
included the second condition,
i.e. modulated interviews that
didn’t change the interviewee’s
pitch. As you probably noticed,
if you played the videos above,
the modulated one sounds fairly
processed.
The last thing we wanted
was for interviewers to assume
that any processed-sounding
interviewee must summarily
have been the opposite gender
of what they sounded like. So
we threw that condition in as a
further control.
The results
After running the experiment,
we ended up with some rather
surprising results. Contrary to
what we expected (and probably
contrary to what you expected
as well!), masking gender had
no effect on interview performance
with respect to any of the
scoring criteria (would advance
to next round, technical ability,
problem solving ability).
If anything, we started to notice
some trends in the opposite
direction of what we expected:
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