There is a widespread belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace. I’m sure at some point you’ve heard some of the crazy anecdotes, like that one guy named Kim that couldn’t get a job interview until he put Mr. on his resume. The weird thing is that peer reviewed studies have struggled to demonstrate this discrimination in any substantive fashion.

Some of you will remember an experiment that I am always fond of mentioning every chance I get. A website called interviewing.io which allows people to practice simulated job interviews ran an experiment where they used audio modulating software to alter the voice of the interviewees so as to mask the gender of the candidates.

They thought women would perform better without having to face gender discrimination, what they found was that the gender masking actually improved results…for men.

If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women.

Further analysis of the data revealed that the reason women may not perform well in STEM has to do with attrition. Women who failed an interview were a whopping seven times more likely to give up and not even try a second interview, compared to men.

Well, guess what, a similar experiment was just conducted in Australia, and it seems to confirm what the last one already told us.

The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman’s name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door. “We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect,” Professor Hiscox said.

Abort! Abort! Who cares if men are being discriminated against!? It really makes you think, doesn’t it? These people aren’t interested in ending discrimination, they are only interested in improving the lot of women and minorities, merit be damned!

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