I am a co-founder of a start-up that helps companies with their efforts to hire more women. In the fall, in meetings with potential clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, I became aware of a dangerous trend: Employers are turning to techniques that “mask” the gender of the candidates they interview — removing names from résumés and altering voices on phone calls, for example — with the hope that this will offer a quick fix to diversity failures.

These gender-masking tools and the related trend of “blind hiring” have recently been chronicled in The New York Times and Wired, and discussed at tech conferences. One head of talent at a major financial services company told me she’s getting up to five pitches a week for tools that can mask applicants’ gender. My team is regularly told by potential clients in the Fortune 100 that they are already using tools to obscure gender in hiring. Yelp has tried using a voice disguiser on initial interview calls to hide applicants’ gender.

This is a misguided distraction from the hard work of evaluating and fixing the ways in which their cultures drive out the women who are actually hired.

I understand the appeal of gender-masking for companies that are rightly concerned that bias could be eliminating qualified female candidates, especially in tech roles, where women are severely underrepresented. In 2016, a group of computer scientists compared acceptance rates for code written by women and men on the code repository GitHub. It found that developers accepted nearly 72 percent of code written by women when they did not know their gender. When it was revealed that women had written the code, acceptance rates fell to 62 percent. After reading this study, I suggested that using virtual reality — with candidates identifiable to interviewers only by avatar names — might be a promising way to keep sexism out of the hiring process.