When tech firms judge on skills alone, women land more job interviews - CNET

You can guess what happened next, right? When identifying details were suppressed, that figure jumped to 54 percent.

Diversity in the tech industry has become a major issue, and tech firms from Apple to Facebook to Intel have been releasing annual reports to show how they're doing. The numbers, though, are often lackluster, with little improvement from year to year. For example, Apple's latest diversity report earlier in the month showed the company is 32 percent female, which is 1 percentage point higher than last year. Many companies are trying to pinpoint the cause, yet there are myriad ways women and minority job candidates can get derailed or overlooked.

Speak With a Geek seems to have zeroed in on one.

Removing traces of gender or race may prevent employers from basing interview decisions on a conscious or unconscious bias, Speak With a Geek said. The former would be an outright belief that women, for instance, aren't as good at coding as men are. The latter would be more subtle and might mean a company picks the man because he better fits that employer's unexamined idea of who a coder is.

Blind auditions aren't new. In the '70s, The New York Times notes, symphonies started having musicians audition behind partitions, and researchers at Harvard and Princeton found (PDF) that when blind auditions were used, the odds of a woman being hired by an orchestra jumped from 25 percent to 46 percent.

Over the years, there have been various studies, both formal and informal, dealing with the question of whether job applicants with foreign or ethnic-sounding names are more often passed up for jobs. The results often say yes.