I want to have a series of discussions about masculine traits, one by one (where masculine traits are defined as a trait commonly associated with men and sexually attractive to women). The first of these traits I want to talk about is perseverance. First I will give evidence as to why I consider this a masculine trait:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/15/this-tool-gender-swapped-the-voices-of-tech-job-candidates-heres-what-happened/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2d038e582a08

...It inspired her to create interviewing.io, a platform that allows people to practice technical interviews in a bias-free environment with people from major tech companies such as Google and Twitch. A person’s education, employment history, name and other identifying features are stripped out of the process, leaving only the ability to solve technical problems. Sometimes the experience can lead to a job opportunity.

But now Lerner is using that platform to also examine the gender gap in tech after she discovered a notable trend. Men were 1.4 times as likely as women to advance to the next round on the website, and on average scored a 3 out of 5 on technical ability while women scored 2.5.

“I was surprised,” she said. “To me, there is nothing about programming a computer that ought to favor one gender over another. And technical interviews, especially, are a learned skill.”

The data inspired her to adopt voice-masking technology as part of the interview process. The tool modulates the candidate’s voice in real time, either to the opposite gender’s voice or to a gender-neutral voice. The tool also preserves the candidate’s vocal inflections so that the person doesn’t come across as a robot.

The result? Those men whose voices were modulated to sound feminine were rated slightly higher than those whose weren’t. On the flip side, women’s voices that were modulated to sound like men’s were rated a bit lower than when unmodulated. Lerner stresses that the trend was not enough to be statistically significant but does point toward something surprising.

Why, given that result, were women on average performing worse? The answer may lie in another data trend that Lerner noticed: rate of attrition. After an interview was rated poorly by the interviewer, women were seven times as likely to leave and never return to the site as men who also received poor ratings. After the second interview, poorly rated women continued to leave at a higher rate than poorly rated men.

...the experiment’s conclusions do fall in line with other studies that examine possible reasons for the gap between women and men in tech. In a Cornell University study, researchers tested scientific reasoning skills in women and men. They found that there was no difference in ability but that women repeatedly underrated their own performance. And in a study published by the independent organization Sage Publishing, researchers examined diary entries of college students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) studies. They found that when female students encountered evidence that they weren’t performing at the top of their class, “the experience [triggered] a more fundamental doubt about their abilities to master the technical constructs of engineering expertise [than it did with men].”

“I do hope that we can start a conversation around the gender gap through the lens of grit … rather than just the narrative that the tech industry is biased against women as a whole,” she said. “That’s not to say that biases don’t exist or that the playing field is level. I just think that this problem is going to need a lot of different approaches to fix.”

Q4All: Why do you think research shows women are more likely to quit a pursuit in the face of adversity? (Evo psych? Social constructs? etc..)

Q4All: Do you consider perseverance a masculine trait?

Q4All: How does this extend to the dating world?