When 97% of your Machine Learning Engineer Interviews are with Men

Of the 33 interviews I had for machine learning engineering roles, only 1 was with a woman.

In November and December of 2021, I interviewed for machine learning engineering roles at 9 companies. I interviewed for a variety of companies: software companies, AI startups, R&D groups within larger organizations, and data science consulting groups.

During the interviews, my interviewers took extensive notes about me and my capabilities. But as a data scientist and machine learning engineer, I couldn’t help but reciprocate this data collection process. Therefore, I also collected metadata about my interviews and interviewers in order to conduct an analysis about my overall interview experience.

This article outlines some of my main findings. Some of the findings are conducted with a humorous lens and are meant to be facetious. However, my most serious finding, which may not come as a surprise for most folks in this field, is the dearth of female interviewers. Of my 33 interviews, only one was conducted by a woman, and it was not even a technical interview (it was a 20-minute music theory interview for a team specializing in automated music generation). This means that the other 32 interviews were conducted exclusively by men. On the other hand, every single one of my recruiters were women.

What does this mean, and why does this matter? This article doesn’t aim to explain any…