No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform worse at CS-related questions. That's a much bigger can of worms than the bias being implicated here.
Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college?
What it does do is effectively exclude applicants who didn't study CS, or who haven't heard of and memorized "cracking the coding interview".
Assuming `fake CS questions == good engineer` is a huge mistake, but one i keep getting downvoted for everytime i mention it. Most rebuttals are usually something like "it's the best system we have", something i find unsatisfying.
While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?
These interview processes exist sure, and I personally find them idiotic, but is there evidence that they disqualify women more than men?
After we moved to a logic-based test, we were able to hire several more women from interesting disciplines including psychology, math, and biology. The tests involved technical problems written in a general way. For example, thread scheduling was written to instead involving painters, rooms, and drying time. We were able to hire 4 women on a ~50 person team in a very short time, and it worked out pretty well.
One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions. There are many great engineers I've worked with who didn't do a CS degree, and even though they are brilliant thinkers and talented engineers, too many times the interview question is "solve this problem using <pet CS 101 lesson, like red-black trees>".
And the number of people who are hired who can barely communicate effectively is still shocking. Very few interview questions focus on communication outside the technical realm.
So you can argue there is a bias in recruiting, simply because different people have different criteria for what the best traits/skills to look for is - even though everybody has the same goal, hiring the "best".
I'd also caution about taking Reuters too seriously though. Seems that they've only focused on the gender issue, but this is the money quote:
> With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.