I think playing an instrument is easier to do this kind of interviewing for than software development. The latter is mostly about communication, whether it be by speech or writing. Those are things in which gendered signals are found all over the place.
I would say it's actually the opposite. Most comms in software engineering is async/textual, and the work we produce is also textual. The takeaway here for me is maybe there is something to be said for doing an all-text interview.
And yet my brain functions at least 100x faster than I can speak, leaving me to unsnarl the proverbial traffic jam in my head as the rate at which speech can communicate ideas lags behind the vast decision trees quickly generated in my thoughts.
It's much more effective for me to write something that's both clear and persuasive than trying to express the same idea with synchronous, expository speech. For full disclosure, I was trained as a writer.
Whenever the interview process includes a writing component, I invariably ace them. I'm a software engineer.
Also, if I want to know how good someone is at playing a musical instrument, I can usually get a good idea from just a few minutes or even seconds of hearing them play. There's no similarly fast way to judge how well someone will perform in a programming job. (Or at least if there was, hiring would be a lot easier.)
