It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing.
The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.
Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?
Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)
Compared to her anecdote about her kids, she spends more space recounting how she tried to hire and retain women with no appreciable success.
EDIT: Also she recommends these at the bottom of her piece:
"""
Start a mentoring program.
If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized.
Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.
Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective.
"""
...the mentoring program could be for girls and young women, but it could also be for women already on the payroll. The rest of the recommendation are for after hiring has already taken place.
It's not news to anyone that the candidate pool for software developers is comprised almost entirely of men. You can't have have hired a single software developer without confronting that fact. Exactly what was interesting about her reported experience hiring?
That's a fair point. Her recommendations also look a lot like current corporate diversity best practices as far as I can tell.
Likely it's interesting because she's a coder, a founder, a hiring manager, and a woman. That gives her a lot of credibility in one person that is fairly unique. I suppose, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an argument from authority. But people do make decisions that way.
For better or worse, her credentials (top tech first, high rank, woman ) will lend her more legitimacy in what she's said.
It's not a novel idea, but the reality is that someone who is convinced all men are out to discriminate against women is more likely to listen to her than to a man writing the same post.
So if for nothing at all, her voice matters in that it strengthens the argument that pipeline is a big part of the problem. It is obvious to a lot of people in this crowd but might not be to many, many others.
Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same
>Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same
I see this trope trotted out again and again. Where exactly are we drawing the line between opportunity and outcome? When a 22 year old (woman or otherwise) gets hired at google that's no more an outcome than an opportunity. It's not like they're going to be sitting on their deathbed thinking of the way their life turned out realizing it was all set in stone at 22. More likely they're going to work for google for a few years, maybe leave to start a new business, get poached by a competitor or make a run at climbing the google ladder but what is that 22 year old going to be thinking later on in their career, say ten years down the line? Probably something like "I'm glad I got the opportunity to work at Google."
The phrase typically refers to what happens before the hiring stage.
Think kids that don't have role models of their gender/ethnicity. Think kids that are placed in gendered roles without respect for their own interests ("oh you're a buy, let me get you the trucks and computer programing skills. I'll get your sister the art books instead").
It extends to school programs, funding, etc. and is certainly a complex issue. It is more about giving people similar access and motivation to enter careers/areas of study/careers.
I agree that many events (hiring, etc.) can be seen as outcome or opportunity, it's about where you draw the line. The phrase comes up because the common conversation about diversity is focused on 50-50 splits in hires and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.
>The phrase comes up because the common conversation about diversity is focused on 50-50 splits in hires
I'm not sure that's true.
>and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.
Except it's not dangerous at all? What I specifically don't like about this article and your focus on outcome vs. opportunity is that it draws this bright line where none exists. The writer in this article basically lays out that everyone in the pipeline right up until her has a role in reducing gender bias. For example when she says: "I beg you to expend your energy motivating and mentoring young women at the crucial stages of making decisions about a tech education" she makes it clear that she doesn't think she's at a crucial stage. But she is. She admits to having failed to produce a diverse workforce at her startup but rather than really admit it as just that, a failure, she basically says that it's not her fault because all these other people aren't making it easy for her. It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.
> Except it's not dangerous at all? What I specifically don't like about this article and your focus on outcome vs. opportunity is that it draws this bright line where none exists.
Apologies then, I am not trying to focus on a line. It is constant effort to seek, identify and pursue opportunities. I agree that "Outcome vs opportunity" is a nuanced topic and one that will take forever if we try to draw lines.
> It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.
Agreed. But "hire some damn women" is the very thing she set out to do and then realized that it is much easier said than done when you don't have many women applying.
Think kids that don't have role models of their gender/ethnicity
It's funny, because I am an ethnic minority. I mean that almost literally; outside of my family I have met exactly one person of my same ethnicity. If I had been waiting for a role model I would still be waiting. So my lived experience means I am pretty skeptical of the need for one's role model to match one's skin colour (or anything else).
Incase it matters my role models were Avon and Scotty.
I'm not saying everyone needs one. I happen to be a minority similar to you and I grew up without seeking a role model that looked like me.
As time has passed and I've encountered more people from all walks of life, I have started to see that for some people, it is _really_ important to see someone "like them" in a role they never thought they could fill.
>the mentoring program could be for girls and young women //
How is that fair for boys/men if they're excluded from mentoring opportunities (eg in a company that hires them) simply because they're male.
This is "fine" if your objective is "hire more women". As someone who supports equality of opportunity I don't see how compounding more sexism will ever lead to less sexism.
In the UK, overall, young men get poorer school results, are less represented at university, receive lower wages than women (up to the ages when people choose to start families) ... how does this sort of sexist mentoring policy fit in here? Is it really enough to say "well if we look only at this industry segment"?
I didn't comment on any of her suggestions other than to say I've seen them in place already. So if we're not happy with the current proportion of women in tech, the industry should explain why, say, current mentoring efforts aren't working.
The answer could be "it works, but there's not enough of it" I guess.
I mostly brought it up because tptacek wrote, "It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline..." and I thought the recommendations for helping already-in-engineering women pointed to a more complex position. Though perhaps that position wasn't communicated, at least not clearly enough.
I don't see where the author's reasoning is weak. A female tech lead / founder tried the standard way to get better representation of women at Google: try to hire more women, and found out there weren't enough highly qualified candidates to significantly move the numbers in the desired direction. Then as a founder herself, she tried to hire a higher percentage of women, and found there weren't enough candidates. She compared two approaches to fixing that: lowering standards (with negative effects she outlined), and generating more candidates from colleges. She recommends the later approach. The argument isn't novel, but it's also not made in a vacuum or from an ivory tower as she tried the "try harder" approach down in the trenches more than once, and so suggests "try different" instead.
Again: everyone knows the candidate pool is overwhelmingly comprised of men. There's no real dispute anywhere about this fact. It's not part of the debate; there is no debate about it. Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.
That makes that part of the argument in her post a kind of straw man.
> Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either.
You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.
As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".
The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.
Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.
No, you're relying on a false dichotomy here. The logic in your post suggests that if I believe it's unreasonable to expect gender parity at Google, I must also believe that the current gender distribution at Google is OK. That doesn't follow logically.
The downvotes here indicate logic doesn't always follow where there exists polarity in a belief of "truths". While you may be correct in your assertions, you will still lose the argument because it's not what people want to hear. My own downvotes aside (within 30 seconds, no less) is the point is that some topics become "logically lodged" in a jam and cannot be freed by open discourse.
> You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10
tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.
Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.
I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.
> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.
Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".
I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.
Doesn't that kind of point to an alternate solution, that the entire interview by interrogation coding process is the problem (if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out) and they should be doing the mentor approach/internship for all junior programmers instead of the rigid pass/fail requirement. One of the problems with their current approach is similar to the college hazing ritual, all the upperclassmen went through it, so they're going to make everyone else suffer through it as well.
It's some of undeterminate without data on longevity because on the other hand we could hypothesize that even with equal gender representation initially maybe men would stay longer because women want to spend time raising children and that would skew things. Also, there might be some self filtering as you described in the last sentence where I could speculate that maybe the average man is used to being rejected a lot so they apply more to places that are hailed as hard to get into, though with the 30% figure female representation in CS touted elsewhere in this thread, it leaves the question where are these 30% women going to in CS?
My understanding was that was what she was seeing in the candidate pools for jobs when she was a hiring manager, not the overall percentage of women in computing.
> But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there.
If men changed jobs more often than women [1], or sent more applications to other companies (as a means of getting a raise at their current company), could that anecdotally make it seem like the ratio is more skewed than it really is?
I mean, if men are more often "candidates" for moving between jobs, then it would, right?
If that were true, then an employer wanting a more loyal or longer term employee might seek out more women.
My personal anecdote filtering candidates for three years in the 1990's for a video game studio was 100's of male candidates submitted their resume for programming positions versus three females at that stage. We interviewed two of the women (the third took a job in another industry before we had the chance to interview her) and made offers to the other two of them.
>, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop.
Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo, the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.
To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.
Because the piece isn't very well written†, it's unclear whether the "infinite loop" of mediocrity she's referring to is something she actually observed, or something she surmises is possible. She is clear and specific, presenting numbers, when talking about things she was personally involved in.
Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term) side of this debate, I'm left assuming she didn't see that occur. But she could also clear that up easily.
Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard not to taint them.
If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.
† 99% of what I write isn't well-written either, in case this sounds like a jab at the author, who I am not familiar with.
I think that her "infinite loop" theory was her perception of the anecdote around hiring at her own startup. It does seem conceivable, but yeah obviously data is light here.
Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.
Another weird attribute of her theory about setting the bar and paying premiums for talent is that her engineering team, according to LinkedIn, is in India --- which is a radically different market for software talent than SFBA. In particular, the gender distribution of CS grads and programmers in India is very different from what it is here.
One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.
I used the following advanced sleuthing techniques (don't share outside HN):
1. I went to LinkedIn
2. I searched for "Silverlabs"
3. I found the page for their company
4. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have LinkedIn profiles"
5. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.
I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this "research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.
Even in her anecdote she doesn't actually come out and say they lowered their standards until they ended up hiring women who "couldn't do the work", at least in terms of technical ability. Her only description of these women is:
"But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team."
What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women unqualified or otherwise incapable of doing the work? If so, why not say so explicitly? Because otherwise, in the context of startups I would be inclined to interpret that sentence as meaning "they weren't willing to work 80 hour weeks like the rest of our team so we fired them".
> Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering.
I don't think it's obvious at all. That an experienced engineer or manager can correctly evaluate a software engineer is one of the ground assumptions that runs through our industry and its thinkpieces. (Though it is borne out by the studies that, e.g., even Google has done).
> If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.
This is a significant point: Google's hiring process is legendarily bad. While I would work for them (I think their ethics are solid, their engineering is excellent, their benefits suitable for adults, and reports of internal culture are generally good - a rare combination), the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing. I just don't have enough of a taste for doing an independent study of my upper division algorithms class to have aggressively tried to get hired there.
It's also evidence, I think, that broken hiring processes do not inherently break a company - or at least a sufficiently profitable one.
> It's also evidence, I think, that broken hiring processes do not inherently break a company - or at least a sufficiently profitable one.
Also, it's possible that the hiring processes were broken in her chain, but not everywhere. Her experience doesn't seem to align with what either Google or Damore say (he felt all his female coworkers were equally capable and deserved to be there).
> Google's hiring process is legendarily bad ... the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing
How does having a high standard implicate any other hiring practices? "Bad" in one sense doesn't mean "bad" everywhere, and certainly "bad" for you doesn't mean "bad" for everyone. All that said -- I personally don't wish to go through an interview in which I'm grilled in detail on all the algorithms I reviewed in college. Hence why I don't work at Google.
>Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice
This is vastly under-acknowledged. Implicit biases affect even the most well-intentioned of us, which then persistently and negatively impact the targets of our biases (see the movie Get Out for an exaggerated, but entertaining take on this).
For an "out-group" in any particular environ, their very status as a historical out-group itself fuels the perceptions that perpetuate their disenfranchisement.
So, the remedy to this has not been to psychoanalyze every hiring manager in an attempt to navigate these murky, subjective waters; but to set objective goals that seek to counter the equally objective under-representation manifestations that we can actually measure.
"We [UrbanAMA] try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. I’m now back to being the only woman on the (tech) team."
I'm not sure what it says about the situation that 98% of the candidate pool is male or that she had to fire specifically the women for draining energy.
She clarified in a comment that she fired men as well as women for "lacking the energy to put us into overdrive." She says:
"Yes, we invest in mentoring and training all our team members and we did with the women we hired as well. We definitely found a few men and women who were either unwilling or unable to take on the role. We did end up losing the men who didn’t as well. On that part, it wasn’t a gender thing really — sorry that the post made it sound like that. Basically we had fewer women to begin with. And as luck would have it, these women did not end up having the desire to do what it takes."
> For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity.
Wow, that sounds terribly unfortunate! Did this happen while she worked at Google? Or while working at her startup? What are the mechanisms behind this? Do the diversity programs at Google have lower hiring standards than the normal hiring track?
(In case it's not clear, my point is that she appears to be describing a hypothetical scenario. The claim that diversity programs result in hiring unqualified women is a very strong claim (not even one that James Damore makes in his memo), and needs to be backed by actual evidence.)
> For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work.
I've learned to be especially leery of arguments that sound reasonable and logical, but lack something concrete to prop them up. The post says her company paid premium salaries -- despite allegedly not being able to afford market salaries -- to women who then "lacked the energy to put us into overdrive" and "were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team".
Even if I were to disregard that the post seems to be basing its argument on a single company's set of anecdotes, I would still need an explanation of just what the heck is meant by "energy to put us into overdrive" and how you "drain" that energy from the rest of the team.
I found the anecdotal information about her children confusing. The only way I could rationalize it, in the context of her broader argument, is that she is suggesting that there are less women in tech simply because girls don't like to code. And given this natural reason for less women, having quotas actually harms the women who do want to code. I'm not sure though.
> But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.
Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.
If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.
I'm involved in one and I can guarantee you that it's about 1000 times easier to blog about the issue than teach programming principles to kids.
My average student is a 14-year-old black female who wants to learn web dev. It should go without saying, I've not seen even a hint of ability difference based on gender or race. We cover JS as well as HTML/CSS -- this is not a design class, but a real development class where kids are writing native markup and code.
The program is free and held at the public library. All students are there because they want to learn. I thought some might come due to parental pressure, but I haven't seen that.
> the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.
Please do not mislabel opinion as fact. You do both yourself and the world a disservice.
I have been paid very good money (north of USD 85000 in Norther Europe) for stuff that was mostly so simple I could easily taught a bright and reliable 16 y.o. to do it. (I did at a similar job.)
As an academic turned to industry, I have to agree with him. Almost all of the "CS fundamentals trivia is engineering" stuff I see is more because a bunch of CS grads who consider engineering, architecture and the like to be beneath them or else they're completely unfamiliar with how engineering works in any other engineering field.
>>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.
I wished more of these conversations around diversity were focused on these types of points, I call these "the small things". Talking about "college pipe lines" and "biological differences" are "the big things" and they make perfect red herrings for arguments.
Indeed if we want to talk about fitness for a job I would expect a major part of that conversation to be getting a fairly good sense of what is it exactly the job entails skills wise...I have a computer science degree (with a minor in math) and an MBA but I spend most of my days working on things that absolutely don't require that level of education. Education and level of skills is definitely important and should not be underestimated but we also need to be honest and realistic about what it takes to do most jobs.
No, the core of the article was pointing out that setting arbitrary quotas for female hires and then sacrificing your standards in order to meet those quotas does more harm than good. Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs. Secondly there's the issue of how to address sexism and bias in the industry which results in wage gaps (they're a lot smaller than most of the media makes it out to be, but they do exist), and more importantly in passing women up for promotions or skipping qualified candidates. The later happens rarely thankfully, but it does happen and needs to be addressed, but setting quotas does not fix that problem!
One thing that could potentially help I can think of is encouraging hiring of women in more junior roles (and I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position). If we're not seeing qualified female senior level candidates it could be because they're not getting opportunities to learn those skills in lower level positions. I know from experience it can be hard to make room in a team for a junior employee, but it's something that the industry needs to get better at doing if we want people to eventually have the skills to fill those senior levels roles.
> ...I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position...
The word "shove" aside, I wish more companies would hire senior people for junior roles if they want them. One of the big problems with the American (and I presume Western) job market is the unwillingness to train people unless they're straight out of college. It seems that moms (and less often, dads) who take time off to raise the young ones would benefit from a new approach.
Of course, the employer and employee need to be on the same page about day-to-day duties, expected career growth, and so on. But that seems like a solvable problem.
Sorry, I think there's some confusion about the usage of the word senior there, I meant senior in terms of skill level, not in terms of age. Age shouldn't be a factor at all, it doesn't matter if you're a fresh college graduate or a 60 year old so long as you have the skills to do the job. What you don't want to do is take a highly skilled worker and then hire them into a low skill position, they'll get bored/frustrated, assuming they even accept the position in the first place because presumably you're paying market rates so you'll be massively under paying them in that position.
> ...I meant senior in terms of skill level, not in terms of age...
No worries. I understood your meaning. I also meant that. I meant that hiring managers, in my experience, are more likely to give an outright "no" to an underqualified senior person than to offer them a junior role.
If the person took some time off, decided to switch industries, decided to switch specialties, or just figured out they were in a rut, giving them a junior role and letting them work their way back into an expert role should be a consideration.
I always figured that was part of some implicit contract.
"You'll hire me for a job I can't immediately do, and I'll treat growing into my job as the number one priority".
With the job market as it is, it's unrealistic to expect people to hire candidates who can't help lighten the load within a week or two of their start date.
I wish there was a less-risky way to 'try out' candidates. Someone I know works in boutique finance and whenever they bring on someone at a junior level, they're on a 60 day probation and the partners decide whether or not to retain them.
I think it's easier for them to do it because their applicant pool / candidates are predominantly young, white/asian, male, and high-achieving. They've never been sued by a candidate they've let go and they've found some real 'diamonds in the rough'.
I can't imagine that they could say the same if they let go of 40 mothers with children. But it does highlight a solution path - make it less risky for companies to evaluate candidates although I don't know how to do that without eroding worker protections.
I know the prevailing sentiment around here is anti-age-discrimination, but the flip side is also bad. We've seen in a few European countries what happens when the unemployment figures for young people are an order of magnitude higher than people with more experience and it's not pretty. Young people need to be given a chance to start their careers and senior people taking junior roles can get in the way of that. The current trend towards people not having the required savings for retirement is going to echo into future generations that have to delay the start of their careers because those jobs haven't been vacated.
But what if there aren't enough women training in tech because not enough women want to train on tech. And why aren't we doing the same for male nannies?
One aspect I haven't read much about are the incentives that the big tech companies are offering women candidates.
You mention wage gaps but if the pool of qualified engineers is mostly men and Google (and other tech companies) want to hire women, it seems that salaries for women should be far, far higher than it is for men. The fact that they are close to equal might be part of the problem.
That's true, I didn't think of that. It does seem like it would be a more direct way for them to increase the number of women that work there though. To me it doesn't feel worse than allowing a numeric quota.
I suppose individual women are free to negotiate a higher salary.
You could get around it by advertising a senior position, for which women applicants are sought, and a junior position, where everyone will be considered, with substantially the same responsibilities but different pay.
Would a US court disallow this? It doesn't seem to violate the spirit of affirmative action, or the letter of equality laws.
True, you could let the market dictate their salaries, but then you run into the issue of paying one gender more money for the same amount of work, a practice outlawed under the Equality Pay Act of 1963.
The lawsuit in that article is about a dispute over Google providing employee contact information to support a Labor Dept audit, not about alleged pay discrimination.
> No, the core of the article was pointing out that setting arbitrary quotas for female hires and then sacrificing your standards in order to meet those quotas does more harm than good.
Is this actually occurring at Google due to the existence of their diversity programs? If so, that is quite a strong claim and needs to be backed by evidence. But she doesn't appear to be actually making that claim.
> Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs.
Isn't this literally what Google's diversity programs do? The ones that James Damore advocates eliminating? I thought they were internship programs designed to encourage more minority groups to get into computer science?
>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.
Bingo, Google could train a bunch of SWEs no problemo, but they'd rather externalize that cost. I figure most positions wouldn't require much more than 6 months of on-the-job training.
I actually see it as calling more attention to the start of the pipeline. If you have a broken tech stack with bugs up and down the toolchain from the physical hardware up to the software you kinda do want to fix the base layer first. Though there are arguments to be said to attack the bugs from the standpoint of the entire system.
Well, that analogy breaks down when you consider how young people are not like CPUs (or whatever counts as the bottom of the stack). CPUs never look at all the garbage code up the stack and decide it's not worth it.
A young woman could hear a lot about how tech is a rough place to work and decide to do something else. So the various parts of the pipeline do affect on another.
It also conflates the hiring needs of a large mature corporation like Google with those of a struggling startup:
We try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive.
A lot gets muddied in these few lines. One way to read this: as a startup, we usually pay below-market salaries. But we really wanted some experienced women on the team, so we offered them market salaries. They weren't ready to sign on to 60-70 hour weeks like the men on our team. So we let them go.
With the salty language, I gather the real intent of this blog post was to ride the tails of the Google memo backlash and draw attention to her startup. And maybe find some more male engineers to join her startup at below-market salaries.
> The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.
Here's the problem : the candidate pool consists of 90% men and 10% women so the gender ratio at companies tends to represent that ratio. How do you propose we fix this to reach a healthier balance of something close to 50-50 without encouraging more women to join tech?
In other words, aiming for 50-50 when the candidate pool is 90-10 is suboptimal. So I agree that work needs to be done at all stages of the pipeline, but as the author suggests, the way to fix this issue is to encourage more women to join tech at the earlier stages. How is this a cop-out?
I can't speak for Google, but I work for a large SV company with an aggressive diversity program, and the goal is to hire to match the demographics of the pipeline of qualified candidates, not the population at large.
I'm almost 100% sure that isn't the case. Maybe you're told it is, but Google liked to tell its employees the same thing.
If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally.
When your company says "the goal is to match the pipeline" yet still has an "aggressive diversity programme", what they mean is, "we know what we have to say to avoid legal trouble but we want to hire as many women as possible, and will find as many ways to bend the rules to do that as possible".
Not necessarily. If 20% of college grads are women and all your competitors have an "aggressive diversity programme" you'll be hard-pressed to get 20% female hires without an "aggressive diversity programme" of your own. They would be out-marketing you for female candidates.
If you assume women pick companies based on diversity programmes and not the usual reasons people pick companies like needing a job, finding the problem interesting, good compensation, etc then yeah.
But unless that "aggressive programme" is illegally benefiting women with something concrete, like more pay, easier interviews or special privileges unavailable to men, it's like that the programme will be focused on trying to attract women into the profession who aren't already developers. So it'd make no difference to this hypothetical new college grad.
And if it did, then why would you want an employee whose primary reason for joining your startup over a competitor was the existence of a diversity programme? They'll just seem low energy compared to the men who joined because they love online discussions or whatever it is your firm does. Better pass and keep looking.
it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency
You still have to make sure you're doing that in an unbiased way. For example, if you ask interviewers to determine if a candidate is a good "cultural fit," you might accidentally end up with 95/5 men instead of 90/10.
Some kind of diversity program to make sure you're not undershooting the diversity of your job applicants is an absolute minimum requirement, I'd say.
Should you aim to overshoot? Maybe! That's a discussion worth having.
> If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally.
Statistically, you're correct. But there's a lot more of a subjective element to hiring than matching skills to requirements. One of the replies to your comment mentions "culture fit", for example.
I'm familiar with the culture of the company I work for, I see the hires, I'm part of the hiring process, the goals and results are all public - as in available to anyone with an internet connection. All due respect I'm absolutely 100% certain that you're wrong.
I was way into photoshop as a kid having free access to all kinds of software (thanks, mom!) but now I'm incredibly glad I'm a programmer and not in any profession that uses photoshop or similar tools. Thank goodness people didn't insist I was only cut out for the arts :)
Riiigght... It takes years to become decent, and almost a decade to become 'really good'. Most junior engineers (first year off the school), or interns are a net negative for the first year. Including the folks that just went to hacker/training type of programs.
Hence most startups avoid them, and only large companies have the means to absorb them in large numbers. The only good right after school engineers I have worked with, had been the types that had started coding at 15. Some of them didn't even go to college, but had at least 5-8 years of practical experience before getting to the point on being hirable to the big cos...
On one hand you are right that CS degree is not required, on the other hand your argument just ignores the fact that it takes years to become decent and at least 5 to 10 years of practice to become really good. Google (and any other large company) is a business at the end of the day.
Even though what I say might sound a bit stupid, I think it's because of style. Everybody that I work with is a geek. If you always thought of yourself more of a guy who is a lawyer, serious, likes to dress well, you will probably want to run away from being a software dev. They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever.
Then you might have less geeky people and companies, but the overall sentiment that I get is that who does "computers" are geeks, nerds, people with glasses and so on.
Being a male myself, I saw how rare are geeky-type of girls, and usually how many males usually one gets attention from(lots!). It's not that there aren't many, there are many geeky girls, but the pool, in comparison to men, is big. Maybe it's just my eye, but at least I saw how much lonely man there is due to this fact, they lookout for a geek girl, see how much competition there is, much more to the attractive ones and then end up alone. 4chan is an example of this.
And this is mostly regarding to culture. The stuff we watch, the stuff our parents talk with us, it has too many factors. In the end, you are a geek. Or you are something else.
So I think that either tech has to look less geeky(how to?). Now that I've grown up, I'm less interested in being a geek, I've started to look up to fashion and a range of other things which I didn't when I was younger, but it was when I was younger that I've picked my profession and many other do.
I've started to discover that there was a lot of stuff I was missing out, I've never had money to buy clothes for myself, now that I do, I pay attention to what people wear, how to they act and so on. I talk to my wife and she teaches me many things. As time passes, I actually distance myself from the prototype of people who I work with.
To my very small knowledge of lawyers, they behave very very differently from IT people in general. Some people might be more attracted to becoming one, for example. It feels more mainstream. I think that when we make this kind of choice, it's more like we want to fit in. Nowadays, after years of working experience, I think that even me, I would pick something else, even though I love coding, studying new programming languages and so on, but I could as well be as productive somewhere else, maybe being a lawyer or a doctor, why not?
As a software dev you are also expected some kind of weird labour, you are always building, your leadership capabilities aren't so well tested. For many, they would even like if you would just code. I don't like the industry so much anymore. I feel that the industry enjoys the way that it breeds very smart people which would rather be given orders(or pseudo-orders, in a SCRUM cycle or whatever agile methodology) versus actually taking up responsibility from very early on your career.
Coming back to my argument, people when deciding on what to do on their life, they chose something which they want to belong, generally. Girls because of their experience and what they get bombarded by media end up choosing different stuff. There are rare cases though.
> They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever.
Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal.
In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's good. But they are often weird, rude, or creepy (still 40 and shopping at Hot Topic?). They're usually taking orders rather than giving them. And they're often squirreled away in some lab instead of being part of the story itself. I'm concerned the message for women (and men for that matter) is "Tech is great... if you're into dressing up like a wizard and sitting in a cubical. You do you (over there)!"
Garcia from Criminal Minds, Chloe from 24 (more antisocial than specifically Hot Topic), Jenna Simmons from Agents of Shield, one of the clones from Orphan Black (IIRC... didn't watch this much).
Basically anyone in Big Bang Theory, Bones (herself). They're certainly STEM, but maybe not "tech" depending on what people mean by that.
I don't necessarily think the equivalent male characters are treated comparably well, for what it's worth. But if you want to encourage teenage girls to look at tech, showing them that it's also for normal people would help a lot.
I will say that Silicon Valley does a decent job subverting the trend with a handful of minor female characters.
What if it's not really great fit "normal" people, if geeks and nerds get on better with it. Doesn't that make it bad to try and convince people to take up STEM jobs, if they won't enjoy then as much as other roles?
I've only worked one job in science, I wouldn't describe the 400 or so people as "normal" as a population: geeky and nerdy, weird a wide variance, but not what I'd expect 999/1000 to be enamoured with.
Perhaps the lack of social skills, and friends, of a good portion of that population (myself included) was an aberration and didn't represent people who prosper in STEM roles in general.
Going against GP's point but Root in Person of Interest was a great geek character IMO. Tough, sharp, ninja coder and the complete opposite of uncool (so I guess that would be 'cool'). Swerved all of the cliches.
> So I think that either tech has to look less geeky(how to?).
I think this is already happening. It is 'cool' to do software (and be geeky in general - look at the popularity of The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones). The problem is that it take time for those changes to trickle up.
"...the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place."
That's really true of any job where a degree isn't a regulatory requirement.
I think the problem with Google's hiring is less that they are hiring mostly people with degrees and more that the hiring process is a hyper competitive, stressful, multi-week long gauntlet.
> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix.
If you've paid any attention at all to the conversation around this (or any other diversity issue), you'd know that _tons_ of people care about this. There are multitudes out there who are unable to rebut an argument objectively and have to fall back on "all we have here is men talking about women's issues" or "no women in tech agrees with this viewpoint: that should tell you something".
For anyone intelligent enough to consider an argument on its merits, this example isn't useful, but unfortunately this type of conversation is always dominated by those who aren't.
The pipeline is a huge problem. The numbers just aren't there currently to support a 50/50 diversity goal. It is far from a copout. It is addressing the problem at the source.
The real copout is is saying that much of software engineering does not require a degree. That might be true in a very narrow sense as far as computer science degrees go. But people still need education and degree or certification programs. We don't need a lowering of standards or removal of standards that is the copout.
Huh, I found the anecdote about her children just a cute example. The meat of the post to me was her drawing on her years as a hiring manager.
Since you, tptacek, are well known here on HN for your hiring experience, both at Matasano and Starfighter, I'd be extremely curious to know your experience with regard to that and gender. How many men vs how many women completed the crypto challenges? What about people you worked with and placed at Starfighter?
> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?
I would say that this woman's credentials, personal experience with hiring at Google and hiring at her startup, and her (seeming) non-idealogical leanings lends weight to her words.
I wouldn't say she writes perfectly but at least well enough that I could see her frustrations, and more importantly, understand why hiring quotas may create vicious cycles.
Finally, to say "who cares?" shuts down a potentially-enlightening discussion before it can even occur. I'm all for dismissing vitriol spewed by randos, but this post was written by someone with good intentions, a clear mind, and above all, feelings that she feels are valid.
Implying she has nothing worth hearing on this subject is rather unkind.
For a long time I did not comment on these types of stories. However, I have since been able to formalize one specific way in which posts that include some of the information that this post includes make the world a worse place in certain specific cases. You can read a formal deductive analysis here:
It is mathematical and hard to follow. It's very formal.
If you follow the program of study outlined in the above comment you will have an extra tool to decide which articles make the world a worse place. (I realize that not everyone will be able to follow my comment.)
Didn't we have a point where there was close to gender parity in college in computer science at a lot of colleges in the 80's/90's? My off the wall hypothesis from the gender pay disparity data is that the lack of women is more related to people making the judgement that the amount of time at work (versus time with family) in relationship to the value of the work itself means women choose not to work/continue a career in computer science/programming jobs, but women do not have this issue with the medical or legal profession (that have a much higher societal status in certain circles versus computers), i.e. working at Google in this case is associated (wrongly or rightly) with making money from motivating people to click on ads versus making a difference in people's lives with medicine or law.
This is special pleading. Software developers like to believe they're workaholics, but a job as a biglaw associate or a medical resident will eat your life in ways we'd find difficult to imagine, and it's hard to believe that the kind of work a law associate does (kowtowing to partners to gather more scut-work to get done for faceless corporate clients) is more meaningful than the work a developer does. That, and the fact that our supposed 80 hour work weeks consist of huge amounts of fucking around, and unlike an associate or a resident, we can almost always spend at least 30 of those "hours" WFH, and unlike either of those alternatives, if we roll into the office at 10:30 we're probably in the early bird cohort.
You might be right about the work load/work type on average/median/most cases? but I still think there is a difference in social status for the fields/titles. To go slightly off topic, can you speculate as to why is there more gender parity in those fields that are harder to get into (in terms of specific schooling) in the first place?
That's the entire question we're addressing in these threads. It is weird that women excel in:
* the rest of STEM,
* the law,
* medicine,
* pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c)
... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.
Add to that the fact that most software jobs are far more work/life flexible than other professions (roll in late, work from home, wear whatever, weekly+ deliverable cadence, &c).
It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.
That's the entire question we're addressing in these threads. It is weird that women excel in:
- the rest of STEM,
- the law,
- medicine,
- pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c)
... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.
Agree, this is reason for concern.
It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.
Here's were we disagree.
I think there are lots of things to be done but if this was true then there should be a massive opportunity for whatever company moved first and hired all those qualified candidates that others shun.
Possible explanation as follows: The perks for those jobs in our culture are different ones and on average women prefer a different mix.
In western culture, my experience has been: When you tell some acquaintance you're a software developer, engineer etc., they are almost instantly bored.
Contrast that with
* Science - The flair of knowledge, curiosity, discovery and a general sense of meaning
* the law - Status and money
* Medicine - Making a real difference in peoples lives, also extremely prestigous
Maybe men are just less capable of resisting the urge to tinker in order to achieve more respected/better payed jobs?
It bears to be repeated: This is western culture valuation, might be different in other cultures, which also might result in a different distribution.
>In western culture, my experience has been: When you tell some acquaintance you're a software developer, engineer etc., they are almost instantly bored.
I think telling someone that you're a software engineer isn't the best way to make it sound exciting and high status. Tell people what the software does, or what the company does. Saying "I'm a software engineer" is like saying "I'm a screwdriver operator" rather than "I'm an aviation maintenance technician". Nobody cares about the nitty-gritty details of how exactly you get your work done.
At 35%, women practice law at about double the rate they do of more masculine occupations like engineering, while law practice involves abstract reasoning the degree of "social reasoning" is higher than engineering, thus more women I suppose.
medicine,
particularly the more caretaking functions of medicine
accounting
The work of an accountant and a mechanical engineer, or an information security analyst are hardly comparable, not in a hierarchical way necessarily, they just have totally different goals and methods.
I saw an interesting argument about this. In the 80's, programming wasn't a high status occupation and the CS community was more accepting of women than other professions. Over time, as the rest of society became less sexist, women had more options and gravitated away from CS towards law, medicine, and other fields.
> The only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate"
Are you serious? An ex-Google hiring manager shares her experience hiring software engineers, and you conclude the only contribution this post makes is that "she's a woman". Frankly it's impressive how much of her perspective you ignored to focus on her status as a woman and a mother.
> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix.
I think you're underestimating the importance of one of her main points, specifically the fact that lowering the bar for diversity hires only perpetuates negative stereotypes about those groups and breeds resentment in all the others. It's increasing the divide rather than doing the opposite.
Yes we should. But if we have College intermediate Computer Science courses with 85% men (which was my anecdotal experience at a large University) this is clearly a massive (if not the largest) bottle neck and should be focused on.
Uhg. Another post that asserts increasing diversity inevitably means lowering the bar. I don't think that's the case at all.
Rhetoric like this is toxic and erodes the presumption of competence people should have in their colleagues. I know great developers of every gender, but it's always only the women that have to justify that their presence isn't the result of some "diversity charity".
> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix.
Wow, this is extremely dismissive and ignorant to what this woman has written. Why?
Since she is a women in tech, the very thing which we don't have enough of and we so desperately want to have more, perhaps we should give her voice a little bit more respect and listen a bit further into what she thinks can help to fix the problem.
Completely agree, and I was about to comment on the same thing that the author was drawing some dangerous conclusions from the anecdote about her kids, the same sort of conclusions I see a lot of other parents with young children making as well.
I'm female. When I was 7/8 years old I literally cried about having to do multiplication and addition flash cards. I was failing math. My dad said "Listen, you're not going to be a mathematician, but you have to learn multiplication!" Hated hated hated it.
Things started to turn around in middle school. My teachers kept pushing me, I kept taking math, I started to enjoy it. By 16 I was cross-registering at a local community college to take calculus and was in differential equations my senior year. I have a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in software engineering.
The preferences of seven year olds are almost meaningless, and their career aspirations are definitely meaningless. When I was seven I wanted to be either a baker or a manicurist or president of the United States. I haven't been interested in the culinary arts, cosmetology, or politics since. My sister was an avid artist, now she's an actuary who doesn't even do art as a hobby.
Almost every parent (especially parents of mixed-gendered children) I have this discussion with ends up saying something along the lines of "Just wait until you have kids -- boys and girls are super different and my son likes trucks and machines and my daughter likes dolls!" Yeah, but what does that have to do with which classes they enjoy in middle school or high school? I don't know. Maybe I will change my mind, but this extrapolation of early childhood preferences into adulthood career paths bugs the heck out of me.
FYI: More than 80% of the workforce at Google have a higher education degree. (Bachelor or more).
The big companies only recruit juniors out of universities, usually the well known ones. An aspiring programmers will never get an interview without a degree.
Once inside the company, you will realize that virtually everyone has a degree. People who don't have a degree are discriminated during every step in the interview pipeline.
> But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline.
We have finite resources to devote to this problem. Prioritizing them to the interventions that work is not merely acceptable, but praiseworthy and necessary.
> virtually none ... requires a college degree in the first place
Absolutely, but the pipeline leaks start far before college.
Do we need to be "working on all stages of the pipeline" to get more men into nursing and school teaching? More Asians and Indians into professional sports?
The key point of Damore's memo was that the average members of different groups have different interests and strengths.
This is born out not just in observational studies of the labor market, but also from surveys, and performing personality profiles.
What's with the obsession with with square pegs in round holes, but only for certain classes of squares?
If most people are doing things they have at least some interest in, isn't that a success? Why are so many people running around with their hair on fire, trying to solve a non-existent problem?
I like realistic posts like this. She presents her experience and the problems associated with trying to diversify a tech team. She's sincere in her efforts, yet still finds she can't achieve her goals. Also, she brings up two points I've long believed about the troubling lack of women in tech.
She's 100% correct about the fact that it's too late to make a difference in industry when you're only dealing with women who just graduated from college. You have to start earlier and teach young girls that technical skills are necessary. Even if they don't like technical subject matter, they should be made to learn it. It's no longer an option.
Aiding men in industry who want to help is crucial. I see a lot of rhetoric online about how all men in tech are a problem and that they should be excluded from this whole process. "Men can't speak for women." If you believe that, you're contributing to the problem. Perhaps men can't speak for women, but they can at least speak with them.
Patience will be required because this situation isn't going to be solved overnight, or even in 10 years. It'll take a generation of concerted effort to really make a difference.
>Feminist outbursts are driving even the most genuine of men away from us.
I think this depends on what "genuine" refers to in this sentence. Many issues have loud and/or shrill advocates on any or all sides, but that has nothing to do with the actual merits of any side. Anyone who is seriously interested in arriving at the best estimates of truth or utility available should disregard whether or not advocates are shrill and simply focus on facts.
When part of your pitch relies on trust and goodwill (open dialogues, open corporate culture, leaders worth voting for, etc.), there is a component you cannot neglect: trust.
If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.
Serious people are people willing to put their time and/or money into a cause. All power to these people but they are a fraction of the critical mass needed in any social campaign.
Genuine people are people who are sympathetic and have good intentions. They will do / not do what is helpful to the cause but it's not on of their top X priorities. Every movement needs lots and lots of these people. But these people will flee if a situation becomes toxic or they feel like they have more to lose than they can risk.
For example, few "genuine" men would ever write the article written by the OP, which essentially says, it's a pipeline problem. Why? Because even if they could prove with hard data that the biggest factor is the lack of female applicants they would still get torched by the ideologues. So the safe choice is not to engage, give a little extra consideration to the few female applicants received, and move on with your day.
Maybe in some imaginary utopia. Here in the real world, being shrill or hateful is a great way to drive people away from your point of view, regardless of its merits.
It has been kind of strange to watch the diversity programs and the conversations around it, because it all seems partially designed to sorta try to fix the problems, but also not be confrontational or force any hard questions to be asked/answered.
It seems more important to do something, and to be seen doing something, than to get real about what will work, and what won't, and why.
Which of course is impossible because the sex of the person who uses/states an argument is the most substantive part, nothing else matters. Thus dismissing a person's argument based only on their sex is just right.
/s
Calling someone's comment "mansplaining" is the mirror image of asking to see "the man in charge"; it's dismissal based on the sex of the person being addressed.
Here we have a straight white male telling a woman she's wrong about her experience. I don't subscribe to identity politics, but if you do - there's a fishy smell here.
Of course the logical thing is to evaluate all ideas for their merit. But that's not what we're doing here.
Can't we address it like "here's a person telling a person they're wrong about the inferences they're making based on their reported experiences" and attack anything substantive rather than getting hung up on the sex of each person?
I thought that was what we were trying to do here.
Unfortunately that's not how identity politics works. The whole point is that your sexual anatomy can disqualify you from having an opinion - which really seems to be the crux of this whole debacle. If you're a man who agrees with identity politics then it's because you're intelligent and compassionate. But if you disagree.. Then it's time to check your privilege.
I can see how it looks like flamebait, but I was just trying to condense the idea into a sentence. Given the topic, context and follow up explanation - banning me from HN would seem a little zealous. But do what you have to do ;)
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."
Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas.
Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.
But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?
My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing.
It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's noticeable.
It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs to be corrected most in today's tech workplace.
Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.
I keep thinking about orchestras, where simply auditioning performers behind a curtain completely fixes the bias problem.
Of course the trick is that you don't need to see the candidates or talk to them, just listen to their playing. In software, we would need to find some similarly effective way to measure anonymized performance.
In fact, completely aside from fixing gender and racial biases, that's something we could really use just to make good hiring decisions! I don't believe anyone really knows how to make consistently great hires in software.
For a start, the hiring decision could be based on gender-anonymized feedback from the interviewer(s), although that obviously wouldn't fix any underlying biases in the feedback itself.
I believe interviewing.io did something with voice-pitch-adjusting (to make girls sound like guys, or vice-versa) in phone interviews to try to study exactly this effect.
I think their results were confusing and uncertain, but the methodology seemed brilliant and I think should be the gold-standard for tech interviews. If we keep it phone it would remove other subliminal biases (attractiveness, physical disabilities) as an additional benefit.
There appear to be problems with this approach that wouldn't be acceptable to the people driving the diversity effort [0]. To summarize the linked example: ElectronConf tried a gender-blind selection process for speakers, and when they lifted the veil on their selections, discovered they had only selected men to speak, so they canceled the conference.
So hiring unqualified people is not useful. Giving someone the same benefit of the doubt you'd give another person with a different background would be great but is really, really hard in practice.
Other than doing thought experiments to try to correct for biases... It's hard.
One thing, and it's a small thing, is noticing if people in a group seem to have something to say, but seem unable to say it because they won't interrupt/talk over people (or that keeps happening)... Once you notice it, clearing a space for them to actually talk can help.
It requires being tuned in not just to the conversation, but the people in it, which is itself difficult. But I have seen it happen and it can be powerful.
There are a lot of little things like that which can be worked out, and I have no list of them or any magic wand solution.
Basically? Pay some attention to your biases and how you - and those around you - are treating others, especially those who might have internalized negative stereotypes and be struggling with imposter syndrome and all of that. Emotional awareness really helps.
I believe that treating everyone as individuals, rather than as stereotypical groups, is the only way forward. It's the only truly fair approach.
What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit?
If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hiring," instead of the current "diversity-conscious" hiring? You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.
It worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in tech?
You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.
I agree, but how do you estimate their aptitude in an unbiased way? That mostly rules out face-to-face conversations, which is what most companies use.
Aptitude tests? I feel like those have a bad reputation, at least in Bay Area tech companies. Are there good tests we should be using? How do you customize the test to fit your own company? To the extent that "cultural fit" is important for effective teams (and isn't simply a way of excluding women, black people, etc) how do you test for that?
I personally believe including "cultural fit" in hiring decisions is introducing massive amounts of bias, almost by definition.
Aptitude can be figured out by something as simple as SAT or GMAT scores. If universities use those test scores, why shouldn't employers?
Skill level is determined by doing tasks very similar to the ones that will be given at the job. You know, like reversing red / black binary trees in memory. ;p
Mainly because those tests aren't really a good measure of aptitude, and minoriies and women tend to (at least historically, idk about now) score lower. So you would end up with a company full of white, Asian, and Indian guys. (Not making a judgement here just pointing it out)
You could also use the test as a filter mechanism, but I'd just not take the test unless you paid for it as the recruiter. Even then they require months of serious study for most people. It just doesn't work well overall. Take home "work samples" tend to be the preferred method right now and they seem ok as long as they aren't abused.
How about an artificially anonymized process. HR does know, or assumes, your gender from receiving your CV. But from that point onward your identity is anonymous.
For instance, HR creates a throw away email which will be used during the hiring process to coordinate the rest of the tasks. The coding interviews could use one of the many platforms we have for shared/same space coding with an added chat box for talking your way through the problem so to say.
And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender or how the candidate looks.
I think this would allow for a good level of blind testing, but would provide some downsides in the side of cultural fit screening. It's a lot easier to pretend you're not an asshole in asynchronous text-only communications.
>What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement?
A few people didn't have the self control to pull it off, hired a bunch of white dudes, fired a bunch of "diverse" people and basically showed favoritism to people like themselves (i.e. mostly white men) which increased the disparity. After awhile this pattern became obvious and HR departments instituted quantitative policies because doing it poorly in a legally defensible way is better than trying to do it well at a risk of doing it poorly enough to get sued.
Doing blind hiring for software is really, really, hard. It's unsurprising that most interviewing pipelines end up being conversations + some whiteboard coding, because coming up with something standardized, systematic, and as blind to biases as possible is something we really haven't figured out yet.
> If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?)
I don't know if there are studies, but I absolutely know toxic and unfriendly environments exist. I don't know how you'd quantify the effect; if you made up some metric where you looked at how many women COULD be in tech, there's huge lost productivity, but that's not necessarily meaningful.
Even clearing the hiring hurdle is not nearly enough. Hiring someone who your culture treats like crap is not going to help you or them. If the person is actually very competent, but consistently treated as a newbie, their work will be sub-par and they will burn out and leave.
It turns out you need managers who can actually see people, how they interact, and manage them on a personal level. Set up mentoring for those who need it, put people who like to work alone tasks that can be handled alone, people who like to be on big teams on big teams, etc.
There's no way to exhaustively list the things you could do, and that's the point - it's a big, hard job that is a job, that I think SV too often wishes didn't exist.
> But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?
I think the issue is not so much about someone actually being outright blocked at the interview, although that may well happen also, especially if there are substantial numbers of people who think that women need to be accommodated because of fundamental biological differences.
But I would say the issue of bias is more systemic than that, it's more about the pipeline, that there are fewer female candidates at the interview stage because programming has been seen as a male activity. Women are discouraged from getting involved, through their own attitudes, and the attitudes of others projected onto them, and over time that winnows down the crowd of candidates. It's death by a thousand cuts, usually nothing dramatic, just a thousand subconscious decisions and comments.
That is not a problem of the same order, but it is still a problem, and assuming we accept that, the issue is what can be done about it. I don't think it's enough to say that we need programmes only targeted at teenagers or children, there should be something which happens at the end of the pipeline as well, so that company cultures are welcoming, there are female role models, and that it's clear that jobs are available if you buck the trend. The problem is made up of myriad small issues all along the pipeline, so that's also where you need to tackle it. Over time you will get to a point where the small changes are self-reinforcing, and no further action is required.
> The problem is made up of myriad small issues all along the pipeline, so that's also where you need to tackle it.
Yup. The WHOLE pipeline, from how we treat girls who are interested in math to how we figure out who to promote. The system pushes female gendered people out at every step. In High School, College, at Interview, at Work, at Promotion time.
I think though it's a bit disingenuous to say if we just look at the beginning, then it will eventually all sort itself out.
I can promise you as a person coming to grips with a transgender identity, seeing that there are women in upper management at my workplace is really, really important to me. You need to see people further along the path than you to know it's a real option. I needed to see women succeeding in ways I wanted to before I could be comfortable accepting my identity.
I wish I had more transgender women as role models, but cis women make a huge difference, too. I know that me, personally, presenting in a feminine way at the workplace has inspired at least one other person to accept her gender identity, too.
Point is, it's not an abstract thing that affects hypothetical people. It's a concrete thing that very directly affects me, right now. I'm in a fragile place trying to rebuild my identity, and I need people to look up to.
Edit: Either you edited what you wrote or I missed half a paragraph, but either way, we're in agreement :)
> But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?
Quotas are not the answer, period. It's not okay to deny someone a job to correct for some possible, unmeasured, inaccurate judgement call on another person based on a stereotype whether or not that stereotype is accurate across populations. All you're doing is transferring the injustice to another person. What you're doing is preferring certain victims of injustice based on race/gender/whatever, and transferring their injustice to some other race/gender/whatever.
Find another solution. Get creative. But subverting explicit meritocratic hiring to correct for unconfirmed but suspected implicit non-meritocratic hiring is unjust. And stupid.
There is an argument I'm not sure I support that diversity has value on its own - that 5 people with different backgrounds is worth more than 5 with the same background.
But that being said - questioning biases, and correcting them at every point you spot them (not just interviewing!) is vital.
Whether or not it has value on it's own (which I'm not convinced of in coding). It doesn't matter.
Meritocratic hiring has value on its own. The best person getting the job has value on its own. Not including OR discluding someone from a job based on their skin color or genitals has value on its own.
Insisting that having people with different skin color program a piece of software makes that software better is one thing, actually playing god with people's careers on the basis of their skin color or genitals because you, personally, value that more than meritocracy is an irresponsible and highly unethical course of action.
Well, right, but there are biases that are hard to account for; and saying "I know I am probably biased, so I will act on the margins to try to correct that" is in no way irresponsible.
Choosing the best team for the job is always the goal.
And once again, the hard work isn't just the interviewing - it's managing the ongoing workplace environment, day to day.
> Saying "I know I am probably biased, so I will act on the margins to try to correct that" is in no way irresponsible.
Whether this is true depends on your methods of correction. That's what this whole conversation is about. If you don't KNOW you are biased (you don't), but suspect you are, and further, if you are, but don't know the extent to which you are biased or what the outcome would have been if you weren't biased (you don't; shit, the outcome may have even been the same), adding explicit discrimination that you do know is happening is stupid, unethical, and unjust.
Now, if you solution is instead to, say, "I'll do blind resume reviews, score candidates based on those, then do separate scores based on interviews, and compare them after a few dozen hires. If I see a significant and meaningful drop in acceptance rates for ANY group moving from blind resume reviews to in-person interviews, I'll do further review to see if there is good reason to believe the cause is, in fact, discrimination, rather than some benign issue like candidates of specific groups being legitimately worse at things that only come out in interviews. Then, if I don't find clear evidence of non-benign cause, I won't change anything, but if I do, I will attack those specific causes - even if we happen to find that it's actually white men that are being discriminated against, however unintuitive that is." then you'd be fine.
The response to the suspicion of injustice is key, here. Simply assuming your suspicions are correct and attacking perceived symptoms by doing exactly what you're trying to prevent, while qualifying as "trying to correct that," is not okay.
> course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either
Women can be biased too, right?
I think I'm with you on the rest. Fixing early pipeline isn't enough.
We've been going down the path where virtually everyone agrees people ought to be hired and promoted based on merit, yet we have an industry rife with harassment, various -isms, and discrimination.
I'm pretty sure quotas are not the answer, but offering up the tried and failed idea that we should all just stop being bad is rather pathetic, in my opinion. In any case, I think we can expect it to work as well as it ever has.
That would be a meaningful statement if there actually were quota hiring.
Alas, there is mostly lazy hiring. Her point that 98% of the candidates are male? I have a long list of colleges right here on my desk that she could reach out to that have a wider pool.
By all means, hire by quality. And I'm not aware of a single company actually doing quota hiring. It's a silly proposal. But look at a wider range. It's not as hard as the author makes it out to be.[1]
But all that bringing in of candidates doesn't help if your culture is crap. If you let people behave like it's a frat-house, guess what? The few minority people you'll find and hire will leave, because they'll be made to feel unwelcome.
I'm sick of tired of the hiring strawman. The reason there's a scarcity of women and other minorities is that many companies have a culture that's full of toxic sewage.
New hires aren't judged "by character". I wish more companies did, because we'd see less problems. But we're all desperately clinging to the ludicrous idea that reciting some algorithms from memory in front of the whiteboard is the one indicator for job fitness.
If you actually want diversity (and quality!), start right there. Test how people actually behave in a group setting. Have them solve real problems, together with other people.
[1] Of course, if you pay your recruiters by quantity, they'll be happy to let people self-select. And if your company's culture skews exclusive, guess what, minorities won't self select. It's not a problem of the candidate pool, though.
> I'm sick of tired of the hiring strawman. The reason there's a scarcity of women and other minorities is that many companies have a culture that's full of toxic sewage.
Correlation does not imply causation. Is rampant systemic sexism the reason why most oil rig workers are male? Is rampant systemic sexism the reason why 95% of child care teachers are women?
"Correlation does not imply causation". The go-to of the armchair scientist. It doesn't imply there isn't causation, either.
We have plenty of evidence of rampant systemic sexism. We have plenty of evidence that women left the field due to that sexism. We have evidence that the field's composition changed fairly recently (in the late eighties). We have evidence the culture changed around that same time.
If you would like to make your gender-essentialist case, you should at least try to build a model that explains these things, instead of asking empty rhetorical questions.
Most importantly, I suggest staying in the industry we're discussing, as opposed to bringing up straw men outside of it.
We do not have plenty of evidence of rampant systemic sexism. That is not a self-evident truth unless you're bought into the ideology pushing that agenda. Next.
We do. It is exactly what we have - plenty of evidence of systematic sexism in tech, many other industries Ana society as a whole. It is so evident that nothing is left to debate about this fact.
My understanding of quota is the higher ups saying "We can't micromanage every aspect of your hiring process, but we see there are about 20% qualified women for these tech jobs. So as long as you generally hit this amount, pick the best people and that's a generally good way to tell no discrimination was in the mix."
My one complaint with this is the authors tone as it relates to her daughters interest in design. I understand the main focus of diversity in tech is in engineering, but it kind of felt it was implying she wouldn't have a place in tech by going into design.
If the point of this is to fix the problems from the bottom, or the 'pipeline', wouldn't some of that also have to do with breaking down the stigma that programming is all that matters in tech?
Or to flip around your statement: it's a special kind of out-of-touch arrogance to assume that programming is the mecca of career paths. Great way to judge anyone who chooses a different field.
While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their own decisions they'd be engineers.
Poorly written. Also does not contain facts to back up what she see's in the market.
I think this article just shows more that CEO's and upper management lack the facts to properly asses their own hiring pipeline and what may be the actual problem to their hiring diversity.
> Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go.
This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.
This woman is NOT someone we should be listening to when it comes to closing the gender gap in software engineering.
> What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women?
Absolutely mystified.
> This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.
Suddenly, no longer mystified at all.
Not that I particularly care, but this is why I have very little respect for hardcore advocates, they see themselves as completely objective while in reality their bias is obvious. The confidence of youth I guess, but this energy would be better expended on actually doing something towards achieving success rather than complaining that someone hasn't delivered it to your doorstep.
In the medium/long term, this is all the distractions of a childish culture. While we bicker dishonestly among ourselves like self-entitled children, China is quietly working its ass off and will soon eat all of our lunches.
I noted the person sounded angry, was called out for it, so added additional descriptive text. And I'm being disingenuous?
This whole discussion is basically one side accusing the other of being a bully/thief/exploiter, that side asking how so, and the other saying no, prove to me that you're not!
And the accusers wonder why they're not achieving a lot of success in the real world. It is truly something to behold.
>What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people?
Yeah, it's annoying that she's forcing readers to interpret that. I would guess that she means that they weren't able to perform their job responsibilities adequately, and others had to pick up the slack.
Why are you so mad about it? The answer is completely obvious: if her startup is offering below market rates to guys and they join anyway, they are apparently passionate about what the company does or motivated more by the promise of future wealth than day to day salary. These people will naturally have more energy because they believe if they put in 110% they'll get back 200%.
Almost without question the interview process was also eliminating men who did not seem energetic or interested in the company.
But she wanted to hire women. So, the women were hired at market rate or higher. Without question they were willing to make an offer even if they had doubts about the woman's energy or passion or commitment to the company. After all it's hard enough to make an offer if you have standards, let alone make an offer to a woman, so the last thing you want is a technically capable woman being rejected because she seemed a bit tired in the interview. These women may have joined simply because the wages were good, without any particular belief or care about the future of the firm. They will work exactly as much as needed to earn their salary and no more.
There's nothing wrong with such workers, it's a fallacy to believe all employees must be passionate. However if your process is selecting for passion except when the candidate is a woman, then the women will seem low energy in comparison. And their "I don't care, why do you care" attitude will probably rub off on the rest of the team too.
She clarifies in the comments. She says that she didn't mean to imply that this was because they were women. And I think she should have gone into more detail because this is the anecdote that defends the title of her post, and this snippet sounds terrible without context.
But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.
I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What minorities need protection and rebalancing?
We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity?
She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.
Diversity is intersectional and people who actually fight for diversity absolutely talk about and work so that Mexicans, Asians, latinos, the disabled, gay people, trans people, etc, etc are given equal opportunities and treatment in the workplace. There are literally thousands of organizations in just the US advocating for workplace diversity for pretty much any and every minority you can imagine. I suspect the problem is your "we" has little to no contact with minorities and a even poorer understanding of their everyday struggles.
this seems off, based on my observed and experienced reality. the incredible lack of empathy for the neuro-diverse is one of the most shocking failures of the diversity movement.
I disapprove of this response on a number of levels. One of the biggest reasons I avoid these discussions is ironically, the "safe-space" crowd has managed to offend, insult, and ignore me more effectively than almost any other group, and ironically, they do so because of my race and gender [white, male].
Working in tech I work with probably 80% minorities (Indians, Asians, women, gays, Iranians, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Russians, one Venezualen, one Egyptian). There was at least one time I was the only white guy on a team of 9.
Most of those I asked did not feel discriminated against.
So you tell your sob stories all you want, but the reality is most americans couldn't afford $500 in an emergency, and however bad you think skin color X or gender Y has it, that gulf pales in comparison to the problem of class-ism in America (and I don't here any SJWs speaking to that, and so I really have to question the motives at play).
And you're just dishonest to us and yourself if you are insinuating you, or Google, or SJW-crowd cares 1/10th as much about hiring an proportionate number of hispanics/jews/ugly-people/tatooed-people as it does a proportionate number of women.
"'safe-space' crowd has managed to offend, insult, and ignore me"
Poor neglected you. I can only assume that the reason why you are being so incredibly defensive, offended and acting like a child is because the criticism hit home. In the end it doesn't matter of course, changing is coming and you will have to adapt to it.
"Intersectionalism" is a clever technique being leveraged by the very people who have, for decades, studied how media influences groups of people to do and think particular things. It is a weapon crafted to create a larger group out of disparate smaller ones. Whether or not it is justified is an entirely different argument. To say that people struggle at different levels in life strictly because of their skin color or ethnicity is hilarious to me. All people struggle in all kinds of ways.
If one person can't imagine any minoroties needing help, does that eliminate the possibility a need can't exist?
I know that's not what you're saying, but should minorities have to meet the burden to satisfy the majority in society for them to validate what they may be experiencing?
In the working world, diversity is something I look for in leadership first, down to management, down to front lines, instead of working up the ranks. Diversity doesn't seem to exist if it's not leadership downwards.
Gender diversity is real. All progress on diversity is good as long as voice and support is lent to all groups affected by a lack of diversity.
I wonder if the current gender diversity conversation indirectly has appropriated the voice of diversity issues groups like our visible minorities may experience.
She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?
This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.
She could have gone with the stats: in a pool of candidates, you have 3% of very good people. And in that same pool of candidates, you have 90% of men. Given that there is not really any compelling reason that would explain why women would be better or worse than men at engineering, only 0.3% of your candidate pool are very good women. Plus given that pretty much every company out there will try to retain their exceptional women worker (in the name of diversity), exceptional women engineers are a rare sighting in the job market. Hence the diversity issue cannot be solved by forcing people to hire women.
No need to involve personal stories about how teenage girls are more interested in clothes than in assembly programming...
If "subliminal biases" is a reference to "Implicit association" and the IAT-- IAT has lost it's scientific footing. The problem with it is that: Just because people have Implicit Associations doesn't predict that they will act in biased way.
> Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral.
> She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?
> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.
She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.
No I mean it's a subjective view from the boss that doesn't mean anything.
She could have said that they were procrastinating, or could have said that they were consistently tired and whiny about it. Or maybe these particular women did not want to work all their weekends away and complained about it. Or it could mean they weren't cheering at the beer pong event. Who knows?
I'm just saying that 'women I hired lacked energy' is the kind of blanket statement that overgeneralizes and that fans the vicious circle she described as damaging below.
Not in itself. I'll even sometimes step up myself and at some point managed to get my boss to hire the girl who cleaned our offices since she was qualified only hadn't been considered since she was Polish.
The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences (wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.
I'm going to push back on the critique of shaming. It's literally the only consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have. It bears no force of law. It creates no consequence directly except for a little discomfort on the part of the recipient.
Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with?
The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.
Shaming by some groups is a badge of honor: If I'm hated by a certain unpopular political group, that's a real point in my favor in some regions. It's credibility you can't buy. And it doesn't matter if the group which hates me is powerful, as long as they're hated in turn by the people I want credibility with.
The only way shaming hurts me is if the group doing the shaming is powerful among people I care about. Thus shaming is an expression of power, and a use of social force which must come from groups which have power.
HN has a terrible bias towards white dudes and now that it's their privilege that's being questioned - as opposed to that of blur collar workers, conservatives, hillbillies etc - they are in full panic mode. Can't even discuss or take in another POV - just downvote.
Why are you not dealing with the response? The very fact that this story got flagged to page two after 5 hours, with 600+ points and only 300+ comments, kind of shows what's going on.
Generic ideological tangents never lead anywhere interesting and pretty much guarantee contentless flamewars, so please don't take HN threads in such directions.
Could you explain why this post is disapearing from the frontpage as fast as it is? Even though it has the most votes in very little time. (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011458)
Users are flagging it heavily, as they have been flagging most opinion pieces that have appeared during this tidal wave.
People who feel strongly one way or the other typically want to see the articles they agree with stay on the front page and the ones they disagree with get flagged. But from a systemic point of view, it isn't in HN's interest to have the front page dominated by repetitive arguments (and certainly not repetitive flamewars) about the same thing. That's not what the site is for and not why the majority of HN users come here.
I find the stance of HN admins/managers on these type stories incredibly biased. When something is agreeable to the "more X in tech" trope it stays on the front page for hours and gets hundreds of points. When a story that is counter to that trope gains traction it quickly drops off the page and admins/managers are all over the discussion picking and chosing what to suppress. The whole google memo/James Damore thing is a perfect example of this. I don't know if it is general community bias, astroturfing, censorship, or whatever. It is clear that the community has a lot of interest in this and some entity is very eager to minimize the discussion. It's disgusting.
I hear you that it seems that way, but it seems the opposite way to people on the opposite side.
Plenty of articles arguing both sides of this hurricane have spent time on HN's front page, and there have been many thousands of comments for and against. At this point nothing new is emerging. If significant new information appears in the developing news story, that's fine, but until that happens, these threads are effectively dupes and it's not unfair for users to flag them. Repetitive rehashing of the same scorched earth is not why most people come here.
Re HN moderation, the phenomenon behind your perception is that both sides of each ideological divide believe, quite fervently, that we're secretly moderating HN to favor the opposing agenda. I'd love to figure out something we could do about this, but alas there doesn't seem much hope of it. For sure these accusations can't all be right since they say opposite things, and what's remarkable is how similar they are except for the one flipped ideological bit.
I think maybe flagging needs to be reworked into:
- spam
- nsfw content
- breaks the rules
So people can flag "bad" stuff and don't remove topics based on their political/social views instead? Currently the system seems to be broken if this happens.
This way you could easly penalize the users who try to manipulate by flagging "valid" topics.
"Men who reported to me liked and respected me. Men who managed me liked and respected me."
Starting straight off with this makes me wonder if it's a perception she had or if it was the reality. The majority of people to not tell someone if they dont like them or dont respect them.
Most people are entirely capable of reading the general attitude others have towards them. We occasionally make mistakes but a large sample goes a long way ("Jerry respects me" vs "most people at work respect me"). Is there any rational reason to think she's wrong?
The author's post is odd. She's sick of "our" approach to diversity, by which I assume from the headline she means "Google's", although that's not clearly laid out in the text.
Her specific advice is:
> Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.
> Start a mentoring program.
> Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.
These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.
Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt, scars, bruises, etc. Believing that stuff was by far the worst mistake of my life. Strong advice: Don't do that. For all the attempts at gender diversity in STEM fields, f'get about it or, except in very rare cases as in the OP, suffer from pain to the agonies of the damned to serious harm to your life (I did) and worse, maybe death, literally, for the associated female.
I'll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are interested in people and the boys, in things. Sorry, that's just the way it is. They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time. There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that's the fact, Jack. Sorry 'bout that. A really simple argument shows that the difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years. Gads, from some recent research, the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has held for some millions of years.
I tried that: As a college sophomore she told me "Women don't just have to be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career." Well, since she had been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class, with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her way to Summa Cum Laude, PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of which she got, I believed her. Wrong. Dumb.
Later I was on the team that did IBM's artificial intelligence language KnowledgeTool. Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample programs. KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM's PL/I, a huge language.
From one of the world's best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS usage, etc. All of that was easy for her.
So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM/CMS account, use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage. Then I gave her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool. A week later she had a nice, first sample program running. It did what she wanted. I gave her a 30 minute lecture explaining the intended role of rules as knowledge representation, and two weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw.
She was genuinely brilliant. She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble. I kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got better faster than I did until the difference was absurd. The OP mentions GRE scores of 800 -- that's exactly the score I got on the Math GRE. So, I was bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject.
She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it.
A STEM field diversity success? Heck no. She hated the STEM fields, including computing. Her view of the STEM fields was "I'm not that kind of person.". What she wanted was "A career that helps people.", and that mostly meant volunteer work. The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she had no future in business.
To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM. She was miserable, desperately miserable. In a training class, she made the highest score in the class, but she was misera...
The central idea at the core of all the diversity ideology is that everybody can do anything, they just have to try and people who fail to become Google engineers or sports stars only have themselves to blame, or even better, since people are loath to blame themselves, some other dominant group.
Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever dreamed of.
I'm going to illustrate why I think the points brought up by this post have at minimum some level of validity with a toy example, that takes sex out of the equation completely.
Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of individual programming skills, and assigned them randomly into two categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) = E(skill of a candidate in B)
Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst, and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates from B)
There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get the result that A is on average better than B.
In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, given the current ratio of men to women in tech we would expect to see a skill disparity in the average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women.
Edited to add some further points:
1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal experience, but I have seen people make this argument.
2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill] then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero correlation.
3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like google.
People are still trying to make weak links between biology and interest in a subject, as if there are some mysterious laws of nature that link work to body chemistry. There's no overwhelming scientific evidence proving this.
Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the barriers they'll face when they get there.
A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work) could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach parity in tech employment, they would actually have to want to reach parity, and fight for it.
Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the system to account for a perceived natural imbalance.
In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy, and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed.
What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today? Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc. Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!
Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats.
To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers.
Can someone please tell me why a woman would want to work in tech in the first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in tech?
The only biological causation here is that people with penises oppress those without. You can't explain human behavior purely in biological terms because they aren't biological systems, they're social.
If your contention is true here doesn't it refute the forget argument entirely? If only males (the ones with penises) subjugate others then there must be strong sex related differences in people, no.
I was being facetious in my first sentence. Obviously, there is no strong biological discriminator when it comes to oppression. There is a historic precedent for something like that, but no evidence that it's strictly due to biology.
Look at any single factor or category of factors you want, and it never applies to all groups of humans. And this is because it's a social dynamic, and so it changes between social groups. Focusing on biology is bikesheddding.
An interesting point in the post is about the Google interview itself, and how she had to appeal in order to hire candidates who then turned out to each have a big impact. Google calls this the false negative problem but it seems to be a big problem. Google itself has already have shown that GPA and academic credentials do not correlate with job performance.
I worked at Google, and Alan Eustace, Google's most emphatic champion of gender diversity when I worked there, repeatedly emphasized that Google couldn't lower its hiring bar for women candidates, because that would hurt the reputation of women already there
The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2) programs for women in college, to advocate for their studying computer science, and 3) the grace hopper conference for women who are engineers now. All those seem in line with the author's suggestions.
This article (and the letter last week, and similar rhetoric) really feel like they're attacking a strawman to me. I left a while ago, but have things changed that much?
Nope. Affirmative action towards historically marginalized groups is explicitly permitted by the law, and in some instances there's even a duty to do so (for .gov stuff mostly). There are some complexities and details to all this, but generally speaking, affirmative action is legal in the US.
Exactly. The author says we shouldn't check boxes to fill quotas... and then doesn't accuse anyone of doing so. She tosses that strawman out there, getting people to nod their heads in vigorous agreement, but she never makes any claims that any particular company is engaging in the behavior she criticizes.
Of course, the implication is that Google is doing so. But if Google was doing so, they wouldn't have the poor diversity stats they've been accused of having.
You can't have it both ways! Either Google is lowering the bar to achieve satisfactory diversity stats... or they are failing to achieve satisfactory diversity stats.
This seems to be another version of: "the pipeline of potential talent from colleges has very few women, so if we go out of our way to hire extra women, we'll reduce our overall hiring quality. The college pipeline needs to be fixed first."
Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often: hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix the college pipeline in future. If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.
That a big maybe, it's completely unproven. Maybe hiring slightly less qualified people just because of their demographic group will cause all sorts of strange resentments across the board. That seems to be what our current hiring protocols are doing now.
> If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.
Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?
On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.
If you reduce your quality bar to fill a quota for a group, then that group can end up having a lower quality than the majority group, which then works to reinforce bad stereotypes in some of the majority against that minority.
That can then harm those in the minority group who were in fact above the bar and for whom the bar did not need to be lowered.
I'm not against quota systems but they need to be aggressively monitored so you don't get unintended effects.
The most unfortunate thing about this article is how often the author has to say "I'm not a traitor" in different ways.
Regardless of the diversity issue, do we really value a culture where we branding people with opinions in tech as traitors? Sure, she's preempting name calling that may never occur - but that means we're in a culture of discussion where being called a "trator" for expressing an opinion is even a possibility in the first place!
> Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did.
This seems like false reasoning. She is using an intentionally biased sample (the candidate pipeline in a narrow subspecialty of software engineering) to draw conclusions about the larger software engineering candidate pipeline, which actually has a higher representation of women - not high overall - but higher than both her subspecialty and more importantly, higher than the current representation of women at tech companies.
> If we increase the inflow of women into tech education, we will automatically increase diversity in hiring.
This is not enough. She would have us believe that companies are automata that will just adapt to the changing composition of the pipeline with no other action needed. It's an absolution of corporate responsibility for diversity (that perhaps reflects her self interest as a founder/executive). But companies are not automata, they are entities with their own inertial biases, and in the case of large companies, these biases often are often rooted in the communities from which the companies sprang.
Companies, especially major tech companies, are major cultural influencers - their businesses are based in part on the power of their cultural influence, and with that comes disproportionate responsibility to act, especially when society at large has not been successful enough at solving the pipeline problem.
It is not false reasoning. She is relating to her specific experiences. Where I work 80-90% of applications are from men. We now have 2 women on our team but it is still male dominated. The women are there because they were best we could find when we was hiring just like everyone else we have employed. They have earned it with their knowledge and skill.
Employing for any other reason will likely demoralise the team because they will likely under perform. They will likely under perform because instead of finding the best person, you find the best person based on a subset of arbitrary equality rules.
There is no reason why 50% of tech jobs cannot go to women. The main barrier we come across is there aren't enough skilled women applying. I think the author hit the nail on the head. It reflects my experiences.
You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they can lead the way on equality. To have equality for equalities sake. It's wrong. Where there are descrepancies between genders we should ask why they exist.
Take child care, the majority of people in childcare are women. Should we be passing over women with years of experience and excellent qualifications to bump the number of men in the industry?
I would love to see a few guys at my kids nursery. However they should be there because they were the best for job. I would pull my kid out of the nursery if they passed over better candidates to fix this gender ratio. I want the best outcome for my children.
The same is true with business. Merit is the measure that matters. More women in tech will lead to more meriting jobs in the industry, which in turn will lead to the male/female ratio improving.
> You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they can lead the way on equality.
That is absolutely not what I said. I'm saying tech companies should take active measures to counter the historical bias against qualified under-represented candidates, while simultaneously engaging in corporate efforts to influence the pipeline to produce more qualified candidates from those under-represented groups. If you don't think that such a historical bias against qualified female candidates exists at all stages of the candidate pipeline, from primary school through to job interviews, then we disagree on the basic assumptions.
The author is insisting that the sorts of efforts I described should not be the responsibility of corporations, but rather should be the result of virtuous charitable actions of individuals volunteering their time. This is like arguing that corporations should do no charitable giving to fight hunger, or fund environmental initiatives, and it should be left solely to charitable individuals to feed the hungry or advocate for a cleaner environment (I realize there are significant number of people who also hold that belief).
Fighting these sorts of large complex problems takes a lot of resources coordinated and guided by a set of values. Today, for better or for worse, those things lie in the hands of corporations. We could argue about whether that should be the case (i.e. perhaps government should be the responsible party), but it is manifestly the case today.
One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues.
The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out.
I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem" people want to point to as a source of the gender gap in hiring will become our primary issue when we first iron out the issues with the atrittion and harassment we see for women in the workplace.
As for gender essentialism, I think this woman has every right to her opinion and I support her efforts, but I think she's approaching the problem wrong. She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter (who has almost certainly had positive modeling for a lot of other roles) isn't interested.
>She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter... isn't interested.
And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?
So you spend your days working arbitrary logic puzzles in a gross language like Python? I know I'd have never gotten into this field.
It's so easy to say, "Gosh this confirms our stereotypes!" But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to "women are worse at programming and math."
Honestly, I would prefer if my days were spent doing logic puzzles. Most of it is doing tedious uninteresting coding tasks, i.e. code that takes no insight nor provides any intellectual stimulation. But the logic puzzles are what initially drew me in. The "sexy" stuff in software engineering is built on a boat load of unsexy behind the scenes. It's easy to be mislead.
>But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to...
True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles it could be torture. Interest is related to aptitude in that those that are interested have the inherent motivation to get good at it. I strongly believe that interest is highly correlated with aptitude. That doesn't mean that those uninterested in logic puzzles can't hack it, its just that they have to be very highly motivated to learn. I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.
> True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles
Here I am, not that type until my late 30s. I've been programming or trying to since I was 5ish. And most folks who talk to, work with, or have worked for me regard my technical skills quite highly.
If all you want is an endless stream of puzzles with no responsibility or connection to reality, be a professional video gamer. The Minecraft folks, for example.
I tried it for awhile, but I find the life of video gaming without any real responsibility pretty empty.
> I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.
Logic puzzles in a language founded on principle of anti-intellectualism is not software engineering.
Maybe if they made things of issuing tests that's a better idea.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadIt's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing.
The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.
Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?
Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)
EDIT: Also she recommends these at the bottom of her piece:
""" Start a mentoring program.
If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized.
Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.
Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective. """
...the mentoring program could be for girls and young women, but it could also be for women already on the payroll. The rest of the recommendation are for after hiring has already taken place.
Likely it's interesting because she's a coder, a founder, a hiring manager, and a woman. That gives her a lot of credibility in one person that is fairly unique. I suppose, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an argument from authority. But people do make decisions that way.
It's not a novel idea, but the reality is that someone who is convinced all men are out to discriminate against women is more likely to listen to her than to a man writing the same post.
So if for nothing at all, her voice matters in that it strengthens the argument that pipeline is a big part of the problem. It is obvious to a lot of people in this crowd but might not be to many, many others.
Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same
I see this trope trotted out again and again. Where exactly are we drawing the line between opportunity and outcome? When a 22 year old (woman or otherwise) gets hired at google that's no more an outcome than an opportunity. It's not like they're going to be sitting on their deathbed thinking of the way their life turned out realizing it was all set in stone at 22. More likely they're going to work for google for a few years, maybe leave to start a new business, get poached by a competitor or make a run at climbing the google ladder but what is that 22 year old going to be thinking later on in their career, say ten years down the line? Probably something like "I'm glad I got the opportunity to work at Google."
Think kids that don't have role models of their gender/ethnicity. Think kids that are placed in gendered roles without respect for their own interests ("oh you're a buy, let me get you the trucks and computer programing skills. I'll get your sister the art books instead").
It extends to school programs, funding, etc. and is certainly a complex issue. It is more about giving people similar access and motivation to enter careers/areas of study/careers.
I agree that many events (hiring, etc.) can be seen as outcome or opportunity, it's about where you draw the line. The phrase comes up because the common conversation about diversity is focused on 50-50 splits in hires and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.
I'm not sure that's true.
>and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.
Except it's not dangerous at all? What I specifically don't like about this article and your focus on outcome vs. opportunity is that it draws this bright line where none exists. The writer in this article basically lays out that everyone in the pipeline right up until her has a role in reducing gender bias. For example when she says: "I beg you to expend your energy motivating and mentoring young women at the crucial stages of making decisions about a tech education" she makes it clear that she doesn't think she's at a crucial stage. But she is. She admits to having failed to produce a diverse workforce at her startup but rather than really admit it as just that, a failure, she basically says that it's not her fault because all these other people aren't making it easy for her. It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.
Apologies then, I am not trying to focus on a line. It is constant effort to seek, identify and pursue opportunities. I agree that "Outcome vs opportunity" is a nuanced topic and one that will take forever if we try to draw lines.
> It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.
Agreed. But "hire some damn women" is the very thing she set out to do and then realized that it is much easier said than done when you don't have many women applying.
It's funny, because I am an ethnic minority. I mean that almost literally; outside of my family I have met exactly one person of my same ethnicity. If I had been waiting for a role model I would still be waiting. So my lived experience means I am pretty skeptical of the need for one's role model to match one's skin colour (or anything else).
Incase it matters my role models were Avon and Scotty.
As time has passed and I've encountered more people from all walks of life, I have started to see that for some people, it is _really_ important to see someone "like them" in a role they never thought they could fill.
How is that fair for boys/men if they're excluded from mentoring opportunities (eg in a company that hires them) simply because they're male.
This is "fine" if your objective is "hire more women". As someone who supports equality of opportunity I don't see how compounding more sexism will ever lead to less sexism.
In the UK, overall, young men get poorer school results, are less represented at university, receive lower wages than women (up to the ages when people choose to start families) ... how does this sort of sexist mentoring policy fit in here? Is it really enough to say "well if we look only at this industry segment"?
What's wrong with equality?
The answer could be "it works, but there's not enough of it" I guess.
I mostly brought it up because tptacek wrote, "It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline..." and I thought the recommendations for helping already-in-engineering women pointed to a more complex position. Though perhaps that position wasn't communicated, at least not clearly enough.
That makes that part of the argument in her post a kind of straw man.
You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.
As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".
The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.
Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.
tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.
Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.
I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.
> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.
Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".
I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.
Unless you take all candidates, you are back to reducing the pool to a more manageable size, presumably using classic interview techniques.
And unless the mentors are biased, this still doesn't change the fact that your hires as a population will be similar to the applicants.
Will they? What if women stay in their roles longer than men? Then, you would less often be replacing women.
If men more often apply to new jobs, that could explain why the candidate ratio is more skewed than the ratio of actual workers.
> But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there.
I mean, if men are more often "candidates" for moving between jobs, then it would, right?
If that were true, then an employer wanting a more loyal or longer term employee might seek out more women.
[1] I have no evidence for any of this.
Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo, the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.
To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term) side of this debate, I'm left assuming she didn't see that occur. But she could also clear that up easily.
Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard not to taint them.
If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.
† 99% of what I write isn't well-written either, in case this sounds like a jab at the author, who I am not familiar with.
Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.
One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.
1. I went to LinkedIn
2. I searched for "Silverlabs"
3. I found the page for their company
4. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have LinkedIn profiles"
5. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.
I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this "research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.
https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186026-decoding-femi...
"But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team."
What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women unqualified or otherwise incapable of doing the work? If so, why not say so explicitly? Because otherwise, in the context of startups I would be inclined to interpret that sentence as meaning "they weren't willing to work 80 hour weeks like the rest of our team so we fired them".
I don't think it's obvious at all. That an experienced engineer or manager can correctly evaluate a software engineer is one of the ground assumptions that runs through our industry and its thinkpieces. (Though it is borne out by the studies that, e.g., even Google has done).
> If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.
This is a significant point: Google's hiring process is legendarily bad. While I would work for them (I think their ethics are solid, their engineering is excellent, their benefits suitable for adults, and reports of internal culture are generally good - a rare combination), the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing. I just don't have enough of a taste for doing an independent study of my upper division algorithms class to have aggressively tried to get hired there.
It's also evidence, I think, that broken hiring processes do not inherently break a company - or at least a sufficiently profitable one.
Also, it's possible that the hiring processes were broken in her chain, but not everywhere. Her experience doesn't seem to align with what either Google or Damore say (he felt all his female coworkers were equally capable and deserved to be there).
> Google's hiring process is legendarily bad ... the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing
How does having a high standard implicate any other hiring practices? "Bad" in one sense doesn't mean "bad" everywhere, and certainly "bad" for you doesn't mean "bad" for everyone. All that said -- I personally don't wish to go through an interview in which I'm grilled in detail on all the algorithms I reviewed in college. Hence why I don't work at Google.
This is vastly under-acknowledged. Implicit biases affect even the most well-intentioned of us, which then persistently and negatively impact the targets of our biases (see the movie Get Out for an exaggerated, but entertaining take on this).
For an "out-group" in any particular environ, their very status as a historical out-group itself fuels the perceptions that perpetuate their disenfranchisement.
So, the remedy to this has not been to psychoanalyze every hiring manager in an attempt to navigate these murky, subjective waters; but to set objective goals that seek to counter the equally objective under-representation manifestations that we can actually measure.
"We [UrbanAMA] try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. I’m now back to being the only woman on the (tech) team."
I'm not sure what it says about the situation that 98% of the candidate pool is male or that she had to fire specifically the women for draining energy.
"Yes, we invest in mentoring and training all our team members and we did with the women we hired as well. We definitely found a few men and women who were either unwilling or unable to take on the role. We did end up losing the men who didn’t as well. On that part, it wasn’t a gender thing really — sorry that the post made it sound like that. Basically we had fewer women to begin with. And as luck would have it, these women did not end up having the desire to do what it takes."
https://medium.com/@hellovidya/yes-we-invest-in-mentoring-an...
Wow, that sounds terribly unfortunate! Did this happen while she worked at Google? Or while working at her startup? What are the mechanisms behind this? Do the diversity programs at Google have lower hiring standards than the normal hiring track?
(In case it's not clear, my point is that she appears to be describing a hypothetical scenario. The claim that diversity programs result in hiring unqualified women is a very strong claim (not even one that James Damore makes in his memo), and needs to be backed by actual evidence.)
> there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.
...it's funny how you point to two quite exceptional people as the standard for women to meet.
I've learned to be especially leery of arguments that sound reasonable and logical, but lack something concrete to prop them up. The post says her company paid premium salaries -- despite allegedly not being able to afford market salaries -- to women who then "lacked the energy to put us into overdrive" and "were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team".
Even if I were to disregard that the post seems to be basing its argument on a single company's set of anecdotes, I would still need an explanation of just what the heck is meant by "energy to put us into overdrive" and how you "drain" that energy from the rest of the team.
Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.
If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.
My average student is a 14-year-old black female who wants to learn web dev. It should go without saying, I've not seen even a hint of ability difference based on gender or race. We cover JS as well as HTML/CSS -- this is not a design class, but a real development class where kids are writing native markup and code.
The program is free and held at the public library. All students are there because they want to learn. I thought some might come due to parental pressure, but I haven't seen that.
It's exhausting and rewarding.
Please do not mislabel opinion as fact. You do both yourself and the world a disservice.
I have been paid very good money (north of USD 85000 in Norther Europe) for stuff that was mostly so simple I could easily taught a bright and reliable 16 y.o. to do it. (I did at a similar job.)
I feel very strongly that noone should proclaim opinion as a fact.
I wished more of these conversations around diversity were focused on these types of points, I call these "the small things". Talking about "college pipe lines" and "biological differences" are "the big things" and they make perfect red herrings for arguments.
Indeed if we want to talk about fitness for a job I would expect a major part of that conversation to be getting a fairly good sense of what is it exactly the job entails skills wise...I have a computer science degree (with a minor in math) and an MBA but I spend most of my days working on things that absolutely don't require that level of education. Education and level of skills is definitely important and should not be underestimated but we also need to be honest and realistic about what it takes to do most jobs.
One thing that could potentially help I can think of is encouraging hiring of women in more junior roles (and I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position). If we're not seeing qualified female senior level candidates it could be because they're not getting opportunities to learn those skills in lower level positions. I know from experience it can be hard to make room in a team for a junior employee, but it's something that the industry needs to get better at doing if we want people to eventually have the skills to fill those senior levels roles.
The word "shove" aside, I wish more companies would hire senior people for junior roles if they want them. One of the big problems with the American (and I presume Western) job market is the unwillingness to train people unless they're straight out of college. It seems that moms (and less often, dads) who take time off to raise the young ones would benefit from a new approach.
Of course, the employer and employee need to be on the same page about day-to-day duties, expected career growth, and so on. But that seems like a solvable problem.
No worries. I understood your meaning. I also meant that. I meant that hiring managers, in my experience, are more likely to give an outright "no" to an underqualified senior person than to offer them a junior role.
If the person took some time off, decided to switch industries, decided to switch specialties, or just figured out they were in a rut, giving them a junior role and letting them work their way back into an expert role should be a consideration.
"You'll hire me for a job I can't immediately do, and I'll treat growing into my job as the number one priority".
With the job market as it is, it's unrealistic to expect people to hire candidates who can't help lighten the load within a week or two of their start date.
I wish there was a less-risky way to 'try out' candidates. Someone I know works in boutique finance and whenever they bring on someone at a junior level, they're on a 60 day probation and the partners decide whether or not to retain them.
I think it's easier for them to do it because their applicant pool / candidates are predominantly young, white/asian, male, and high-achieving. They've never been sued by a candidate they've let go and they've found some real 'diamonds in the rough'.
I can't imagine that they could say the same if they let go of 40 mothers with children. But it does highlight a solution path - make it less risky for companies to evaluate candidates although I don't know how to do that without eroding worker protections.
You mention wage gaps but if the pool of qualified engineers is mostly men and Google (and other tech companies) want to hire women, it seems that salaries for women should be far, far higher than it is for men. The fact that they are close to equal might be part of the problem.
I suppose individual women are free to negotiate a higher salary.
Would a US court disallow this? It doesn't seem to violate the spirit of affirmative action, or the letter of equality laws.
Is this actually occurring at Google due to the existence of their diversity programs? If so, that is quite a strong claim and needs to be backed by evidence. But she doesn't appear to be actually making that claim.
> Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs.
Isn't this literally what Google's diversity programs do? The ones that James Damore advocates eliminating? I thought they were internship programs designed to encourage more minority groups to get into computer science?
For example:
BOLD - https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html
CSSI - https://edu.google.com/resources/programs/computer-science-s...
Engineering Practicum - https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/engineerin...
Bingo, Google could train a bunch of SWEs no problemo, but they'd rather externalize that cost. I figure most positions wouldn't require much more than 6 months of on-the-job training.
A young woman could hear a lot about how tech is a rough place to work and decide to do something else. So the various parts of the pipeline do affect on another.
How much is an empirical question, I suppose.
We try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive.
A lot gets muddied in these few lines. One way to read this: as a startup, we usually pay below-market salaries. But we really wanted some experienced women on the team, so we offered them market salaries. They weren't ready to sign on to 60-70 hour weeks like the men on our team. So we let them go.
With the salty language, I gather the real intent of this blog post was to ride the tails of the Google memo backlash and draw attention to her startup. And maybe find some more male engineers to join her startup at below-market salaries.
Here's the problem : the candidate pool consists of 90% men and 10% women so the gender ratio at companies tends to represent that ratio. How do you propose we fix this to reach a healthier balance of something close to 50-50 without encouraging more women to join tech?
In other words, aiming for 50-50 when the candidate pool is 90-10 is suboptimal. So I agree that work needs to be done at all stages of the pipeline, but as the author suggests, the way to fix this issue is to encourage more women to join tech at the earlier stages. How is this a cop-out?
If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally.
When your company says "the goal is to match the pipeline" yet still has an "aggressive diversity programme", what they mean is, "we know what we have to say to avoid legal trouble but we want to hire as many women as possible, and will find as many ways to bend the rules to do that as possible".
But unless that "aggressive programme" is illegally benefiting women with something concrete, like more pay, easier interviews or special privileges unavailable to men, it's like that the programme will be focused on trying to attract women into the profession who aren't already developers. So it'd make no difference to this hypothetical new college grad.
And if it did, then why would you want an employee whose primary reason for joining your startup over a competitor was the existence of a diversity programme? They'll just seem low energy compared to the men who joined because they love online discussions or whatever it is your firm does. Better pass and keep looking.
You still have to make sure you're doing that in an unbiased way. For example, if you ask interviewers to determine if a candidate is a good "cultural fit," you might accidentally end up with 95/5 men instead of 90/10.
Some kind of diversity program to make sure you're not undershooting the diversity of your job applicants is an absolute minimum requirement, I'd say.
Should you aim to overshoot? Maybe! That's a discussion worth having.
Statistically, you're correct. But there's a lot more of a subjective element to hiring than matching skills to requirements. One of the replies to your comment mentions "culture fit", for example.
The kernel is what comes before the anecdote, which is just that - an anecdote. One would be hard pressed to view it as an argument for anything.
Hence most startups avoid them, and only large companies have the means to absorb them in large numbers. The only good right after school engineers I have worked with, had been the types that had started coding at 15. Some of them didn't even go to college, but had at least 5-8 years of practical experience before getting to the point on being hirable to the big cos...
On one hand you are right that CS degree is not required, on the other hand your argument just ignores the fact that it takes years to become decent and at least 5 to 10 years of practice to become really good. Google (and any other large company) is a business at the end of the day.
Then you might have less geeky people and companies, but the overall sentiment that I get is that who does "computers" are geeks, nerds, people with glasses and so on.
Being a male myself, I saw how rare are geeky-type of girls, and usually how many males usually one gets attention from(lots!). It's not that there aren't many, there are many geeky girls, but the pool, in comparison to men, is big. Maybe it's just my eye, but at least I saw how much lonely man there is due to this fact, they lookout for a geek girl, see how much competition there is, much more to the attractive ones and then end up alone. 4chan is an example of this.
And this is mostly regarding to culture. The stuff we watch, the stuff our parents talk with us, it has too many factors. In the end, you are a geek. Or you are something else.
So I think that either tech has to look less geeky(how to?). Now that I've grown up, I'm less interested in being a geek, I've started to look up to fashion and a range of other things which I didn't when I was younger, but it was when I was younger that I've picked my profession and many other do.
I've started to discover that there was a lot of stuff I was missing out, I've never had money to buy clothes for myself, now that I do, I pay attention to what people wear, how to they act and so on. I talk to my wife and she teaches me many things. As time passes, I actually distance myself from the prototype of people who I work with.
To my very small knowledge of lawyers, they behave very very differently from IT people in general. Some people might be more attracted to becoming one, for example. It feels more mainstream. I think that when we make this kind of choice, it's more like we want to fit in. Nowadays, after years of working experience, I think that even me, I would pick something else, even though I love coding, studying new programming languages and so on, but I could as well be as productive somewhere else, maybe being a lawyer or a doctor, why not?
As a software dev you are also expected some kind of weird labour, you are always building, your leadership capabilities aren't so well tested. For many, they would even like if you would just code. I don't like the industry so much anymore. I feel that the industry enjoys the way that it breeds very smart people which would rather be given orders(or pseudo-orders, in a SCRUM cycle or whatever agile methodology) versus actually taking up responsibility from very early on your career.
Coming back to my argument, people when deciding on what to do on their life, they chose something which they want to belong, generally. Girls because of their experience and what they get bombarded by media end up choosing different stuff. There are rare cases though.
Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal.
In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's good. But they are often weird, rude, or creepy (still 40 and shopping at Hot Topic?). They're usually taking orders rather than giving them. And they're often squirreled away in some lab instead of being part of the story itself. I'm concerned the message for women (and men for that matter) is "Tech is great... if you're into dressing up like a wizard and sitting in a cubical. You do you (over there)!"
I don't watch that much TV, but Abby (sp?) from NCIS springs to mind, slightly quirky, but v. intelligent, commanding.
The equivalent character in Alias, f.e., was (in early series at least) a one-dimensional dork.
Basically anyone in Big Bang Theory, Bones (herself). They're certainly STEM, but maybe not "tech" depending on what people mean by that.
I don't necessarily think the equivalent male characters are treated comparably well, for what it's worth. But if you want to encourage teenage girls to look at tech, showing them that it's also for normal people would help a lot.
I will say that Silicon Valley does a decent job subverting the trend with a handful of minor female characters.
I've only worked one job in science, I wouldn't describe the 400 or so people as "normal" as a population: geeky and nerdy, weird a wide variance, but not what I'd expect 999/1000 to be enamoured with.
Perhaps the lack of social skills, and friends, of a good portion of that population (myself included) was an aberration and didn't represent people who prosper in STEM roles in general.
I think this is already happening. It is 'cool' to do software (and be geeky in general - look at the popularity of The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones). The problem is that it take time for those changes to trickle up.
That's really true of any job where a degree isn't a regulatory requirement.
I think the problem with Google's hiring is less that they are hiring mostly people with degrees and more that the hiring process is a hyper competitive, stressful, multi-week long gauntlet.
If you've paid any attention at all to the conversation around this (or any other diversity issue), you'd know that _tons_ of people care about this. There are multitudes out there who are unable to rebut an argument objectively and have to fall back on "all we have here is men talking about women's issues" or "no women in tech agrees with this viewpoint: that should tell you something".
For anyone intelligent enough to consider an argument on its merits, this example isn't useful, but unfortunately this type of conversation is always dominated by those who aren't.
The real copout is is saying that much of software engineering does not require a degree. That might be true in a very narrow sense as far as computer science degrees go. But people still need education and degree or certification programs. We don't need a lowering of standards or removal of standards that is the copout.
Providing anecdotal evidence as a means for support is counter productive...
Since you, tptacek, are well known here on HN for your hiring experience, both at Matasano and Starfighter, I'd be extremely curious to know your experience with regard to that and gender. How many men vs how many women completed the crypto challenges? What about people you worked with and placed at Starfighter?
I would say that this woman's credentials, personal experience with hiring at Google and hiring at her startup, and her (seeming) non-idealogical leanings lends weight to her words.
I wouldn't say she writes perfectly but at least well enough that I could see her frustrations, and more importantly, understand why hiring quotas may create vicious cycles.
Finally, to say "who cares?" shuts down a potentially-enlightening discussion before it can even occur. I'm all for dismissing vitriol spewed by randos, but this post was written by someone with good intentions, a clear mind, and above all, feelings that she feels are valid.
Implying she has nothing worth hearing on this subject is rather unkind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967445
It is mathematical and hard to follow. It's very formal.
If you follow the program of study outlined in the above comment you will have an extra tool to decide which articles make the world a worse place. (I realize that not everyone will be able to follow my comment.)
This person has far more credibility than you do, having worked on the hiring pipeline directly. Don't lecture outside your field of expertise.
* the rest of STEM,
* the law,
* medicine,
* pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c)
... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.
Add to that the fact that most software jobs are far more work/life flexible than other professions (roll in late, work from home, wear whatever, weekly+ deliverable cadence, &c).
It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.
- the rest of STEM,
- the law,
- medicine,
- pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c)
... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.
Agree, this is reason for concern.
It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.
Here's were we disagree.
I think there are lots of things to be done but if this was true then there should be a massive opportunity for whatever company moved first and hired all those qualified candidates that others shun.
I don't think « preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women » does that.
In western culture, my experience has been: When you tell some acquaintance you're a software developer, engineer etc., they are almost instantly bored.
Contrast that with
* Science - The flair of knowledge, curiosity, discovery and a general sense of meaning
* the law - Status and money
* Medicine - Making a real difference in peoples lives, also extremely prestigous
Maybe men are just less capable of resisting the urge to tinker in order to achieve more respected/better payed jobs?
It bears to be repeated: This is western culture valuation, might be different in other cultures, which also might result in a different distribution.
I think telling someone that you're a software engineer isn't the best way to make it sound exciting and high status. Tell people what the software does, or what the company does. Saying "I'm a software engineer" is like saying "I'm a screwdriver operator" rather than "I'm an aviation maintenance technician". Nobody cares about the nitty-gritty details of how exactly you get your work done.
not the case
Law
At 35%, women practice law at about double the rate they do of more masculine occupations like engineering, while law practice involves abstract reasoning the degree of "social reasoning" is higher than engineering, thus more women I suppose.
medicine,
particularly the more caretaking functions of medicine
accounting
The work of an accountant and a mechanical engineer, or an information security analyst are hardly comparable, not in a hierarchical way necessarily, they just have totally different goals and methods.
Look at the actual data, it fits Damore's thesis to a T. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
There is a very obvious gradient from people and nurturing oriented fields to abstract, spatial, and mechanical fields.
Women like working with people and caretaking, and are good at these things.
Men like working with things, and abstract and spatial visualization, and are good at these things.
Do you think society would materially improve if we swapped the sex ratio kindergarten teachers with that of engineers?
Kindergarten 97.5% women.
Engineers 85% men.
Are you serious? An ex-Google hiring manager shares her experience hiring software engineers, and you conclude the only contribution this post makes is that "she's a woman". Frankly it's impressive how much of her perspective you ignored to focus on her status as a woman and a mother.
I think you're underestimating the importance of one of her main points, specifically the fact that lowering the bar for diversity hires only perpetuates negative stereotypes about those groups and breeds resentment in all the others. It's increasing the divide rather than doing the opposite.
Yes we should. But if we have College intermediate Computer Science courses with 85% men (which was my anecdotal experience at a large University) this is clearly a massive (if not the largest) bottle neck and should be focused on.
Rhetoric like this is toxic and erodes the presumption of competence people should have in their colleagues. I know great developers of every gender, but it's always only the women that have to justify that their presence isn't the result of some "diversity charity".
Wow, this is extremely dismissive and ignorant to what this woman has written. Why?
Since she is a women in tech, the very thing which we don't have enough of and we so desperately want to have more, perhaps we should give her voice a little bit more respect and listen a bit further into what she thinks can help to fix the problem.
From the article:
>>Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.
>>Start a mentoring program.
>>If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized.
>>Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.
>>Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective.
Which part of her list of suggestions is a cop-out?
>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline
I fail to see how any reading of the article will give you that impression.
I'm female. When I was 7/8 years old I literally cried about having to do multiplication and addition flash cards. I was failing math. My dad said "Listen, you're not going to be a mathematician, but you have to learn multiplication!" Hated hated hated it.
Things started to turn around in middle school. My teachers kept pushing me, I kept taking math, I started to enjoy it. By 16 I was cross-registering at a local community college to take calculus and was in differential equations my senior year. I have a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in software engineering.
The preferences of seven year olds are almost meaningless, and their career aspirations are definitely meaningless. When I was seven I wanted to be either a baker or a manicurist or president of the United States. I haven't been interested in the culinary arts, cosmetology, or politics since. My sister was an avid artist, now she's an actuary who doesn't even do art as a hobby.
Almost every parent (especially parents of mixed-gendered children) I have this discussion with ends up saying something along the lines of "Just wait until you have kids -- boys and girls are super different and my son likes trucks and machines and my daughter likes dolls!" Yeah, but what does that have to do with which classes they enjoy in middle school or high school? I don't know. Maybe I will change my mind, but this extrapolation of early childhood preferences into adulthood career paths bugs the heck out of me.
The big companies only recruit juniors out of universities, usually the well known ones. An aspiring programmers will never get an interview without a degree.
Once inside the company, you will realize that virtually everyone has a degree. People who don't have a degree are discriminated during every step in the interview pipeline.
We have finite resources to devote to this problem. Prioritizing them to the interventions that work is not merely acceptable, but praiseworthy and necessary.
> virtually none ... requires a college degree in the first place
Absolutely, but the pipeline leaks start far before college.
The key point of Damore's memo was that the average members of different groups have different interests and strengths.
This is born out not just in observational studies of the labor market, but also from surveys, and performing personality profiles.
What's with the obsession with with square pegs in round holes, but only for certain classes of squares?
If most people are doing things they have at least some interest in, isn't that a success? Why are so many people running around with their hair on fire, trying to solve a non-existent problem?
She's 100% correct about the fact that it's too late to make a difference in industry when you're only dealing with women who just graduated from college. You have to start earlier and teach young girls that technical skills are necessary. Even if they don't like technical subject matter, they should be made to learn it. It's no longer an option.
Aiding men in industry who want to help is crucial. I see a lot of rhetoric online about how all men in tech are a problem and that they should be excluded from this whole process. "Men can't speak for women." If you believe that, you're contributing to the problem. Perhaps men can't speak for women, but they can at least speak with them.
Patience will be required because this situation isn't going to be solved overnight, or even in 10 years. It'll take a generation of concerted effort to really make a difference.
I think this depends on what "genuine" refers to in this sentence. Many issues have loud and/or shrill advocates on any or all sides, but that has nothing to do with the actual merits of any side. Anyone who is seriously interested in arriving at the best estimates of truth or utility available should disregard whether or not advocates are shrill and simply focus on facts.
If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.
Serious people are people willing to put their time and/or money into a cause. All power to these people but they are a fraction of the critical mass needed in any social campaign.
Genuine people are people who are sympathetic and have good intentions. They will do / not do what is helpful to the cause but it's not on of their top X priorities. Every movement needs lots and lots of these people. But these people will flee if a situation becomes toxic or they feel like they have more to lose than they can risk.
For example, few "genuine" men would ever write the article written by the OP, which essentially says, it's a pipeline problem. Why? Because even if they could prove with hard data that the biggest factor is the lack of female applicants they would still get torched by the ideologues. So the safe choice is not to engage, give a little extra consideration to the few female applicants received, and move on with your day.
It seems more important to do something, and to be seen doing something, than to get real about what will work, and what won't, and why.
The software engineer who is rewarded for putting out the fires, when in reality they are a serial arsonist...
Modern progressivism (https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberal...) ...
So on and so forth...
No one wants to put in the real, hard work and society continues to reward the facade.
The irony here is tptacek (a man) is out to explain why this woman is wrong - in order to help women.
/s
Calling someone's comment "mansplaining" is the mirror image of asking to see "the man in charge"; it's dismissal based on the sex of the person being addressed.
Of course the logical thing is to evaluate all ideas for their merit. But that's not what we're doing here.
I thought that was what we were trying to do here.
But really, I'd be interested in how many women tptacek hires, and how he cultivated such a talent pool.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009988 and marked it off-topic.
Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas.
Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.
But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?
My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing.
It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's noticeable.
It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs to be corrected most in today's tech workplace.
Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.
Author would suggest lowering the bar [for women] would only reinforce such stereotypes, do you agree or disagree?
Of course the trick is that you don't need to see the candidates or talk to them, just listen to their playing. In software, we would need to find some similarly effective way to measure anonymized performance.
In fact, completely aside from fixing gender and racial biases, that's something we could really use just to make good hiring decisions! I don't believe anyone really knows how to make consistently great hires in software.
For a start, the hiring decision could be based on gender-anonymized feedback from the interviewer(s), although that obviously wouldn't fix any underlying biases in the feedback itself.
I think their results were confusing and uncertain, but the methodology seemed brilliant and I think should be the gold-standard for tech interviews. If we keep it phone it would remove other subliminal biases (attractiveness, physical disabilities) as an additional benefit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Other than doing thought experiments to try to correct for biases... It's hard.
One thing, and it's a small thing, is noticing if people in a group seem to have something to say, but seem unable to say it because they won't interrupt/talk over people (or that keeps happening)... Once you notice it, clearing a space for them to actually talk can help.
It requires being tuned in not just to the conversation, but the people in it, which is itself difficult. But I have seen it happen and it can be powerful.
There are a lot of little things like that which can be worked out, and I have no list of them or any magic wand solution.
Basically? Pay some attention to your biases and how you - and those around you - are treating others, especially those who might have internalized negative stereotypes and be struggling with imposter syndrome and all of that. Emotional awareness really helps.
What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit?
If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hiring," instead of the current "diversity-conscious" hiring? You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.
It worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in tech?
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....
I agree, but how do you estimate their aptitude in an unbiased way? That mostly rules out face-to-face conversations, which is what most companies use.
Aptitude tests? I feel like those have a bad reputation, at least in Bay Area tech companies. Are there good tests we should be using? How do you customize the test to fit your own company? To the extent that "cultural fit" is important for effective teams (and isn't simply a way of excluding women, black people, etc) how do you test for that?
Aptitude can be figured out by something as simple as SAT or GMAT scores. If universities use those test scores, why shouldn't employers?
Skill level is determined by doing tasks very similar to the ones that will be given at the job. You know, like reversing red / black binary trees in memory. ;p
You could also use the test as a filter mechanism, but I'd just not take the test unless you paid for it as the recruiter. Even then they require months of serious study for most people. It just doesn't work well overall. Take home "work samples" tend to be the preferred method right now and they seem ok as long as they aren't abused.
For instance, HR creates a throw away email which will be used during the hiring process to coordinate the rest of the tasks. The coding interviews could use one of the many platforms we have for shared/same space coding with an added chat box for talking your way through the problem so to say.
And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender or how the candidate looks.
I think this would allow for a good level of blind testing, but would provide some downsides in the side of cultural fit screening. It's a lot easier to pretend you're not an asshole in asynchronous text-only communications.
I guess everything carries a trade off.
It might make the situation worse: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
Do you agree?
I meant worse for the problem the GP was trying to solve.
A few people didn't have the self control to pull it off, hired a bunch of white dudes, fired a bunch of "diverse" people and basically showed favoritism to people like themselves (i.e. mostly white men) which increased the disparity. After awhile this pattern became obvious and HR departments instituted quantitative policies because doing it poorly in a legally defensible way is better than trying to do it well at a risk of doing it poorly enough to get sued.
I don't know if there are studies, but I absolutely know toxic and unfriendly environments exist. I don't know how you'd quantify the effect; if you made up some metric where you looked at how many women COULD be in tech, there's huge lost productivity, but that's not necessarily meaningful.
Even clearing the hiring hurdle is not nearly enough. Hiring someone who your culture treats like crap is not going to help you or them. If the person is actually very competent, but consistently treated as a newbie, their work will be sub-par and they will burn out and leave.
It turns out you need managers who can actually see people, how they interact, and manage them on a personal level. Set up mentoring for those who need it, put people who like to work alone tasks that can be handled alone, people who like to be on big teams on big teams, etc.
There's no way to exhaustively list the things you could do, and that's the point - it's a big, hard job that is a job, that I think SV too often wishes didn't exist.
I think the issue is not so much about someone actually being outright blocked at the interview, although that may well happen also, especially if there are substantial numbers of people who think that women need to be accommodated because of fundamental biological differences.
But I would say the issue of bias is more systemic than that, it's more about the pipeline, that there are fewer female candidates at the interview stage because programming has been seen as a male activity. Women are discouraged from getting involved, through their own attitudes, and the attitudes of others projected onto them, and over time that winnows down the crowd of candidates. It's death by a thousand cuts, usually nothing dramatic, just a thousand subconscious decisions and comments.
That is not a problem of the same order, but it is still a problem, and assuming we accept that, the issue is what can be done about it. I don't think it's enough to say that we need programmes only targeted at teenagers or children, there should be something which happens at the end of the pipeline as well, so that company cultures are welcoming, there are female role models, and that it's clear that jobs are available if you buck the trend. The problem is made up of myriad small issues all along the pipeline, so that's also where you need to tackle it. Over time you will get to a point where the small changes are self-reinforcing, and no further action is required.
Yup. The WHOLE pipeline, from how we treat girls who are interested in math to how we figure out who to promote. The system pushes female gendered people out at every step. In High School, College, at Interview, at Work, at Promotion time.
I think though it's a bit disingenuous to say if we just look at the beginning, then it will eventually all sort itself out.
I can promise you as a person coming to grips with a transgender identity, seeing that there are women in upper management at my workplace is really, really important to me. You need to see people further along the path than you to know it's a real option. I needed to see women succeeding in ways I wanted to before I could be comfortable accepting my identity.
I wish I had more transgender women as role models, but cis women make a huge difference, too. I know that me, personally, presenting in a feminine way at the workplace has inspired at least one other person to accept her gender identity, too.
Point is, it's not an abstract thing that affects hypothetical people. It's a concrete thing that very directly affects me, right now. I'm in a fragile place trying to rebuild my identity, and I need people to look up to.
Edit: Either you edited what you wrote or I missed half a paragraph, but either way, we're in agreement :)
Quotas are not the answer, period. It's not okay to deny someone a job to correct for some possible, unmeasured, inaccurate judgement call on another person based on a stereotype whether or not that stereotype is accurate across populations. All you're doing is transferring the injustice to another person. What you're doing is preferring certain victims of injustice based on race/gender/whatever, and transferring their injustice to some other race/gender/whatever.
Find another solution. Get creative. But subverting explicit meritocratic hiring to correct for unconfirmed but suspected implicit non-meritocratic hiring is unjust. And stupid.
There is an argument I'm not sure I support that diversity has value on its own - that 5 people with different backgrounds is worth more than 5 with the same background.
But that being said - questioning biases, and correcting them at every point you spot them (not just interviewing!) is vital.
Meritocratic hiring has value on its own. The best person getting the job has value on its own. Not including OR discluding someone from a job based on their skin color or genitals has value on its own.
Insisting that having people with different skin color program a piece of software makes that software better is one thing, actually playing god with people's careers on the basis of their skin color or genitals because you, personally, value that more than meritocracy is an irresponsible and highly unethical course of action.
Choosing the best team for the job is always the goal.
And once again, the hard work isn't just the interviewing - it's managing the ongoing workplace environment, day to day.
Whether this is true depends on your methods of correction. That's what this whole conversation is about. If you don't KNOW you are biased (you don't), but suspect you are, and further, if you are, but don't know the extent to which you are biased or what the outcome would have been if you weren't biased (you don't; shit, the outcome may have even been the same), adding explicit discrimination that you do know is happening is stupid, unethical, and unjust.
Now, if you solution is instead to, say, "I'll do blind resume reviews, score candidates based on those, then do separate scores based on interviews, and compare them after a few dozen hires. If I see a significant and meaningful drop in acceptance rates for ANY group moving from blind resume reviews to in-person interviews, I'll do further review to see if there is good reason to believe the cause is, in fact, discrimination, rather than some benign issue like candidates of specific groups being legitimately worse at things that only come out in interviews. Then, if I don't find clear evidence of non-benign cause, I won't change anything, but if I do, I will attack those specific causes - even if we happen to find that it's actually white men that are being discriminated against, however unintuitive that is." then you'd be fine.
The response to the suspicion of injustice is key, here. Simply assuming your suspicions are correct and attacking perceived symptoms by doing exactly what you're trying to prevent, while qualifying as "trying to correct that," is not okay.
Women can be biased too, right?
I think I'm with you on the rest. Fixing early pipeline isn't enough.
We've been going down the path where virtually everyone agrees people ought to be hired and promoted based on merit, yet we have an industry rife with harassment, various -isms, and discrimination.
I'm pretty sure quotas are not the answer, but offering up the tried and failed idea that we should all just stop being bad is rather pathetic, in my opinion. In any case, I think we can expect it to work as well as it ever has.
Edit: minor typo
Alas, there is mostly lazy hiring. Her point that 98% of the candidates are male? I have a long list of colleges right here on my desk that she could reach out to that have a wider pool.
By all means, hire by quality. And I'm not aware of a single company actually doing quota hiring. It's a silly proposal. But look at a wider range. It's not as hard as the author makes it out to be.[1]
But all that bringing in of candidates doesn't help if your culture is crap. If you let people behave like it's a frat-house, guess what? The few minority people you'll find and hire will leave, because they'll be made to feel unwelcome.
I'm sick of tired of the hiring strawman. The reason there's a scarcity of women and other minorities is that many companies have a culture that's full of toxic sewage.
New hires aren't judged "by character". I wish more companies did, because we'd see less problems. But we're all desperately clinging to the ludicrous idea that reciting some algorithms from memory in front of the whiteboard is the one indicator for job fitness.
If you actually want diversity (and quality!), start right there. Test how people actually behave in a group setting. Have them solve real problems, together with other people.
[1] Of course, if you pay your recruiters by quantity, they'll be happy to let people self-select. And if your company's culture skews exclusive, guess what, minorities won't self select. It's not a problem of the candidate pool, though.
Correlation does not imply causation. Is rampant systemic sexism the reason why most oil rig workers are male? Is rampant systemic sexism the reason why 95% of child care teachers are women?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8
Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.
We have plenty of evidence of rampant systemic sexism. We have plenty of evidence that women left the field due to that sexism. We have evidence that the field's composition changed fairly recently (in the late eighties). We have evidence the culture changed around that same time.
If you would like to make your gender-essentialist case, you should at least try to build a model that explains these things, instead of asking empty rhetorical questions.
Most importantly, I suggest staying in the industry we're discussing, as opposed to bringing up straw men outside of it.
Yes, absolutely. Men are generally treated very poorly if they choose to voluntarily work with small children.
Would be awesome if there existed a way to remove all human biases from hiring.
Unfortunately, there isn't one yet.
If the point of this is to fix the problems from the bottom, or the 'pipeline', wouldn't some of that also have to do with breaking down the stigma that programming is all that matters in tech?
While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their own decisions they'd be engineers.
I think this article just shows more that CEO's and upper management lack the facts to properly asses their own hiring pipeline and what may be the actual problem to their hiring diversity.
This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.
This woman is NOT someone we should be listening to when it comes to closing the gender gap in software engineering.
Because men and women have entirely different brains. They have entirely different strengths and weaknesses. Hate to break that to you.
The rise of "lets pretend everyone is equal even though they're obviously not" is one of the worst things going on right now.
> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To understand one's mind, you should observe it.
> What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women?
Absolutely mystified.
> This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company.
Suddenly, no longer mystified at all.
Not that I particularly care, but this is why I have very little respect for hardcore advocates, they see themselves as completely objective while in reality their bias is obvious. The confidence of youth I guess, but this energy would be better expended on actually doing something towards achieving success rather than complaining that someone hasn't delivered it to your doorstep.
In the medium/long term, this is all the distractions of a childish culture. While we bicker dishonestly among ourselves like self-entitled children, China is quietly working its ass off and will soon eat all of our lunches.
This whole discussion is basically one side accusing the other of being a bully/thief/exploiter, that side asking how so, and the other saying no, prove to me that you're not!
And the accusers wonder why they're not achieving a lot of success in the real world. It is truly something to behold.
Yeah, it's annoying that she's forcing readers to interpret that. I would guess that she means that they weren't able to perform their job responsibilities adequately, and others had to pick up the slack.
Sadly, that could still fall under what I said.
Almost without question the interview process was also eliminating men who did not seem energetic or interested in the company.
But she wanted to hire women. So, the women were hired at market rate or higher. Without question they were willing to make an offer even if they had doubts about the woman's energy or passion or commitment to the company. After all it's hard enough to make an offer if you have standards, let alone make an offer to a woman, so the last thing you want is a technically capable woman being rejected because she seemed a bit tired in the interview. These women may have joined simply because the wages were good, without any particular belief or care about the future of the firm. They will work exactly as much as needed to earn their salary and no more.
There's nothing wrong with such workers, it's a fallacy to believe all employees must be passionate. However if your process is selecting for passion except when the candidate is a woman, then the women will seem low energy in comparison. And their "I don't care, why do you care" attitude will probably rub off on the rest of the team too.
But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.
Who said it is? It's a woman who wrote that, after all. And right after what you quoted comes this:
> That said, I’m proud to say that our freelance journalists on UrbanAMA are predominantly women and are kicking butt on the AMAs they are hosting.
Oh god how horribly disturbing.
All of this kiddo shit is the result of not listening to Camille Paglia. Close the intellectual honesty gap before you worry yourself further.
We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity?
She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.
Working in tech I work with probably 80% minorities (Indians, Asians, women, gays, Iranians, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Russians, one Venezualen, one Egyptian). There was at least one time I was the only white guy on a team of 9.
Most of those I asked did not feel discriminated against.
So you tell your sob stories all you want, but the reality is most americans couldn't afford $500 in an emergency, and however bad you think skin color X or gender Y has it, that gulf pales in comparison to the problem of class-ism in America (and I don't here any SJWs speaking to that, and so I really have to question the motives at play).
And you're just dishonest to us and yourself if you are insinuating you, or Google, or SJW-crowd cares 1/10th as much about hiring an proportionate number of hispanics/jews/ugly-people/tatooed-people as it does a proportionate number of women.
Poor neglected you. I can only assume that the reason why you are being so incredibly defensive, offended and acting like a child is because the criticism hit home. In the end it doesn't matter of course, changing is coming and you will have to adapt to it.
Uh. You could assume that. You could also consider that perhaps your ad-hominem response plays a role.
I feel like you've successfully illustrated my point for me though and am going to exit this exchange.
I know that's not what you're saying, but should minorities have to meet the burden to satisfy the majority in society for them to validate what they may be experiencing?
In the working world, diversity is something I look for in leadership first, down to management, down to front lines, instead of working up the ranks. Diversity doesn't seem to exist if it's not leadership downwards.
Gender diversity is real. All progress on diversity is good as long as voice and support is lent to all groups affected by a lack of diversity.
I wonder if the current gender diversity conversation indirectly has appropriated the voice of diversity issues groups like our visible minorities may experience.
It was about underrepresented minorities such as Blacks, Latinos, etc..
It didn't really pertain to white women
This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.
She could have gone with the stats: in a pool of candidates, you have 3% of very good people. And in that same pool of candidates, you have 90% of men. Given that there is not really any compelling reason that would explain why women would be better or worse than men at engineering, only 0.3% of your candidate pool are very good women. Plus given that pretty much every company out there will try to retain their exceptional women worker (in the name of diversity), exceptional women engineers are a rare sighting in the job market. Hence the diversity issue cannot be solved by forcing people to hire women.
No need to involve personal stories about how teenage girls are more interested in clothes than in assembly programming...
Scott Alexander (penname for a psychiatrist) wrote about it here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psycholo...
> Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral.
(All PDF downloads) - 1 http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictiv... - 2 http://www.academia.edu/download/41431928/Reassessing_the_pr... - 3 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public... - 4 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstra...
> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.
She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.
She could have said that they were procrastinating, or could have said that they were consistently tired and whiny about it. Or maybe these particular women did not want to work all their weekends away and complained about it. Or it could mean they weren't cheering at the beer pong event. Who knows?
I'm just saying that 'women I hired lacked energy' is the kind of blanket statement that overgeneralizes and that fans the vicious circle she described as damaging below.
The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences (wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.
Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with?
The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.
To me it seems it is more used by resourceful people.
The only way shaming hurts me is if the group doing the shaming is powerful among people I care about. Thus shaming is an expression of power, and a use of social force which must come from groups which have power.
Can you explain a bit more?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010185 and marked it off-topic.
People who feel strongly one way or the other typically want to see the articles they agree with stay on the front page and the ones they disagree with get flagged. But from a systemic point of view, it isn't in HN's interest to have the front page dominated by repetitive arguments (and certainly not repetitive flamewars) about the same thing. That's not what the site is for and not why the majority of HN users come here.
Plenty of articles arguing both sides of this hurricane have spent time on HN's front page, and there have been many thousands of comments for and against. At this point nothing new is emerging. If significant new information appears in the developing news story, that's fine, but until that happens, these threads are effectively dupes and it's not unfair for users to flag them. Repetitive rehashing of the same scorched earth is not why most people come here.
Re HN moderation, the phenomenon behind your perception is that both sides of each ideological divide believe, quite fervently, that we're secretly moderating HN to favor the opposing agenda. I'd love to figure out something we could do about this, but alas there doesn't seem much hope of it. For sure these accusations can't all be right since they say opposite things, and what's remarkable is how similar they are except for the one flipped ideological bit.
More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14994960 and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... if anyone is interested.
So people can flag "bad" stuff and don't remove topics based on their political/social views instead? Currently the system seems to be broken if this happens. This way you could easly penalize the users who try to manipulate by flagging "valid" topics.
Starting straight off with this makes me wonder if it's a perception she had or if it was the reality. The majority of people to not tell someone if they dont like them or dont respect them.
Her specific advice is:
> Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.
> Start a mentoring program.
> Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.
These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.
I'll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are interested in people and the boys, in things. Sorry, that's just the way it is. They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time. There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that's the fact, Jack. Sorry 'bout that. A really simple argument shows that the difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years. Gads, from some recent research, the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has held for some millions of years.
I tried that: As a college sophomore she told me "Women don't just have to be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career." Well, since she had been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class, with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her way to Summa Cum Laude, PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of which she got, I believed her. Wrong. Dumb.
Later I was on the team that did IBM's artificial intelligence language KnowledgeTool. Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample programs. KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM's PL/I, a huge language.
From one of the world's best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS usage, etc. All of that was easy for her.
So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM/CMS account, use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage. Then I gave her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool. A week later she had a nice, first sample program running. It did what she wanted. I gave her a 30 minute lecture explaining the intended role of rules as knowledge representation, and two weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw.
She was genuinely brilliant. She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble. I kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got better faster than I did until the difference was absurd. The OP mentions GRE scores of 800 -- that's exactly the score I got on the Math GRE. So, I was bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject.
She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it.
A STEM field diversity success? Heck no. She hated the STEM fields, including computing. Her view of the STEM fields was "I'm not that kind of person.". What she wanted was "A career that helps people.", and that mostly meant volunteer work. The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she had no future in business.
To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM. She was miserable, desperately miserable. In a training class, she made the highest score in the class, but she was misera...
Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever dreamed of.
Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of individual programming skills, and assigned them randomly into two categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) = E(skill of a candidate in B)
Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst, and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates from B)
There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get the result that A is on average better than B.
In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, given the current ratio of men to women in tech we would expect to see a skill disparity in the average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women.
Edited to add some further points:
1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal experience, but I have seen people make this argument.
2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill] then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero correlation.
3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like google.
Why do something sexist that didn't have a benefit.
How is it OK to respond to a candidate for hiring "sorry you're the wrong sex" if they're otherwise the best candidate. That's completely wrong IMO.
Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the barriers they'll face when they get there.
A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work) could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach parity in tech employment, they would actually have to want to reach parity, and fight for it.
Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the system to account for a perceived natural imbalance.
In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy, and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed.
What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today? Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc. Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!
Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats.
To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers.
Can someone please tell me why a woman would want to work in tech in the first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in tech?
Or progesterone levels to compassion and nurturing desires?
I think you need to look a little harder.
Of course more complex skills/desires/abilities are going to have more complex biological causation; though if you can prove otherwise, go ahead.
On the other hand of it was just as hominem ...
Look at any single factor or category of factors you want, and it never applies to all groups of humans. And this is because it's a social dynamic, and so it changes between social groups. Focusing on biology is bikesheddding.
The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2) programs for women in college, to advocate for their studying computer science, and 3) the grace hopper conference for women who are engineers now. All those seem in line with the author's suggestions.
This article (and the letter last week, and similar rhetoric) really feel like they're attacking a strawman to me. I left a while ago, but have things changed that much?
Of course, the implication is that Google is doing so. But if Google was doing so, they wouldn't have the poor diversity stats they've been accused of having.
You can't have it both ways! Either Google is lowering the bar to achieve satisfactory diversity stats... or they are failing to achieve satisfactory diversity stats.
Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often: hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix the college pipeline in future. If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.
Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?
On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.
If you reduce your quality bar to fill a quota for a group, then that group can end up having a lower quality than the majority group, which then works to reinforce bad stereotypes in some of the majority against that minority.
That can then harm those in the minority group who were in fact above the bar and for whom the bar did not need to be lowered.
I'm not against quota systems but they need to be aggressively monitored so you don't get unintended effects.
Regardless of the diversity issue, do we really value a culture where we branding people with opinions in tech as traitors? Sure, she's preempting name calling that may never occur - but that means we're in a culture of discussion where being called a "trator" for expressing an opinion is even a possibility in the first place!
This seems like false reasoning. She is using an intentionally biased sample (the candidate pipeline in a narrow subspecialty of software engineering) to draw conclusions about the larger software engineering candidate pipeline, which actually has a higher representation of women - not high overall - but higher than both her subspecialty and more importantly, higher than the current representation of women at tech companies.
> If we increase the inflow of women into tech education, we will automatically increase diversity in hiring.
This is not enough. She would have us believe that companies are automata that will just adapt to the changing composition of the pipeline with no other action needed. It's an absolution of corporate responsibility for diversity (that perhaps reflects her self interest as a founder/executive). But companies are not automata, they are entities with their own inertial biases, and in the case of large companies, these biases often are often rooted in the communities from which the companies sprang.
Companies, especially major tech companies, are major cultural influencers - their businesses are based in part on the power of their cultural influence, and with that comes disproportionate responsibility to act, especially when society at large has not been successful enough at solving the pipeline problem.
Employing for any other reason will likely demoralise the team because they will likely under perform. They will likely under perform because instead of finding the best person, you find the best person based on a subset of arbitrary equality rules.
There is no reason why 50% of tech jobs cannot go to women. The main barrier we come across is there aren't enough skilled women applying. I think the author hit the nail on the head. It reflects my experiences.
You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they can lead the way on equality. To have equality for equalities sake. It's wrong. Where there are descrepancies between genders we should ask why they exist.
Take child care, the majority of people in childcare are women. Should we be passing over women with years of experience and excellent qualifications to bump the number of men in the industry?
I would love to see a few guys at my kids nursery. However they should be there because they were the best for job. I would pull my kid out of the nursery if they passed over better candidates to fix this gender ratio. I want the best outcome for my children.
The same is true with business. Merit is the measure that matters. More women in tech will lead to more meriting jobs in the industry, which in turn will lead to the male/female ratio improving.
That is absolutely not what I said. I'm saying tech companies should take active measures to counter the historical bias against qualified under-represented candidates, while simultaneously engaging in corporate efforts to influence the pipeline to produce more qualified candidates from those under-represented groups. If you don't think that such a historical bias against qualified female candidates exists at all stages of the candidate pipeline, from primary school through to job interviews, then we disagree on the basic assumptions.
The author is insisting that the sorts of efforts I described should not be the responsibility of corporations, but rather should be the result of virtuous charitable actions of individuals volunteering their time. This is like arguing that corporations should do no charitable giving to fight hunger, or fund environmental initiatives, and it should be left solely to charitable individuals to feed the hungry or advocate for a cleaner environment (I realize there are significant number of people who also hold that belief).
Fighting these sorts of large complex problems takes a lot of resources coordinated and guided by a set of values. Today, for better or for worse, those things lie in the hands of corporations. We could argue about whether that should be the case (i.e. perhaps government should be the responsible party), but it is manifestly the case today.
The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out.
I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem" people want to point to as a source of the gender gap in hiring will become our primary issue when we first iron out the issues with the atrittion and harassment we see for women in the workplace.
As for gender essentialism, I think this woman has every right to her opinion and I support her efforts, but I think she's approaching the problem wrong. She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter (who has almost certainly had positive modeling for a lot of other roles) isn't interested.
Any pointers to specifics or resources on this?
And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?
It's so easy to say, "Gosh this confirms our stereotypes!" But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to "women are worse at programming and math."
>But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to...
True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles it could be torture. Interest is related to aptitude in that those that are interested have the inherent motivation to get good at it. I strongly believe that interest is highly correlated with aptitude. That doesn't mean that those uninterested in logic puzzles can't hack it, its just that they have to be very highly motivated to learn. I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.
> in a gross language like Python
Brave words to utter on this site!
Here I am, not that type until my late 30s. I've been programming or trying to since I was 5ish. And most folks who talk to, work with, or have worked for me regard my technical skills quite highly.
If all you want is an endless stream of puzzles with no responsibility or connection to reality, be a professional video gamer. The Minecraft folks, for example.
I tried it for awhile, but I find the life of video gaming without any real responsibility pretty empty.
> I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.
Logic puzzles in a language founded on principle of anti-intellectualism is not software engineering.
Maybe if they made things of issuing tests that's a better idea.