HN Explorer

Ask HN: Gender diversity

1 points by gazarullz ↗ HN
I have stumbled upon the databricks leadership team page by chance: https://databricks.com/company/leadership-team.

My surprise was that the entire team of 15 is composed only by male persons.

Until now I have only noticed big companies advocating gender diversity.

Is there a specific reason why this doesn't happen also in smaller companies ?

1 comment

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smt88
1) Smaller companies are under less scrutiny than larger companies. "Databricks has an all-male leadership team!" isn't a good headline when hardly anyone knows who they are. I don't know who they are, and I'm a dev who's frequently on HN.

2) Larger companies have interviewed, hired, and fired more people, so they've had a lot more chances to recognize and promote female talent.

3) Larger companies are more attractive targets for discrimination, which is amplified by #2.

If a company has 10,000 employees and has been around for 10 years, it looks really bad for them to have no female leadership. In that time, they'd have to have run into a talented woman and overlooked her because they'd have received hundreds of thousands of job applications.

All that said, it's idiotic to have a 15-person leadership team and have so little diversity. It turns prospective employees off and reduces chances of success (kind of like having a baseball team comprised entirely of pitchers).