> For fund manager Katie Potts, setting mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of technology startups is a bad idea. Not because she’s against diversity, but because she says there just aren’t enough suitable candidates.
This argument always appears when discussing improving diversity: e.g. fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women, women not as a good football players as men so it makes sense to pay them less, etc.
My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards (even though they might not be as good now as men) then the pool of such women will always be smaller than men. Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Women are second class people for literally thousands of years and now we want to make it right but we're not willing to pay even a small price?
> In this case, especially for smaller companies already battling bigger companies for the best candidates, it’s not easy to find good non-execs
This sounds like a separate problem requiring its own solution - any extra regulation benefits big companies.
EDIT:
multiple replies are questioning "inspiring the next generation". I'm talking about inspiring small girls to choose IT in school, so that there is a big pool of women in tech. That's where the problem is fundamentally but you can't just fix it by spreading flyers in schools. Girls get motivated by seeing successful women.
I've always maintained that women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things, and a bigger part of that seems to be representation than for men. This is grounded in the massive shift in how the population of US "programmers" changed from majority women to majority men. "In 1967, there were so many female programmers that Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about “The Computer Girls,” accompanied by pictures of beehived women at work on computers that evoked the control deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise" [1] But in the next decade, there was a massive cultural shift – PCs were sold, and its ad campaigns targeted the image of a young geeky boy playing with toys. The campaigns were successful, so "By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen were showing up for their first class already proficient as programmers." Those were boys who had bought PCs and tinkered with them at home – excluded from ad campaigns, young girls never asked for a PC for Christmas, and they would show up to these freshmen courses like they did before but find themselves already terribly behind. So the number of women in programming started dropping around this time [1]. This was not seen in, say, Russia, which was not subject to the same ad campaigns, and so the number of women in programming stayed about the same. You might note that a lot of the female programmers you find in SV are Eastern European – this is not an accident.
I do also have a citation that showed how the number of women signing up for archery was minuscule prior to the Hunger Games series, but subsequently ballooned and stayed high since. So the above assumption – that visible token women in a particular field makes a huge impact on the number of girls in that field – is based in some fairly well-known effects.
> women seem to me subtly more susceptible to peer pressure for most things
Isn't the basic assumption behind this entire movement that women are NOT different from men?
In any case, if what you need is "token women", then why not highlight the presumably very competent women that already work in finance (my co-founder is one), rather than forcing quotas?
If your assumption is correct then it's not about the percentage that are women, it's about having a few well known role-models.
No, the basic assumption is that women have equal rights.
Most of the movement acknowledges real differences from men, aside from a subset of the movement that subscribes to the gender assignment idea, and its mutability. I would say it's a loud and educated minority, since the lived lives of most women includes childbirth and insisting "NOT different" runs into some pretty obvious problems here.
But yes, if my hunch is correct, it is about having a few powerful role models so that the image of pursuing this option becomes viable. It's also about removing patent ideological blocks (she's just not a "culture fit"), lessening the barrier to entry (she needs to have a proper engineering degree), etc. But doing the latter without the former yields poorer results.
The problem is of course that if you open up for the possibility that women and men are different then it could simply be that women are less interested in launching startups, rather than a plot to keep women down.
Have you been to a dry-cleaner's? A bakery? A hair-dresser's? All of those were startups. Actually, South Korea has recently seen an influx of female entrepreneurs because their barriers to entry in tech were so high, it encouraged a lot of highly educated women to pivot into the start-up scene (12% of all working age women! [1])
So it seems at least a modicum of women are somewhat interested in "launching startups," and many of them already do in domains outside of tech. But the hostility to them in tech in the west is tricky. It's not overt, which is easier to protest, but subtle, sometimes even well-intentioned – for instance, your claim in this very comment, when spoken "around the water cooler" during a lunch hour with many coworkers present will make many of the women in the room question themselves – is this true? ("Is there something wrong with me that I am interested in this?") Those instances aggregate – how often do you think that your personal failure might be a failure of your entire demographic? How debilitating is that for productivity? They'll think of the lack of female Elon Musks and hang their head in shame, and many who were considering doing something like that will be a little more discouraged, despite many powerful figures in domains outside of tech.
Again, this is encapsulated into my theory of greater acquiescence to social acceptance for this group of people, and greater measures needed to fight it.
You make some good points, but role models and peer pressure are two different things. In my subjective experience the latter tends to have a significantly larger impact. Role models are probably relevant in the first step to make people realise this kind of job is a possible choice. But I doubt it's enough to motivate anyone to stick to it and go through the whole learning process.
And afaik the reason female programmers were the majority in the beginning was mostly sexism combined with the view that writing the programs was a trivial task comparable to simple data entry jobs. Which inevitably was proven wrong after a while.
I don't know about you but I didn't choose to study physics based on the demography of physicist. It's always strange to hear people argue that correctly gendered "role models" are so important.
The main difference between an average female physics student and Isaac Newton is not their gender, she is just as different from him as I am.
> In both
studies, results indicated that female participants were more inspired by outstanding female than male role models; in
contrast, gender did not determine the impact of role models on male participants.
I tend to downplay the impact of role model demographics as well, but then I recognize that I'm represented literally everywhere--except perhaps US football and basketball. I'm willing to accept that because the norm is people that look like me are everywhere, I don't notice the impact it has on me.
The studies that show that women are more inspired by other women also show that men are indifferent to the gender of the role-model. Not that these studies seem that convincing.
> My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow
If you for some reason want more female fund managers, clearly the better way is to improve the pipeline, encourage women to study business. Forcing companies to hire people they didn't want to hire is obviously a very bad idea.
More importantly, why is the number of female fund managers relevant?
> If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards
"Dear Alice, we are happy to tell you that XYZ Asset Management has decided to take the hit and hire you for the position as fund manager, congratulations!"
Changing the way the fund managers look is the easiest way to project a progressive image without actually doing anything meaningful. It’s great for the brand.
Surely you can see how punting the problem back to academia is not a long-term solution. The industry keeps on being an old-boys club that way, and academia can select only for people who are willing to put up with that aspect.
On the contrary. The problem (if you consider it a problem) is one of supply, not demand. So the only long-term solution is to increase the supply, not create an artificial demand.
That's what I'm saying though, punting it back to academia doesn't increase the general supply, it only increases the supply with a smaller subset of people who are willing to put up with the "old-boys network" aspect for their entire career.
> My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow.
> Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually.
> Women are second class people for literally thousands of years
You're saying that because women were/are second class citizens, non-women that may have worked harder, and LITERALLY BE BETTER, should not get the position.
Your implementation details in fixing the problem is sexist and naive.
You and the rest of twitter should stop fixing SYMPTOMS and start fixing the UNDERLYING PROBLEMS.
> fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women
It's not about what 'makes sense' - it's literally that there are fewer of them. If women make up 10% of the hiring pool (say in tech) and your company employs 50% women, all that means is that every other company now has fewer than 10% women.
Surprise, surprise — the only female-indicating handle in this discussion is getting downvoted into oblivion.
One reason boards stay demographically skewed is because everybody on them vehemently opposes taking concrete action to address said demographic skew. Members of underrepresented minorities tend to favor active steps, disqualifying them as candidates from the perspective of the status quo.
A similar effect preserves the demographic skew of Hacker News. HN is overwhelmingly male dominated, and thus disproportionately unreceptive to views typically held by women and not typically held by men. That disagreement gets expressed through downvoting, which is ultimately indistinguishable from animus even if the intent was benign. And thus people who hold views common among women, finding this forum unfriendly, go elsewhere.
> “There are simply not enough experienced women in the sector and of suitable caliber to fill a third of board posts” in the smaller tech company space, the founder of U.K.-based Herald Investment Trust Plc said
I imagine this as part of the political purpose of the assault on the concept of merit. If merit is just a cover for miscellaneous class, race and gender supremacisms, and people are largely the same in capability underneath achievement-skewing social conventions, then the above quote makes no sense. Of course there are plenty of women for these posts. Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much, but fairness will increase.
> Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much
Why don’t you think it would change? If you select from random people then of course it would be worse. A good chef can come from anywhere but that doesn’t make everyone a good chef.. Maybe we should select Olympic athletes randomly too since Olympic training is a form of class supremacy
I don't understand. Either we're not properly measuring merit, in which case you may have a point, or selecting random people will reduce the competence of the boards.
Of course, if we're not good at selecting competent people, one might argue that we should address that issue, instead of substituting the goal of competence for the goal of fairness. Who knows, we could even focus on properly training a more diverse set of people in addition to making things more meritocratic...
I really don't understand your reasoning, here. I'm at a complete loss.
It's not my reasoning, it's my attempt to repeat the reasoning I've heard from highly intelligent people who really don't think individual differences in competence matter much -- even when their own clearly does. I think they do matter, a lot.
One of the most competent people I've ever known is one of them. He told me that Elon Musk is somewhat intelligent, but his success is due to luck and underhandedness, and he could be easily replaced by another somewhat intelligent and similarly underhanded person. He seemed sincere in believing that merit wasn't much of a thing and meritocracy is a racist trope. I got roundly mocked on twitter for arguing that merit is real. I'd like to understand that point of view better, because I'm at a loss too.
People are probably getting angry at you because you are explicitly invoking a politicized definition of the word merit which basically boils down to "best at maintaining the political status quo." In other contexts the definition is different. (For example Elon Musk's business merits seem to be his track record of making a lot of money, or at least that's what they are on twitter anyway)
If you want other examples of people who are pissed off at the concept of merit for other reasons, talk to some PhDs (or other holders of high academic merit) that are struggling to find work.
I didn't see any of the tweets so I can't say for sure, that's just my read on the situation judging by the reactions. That's why I said "probably."
If you find a definition of merit that everyone can agree on, please let us know, because that would be news to me. In my experience in the US at least, most people seem to object to there being a central organization that decides who has merit and who doesn't.
Intelligence and merit are not the same thing. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs etc did not succeed because they are extremely intelligent.
Almost all successful people are somewhat intelligent coupled with a lot of luck/street-smart/hard work/underhandedness etc. These are what constitute "merit" in a businessman.
So your friend is partly right. But certainly you couldn't just replace Musk with someone of the same intelligence, that is not what determines success at that level.
I am for diversity, I think it makes a better, stronger, more agile company.
However Quotas I don't think are the answer.
1) because they reinforce negative stereotypes (you are only here because you are x, rather than being qualified)
2) They make the candidate feel like they don't belong/less valued
3) they don't fix the underlying issues
Now, this is from a UK perspective, so the next points are less universal.
In the UK we have a training issue. It is hard as a startup to source mid/senior "diversity" candidates because they are rare.
Therefore we as an industry need to get into schools and provide mentorship to allow children of all types to come into IT. UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.
since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. From a business perspective its a brilliant way to source cheap, loyal and effective workers. For companies like the financial times, its worked out pretty well. They have something like 70 apprentice/apprentice grade employees in a tech team of 400.
> since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships.
Right, you can't solve pipeline problems near the end of the pipeline. You have to provide robust support as far back as possible. Quotas are a lackluster response to outrage porn and a desire to implement quick fixes, when thoughtful, long term policy decisions are what provides the desired outcome (equitable power distribution).
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
> UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.
That actually sounds universal.
I think a big part of choosing a career/education track is having role models. If there are no women now in tech, then girls will not be inspired. Imagine how many boys are inspired by Elon Musk to work on cars and rockets.
Quotas are not the end game. It can be seen as a necessary hack to kick start the process.
Nope. Girls have their role models. We've been pedalling the exaggerated truth of Ada Lovelace being the first programmer for decades. She even has a programming language named after her. Grace Hopper is pulled out at any opportunity.
Boys don't need role models. They don't do things "because Elon Musk is cool". You speak about things you really don't understand. Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all. Boys obsess over things. Taking things to sometimes absurd extremes. And they're not doing any of it because they want to be rich, or want women, or want to be Elon Musk. Trust me. I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?
Boys are surrounded by role models in lots of areas in a way girls are not (and that was even more true a couple generations back.) They don't need any special effort to provide them because their social context is suffused with them, both real and fictional.
> Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all.
No, if you pay much attention to boys, there's plenty of direct inspiration from specific role models and images from their social context.
I as a man am not expected to become a carer. I am not expected to be a nurse. I am not expected to show emotion. I am expected to fight, talk through grunting and like sports.
Girls are taught to be girls, they must be nice, they must smile, they must care, they must be demure.
Now, this is automatic. You treat others how you see others being treated, unless you have reason to change your behavior.
> I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?
nope.
but, try this: obsess over caring for orphans, injured animals, restoring habitats, etc etc. Kinda naff right?
Its equally as hard as electronics, requires the same level of science. But its not done by boys because its "what girls do"
This comment is strange to me, since the women I've seen that do the best work, particularly my CS high school teacher, were as hard-nosed as any man in the field; e.g., they knew their stuff and didn't let anyone else tell them otherwise.
I don't think that sort of attitude comes from anywhere but the family unit. All this talk of orgs needing to cater to otherwise non-applicants and governments needing to intervene is just barking up the wrong tree.
> I as a man am not expected to become a carer. I am not expected to be a nurse. I am not expected to show emotion. I am expected to fight, talk through grunting and like sports.
Guess what, I wasn't "expected" to become a programmer either. I was outcast and bullied in school for being a geek and a boffin. I still did it, though, because I don't give a toss what you or anyone else says I should do. I don't fight, nor do I like sports.
As for girls being taught to be nice etc., are you suggesting we teach them to be not nice? Or maybe you think they are all naturally unpleasant but they've been taught to have a nice façade? Personally I think girls who are nice are nice because they are nice. But that's just me.
Who says caring for orphans or injured animals is naff? You? Certainly not me. I honestly don't know a single person who thinks that.
You vastly overestimate the importance of nurture in all of this. Think about it: even if we assume boys and girls are treated differently, why is it that some boys grow up to be programmers while others grow up to wipe shit off toilets? They had exactly the same education. Exactly the same opportunities. Why would did one choose to earn a pittance wiping shit over earning loads sitting at a desk?
> They had exactly the same education. Exactly the same opportunities.
a working class boy has the same education and opportunities as a boy going to a boarding school?
At my school I was expected to become a builder, farm hand or similar. Its only because I had parents with enough time and education to _expect_ me to be different. My genetics are not superior, had I been adopted at 3 weeks and given to a posh couple, I'd have been a lawyer, or "business man". Had I been given to an inner city working class couple, most likely I'd be in jail now, knowing the shit I got up to as teenager.
> a working class boy has the same education and opportunities as a boy going to a boarding school?
I didn't say that, but even within the same school, people end up doing different things. I went to one of the worst schools in the country. When it was closed down the OFSTED report said it was in the "most deprived area in the country".
We could certainly talk about the differences in opportunities between being rich and being poor in this country. The class system is alive and well. No matter how hard I try I will never be part of the elite Oxbridge club in this country. And realistically speaking poor people can't become rich just by hard work. Being rich requires inheritance.
But that's a different issue. Rich people have just as many girls as boys. Rich girls have far more opportunities than poor boys, yet still we see more boys end up in tech than girls. You might say the same barriers exist throughout all layers of society, but then tell me why if I go on Github and pick any random project, it was in all likelihood written by a man? There are rich women out there with not a shred of responsibility and all the time in the world to dedicate to programming. But they don't. Because they don't want to.
The difference is that institutional misandry is okay in 2021.
For at least the last decade, the “feminist” movement in Western countries has been a force for misandry, not equality.
Arguably, the feminist movement in education has been a force for misandry since women became the educational majority in the 1980s and feminism in education became a sexist power movement by the majority in education.
> Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?
I'm not sure about the UK but law and medicine in the US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
> US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.
I'm not sure what changed, but its seen as something that a career minded middle class girl _should_ do. it certainly wasn't any sort of legal discrimination.
I'm not sure of the exact stats, but the slim majority of first year doctors in the UK are women
> What is the difference between those fields and IT?
Now this is the million dollar question. I don't have a succinct answer. I _suspect_ that a strong part of it is that IT is notorious for having handsy/abusive colleagues. but that cant be the entire reason, especially given Law's reputation.
> Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?
This is probably not the answer anyone wants... but in medicine and law, you need a university diploma, or it is illegal to do the job. So you can simply set quotas at schools, and thus shape the future workforce.
In IT, many people do not have formal education. So even if you would set 50% (or even 100%) quotas at schools, it wouldn't necessarily achieve the same change at workplace. I suppose people are aware of it, so they don't even try this way.
If you want to fix gender ratio in IT using the same strategy, the first step would be to make it illegal for people without diploma to program computers. Then you can restrict the number of men at workplace by limiting the diplomas.
Of course, if you would want to fix gender ratio in IT using a different strategy, you could e.g. listen to Damore and make overtime illegal, perhaps require companies to provide part-time jobs, and otherwise remove things that women actually try to avoid.
I've often wondered about this myself. I always see "diversity is a moral good" and "diversity is good for business" bundled together. What happens if we were to hypothetically discover unequivocally that more homogenous groups outperformed for diverse ones? Plenty of non-diverse societies are high-achieving (Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia. It always creeps me out when people try to couple morality with "and it's got a practical benefit too". The whole point of a moral is that you follow it because you do, not because you get some added reward.
If folks (and society as a whole) are going to push diversity, we should all be clear on whether this is a moral issue or a practical issue because the implications are very different and it dictates which one takes priority.
> Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence to back it up or is this just a feeling?
monocultures have explosive growth, but are vulnerable to the same threats, this means that one small change can bring a company to its knees. Its the same throughout nature.
given the numbers, its pretty clear there is something significant stopping women studying computing. Given the attitudes, and general conditioning that programmers are male, I can see how it arises.
As a thought experiment, try this: imagine being a boy at 16 and standing up in front of class and saying that you want to be a nursery assistant. Its not going to end well.
Almost the same level of ridicule and "raised eyebrows" would be given to a "normal" girl at 14/15/16 standing up and saying that she was going to be a developer.
> given the numbers, its pretty clear there is something significant stopping women studying computing.
Or that they are free to do what they want and choose to do something else.
I strongly encourage you to expose yourself to people who are not like yourself. Especially women, because they are most unlike you. Believe it or not, vast swathes of the general public have no interest at all in computers or programming. And this is despite it having lower barrier to entry than other technology. The GNU project is coming up to 40 years old and today not only is there more free software than ever before, it's more easily available than ever before. There is a wealth of free training material out there ranging from excellent interactive tutorials for the latest frameworks to full University lecture series. Anyone who wants to do it can do it. But most don't because they are not like you!
> I strongly encourage you to expose yourself to people who are not like yourself.
I don't hang out with programmers. I live in a council estate in a rough part of london. I am fully aware of the world outside tech. Why? because I spend my time trying to unfuck what the council/government are doing to the people around me.
I'm going to level with you. why do I want more women in tech? two reasons:
1) I want my daughter to walk into my job and feel at home. I don't want her to be constantly creeped on like my colleagues are now. (or worse just being told they are wrong because they are different) I want them to feel comfortable like I do.
2) I worked at a number of companies where we had almost parity, it was wonderful. Its hard to describe what it was like, the only way I can think of is when your really loud tinnitus suddenly disappears.
> Anyone who wants to do it can do it
yeah nah.
I had to change my accent to get a job. Nobody hires a country bumpkin. I have coached a number of people, I know they are good programmers, excellent communicators, brilliant interviewers. They have been rejected for "culture fit" reasons, because they are brown, have a vagina, or worse still a long name.
At one company, my boss overruled my teams hire because they didn't find a candidate attractive enough. We lost a cheap and brilliant engineer because my boss was being a shit.
The last point is this: on the minimum wage, in rented accommodation, getting enough time, space and privacy to learn programming is a herculean task. especially if there only one TV, and you can't just shove your pi in at any time.
I agree. These three points you raise are discussed at length in this blog post constructed around a letter written by Judge Flemming in 1969 which accurately predicted how a quota system, or using different standards for different groups, would result in these types of negative outcomes: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-amazing-1969-prophecy-...
Undermining the credibility of existing, properly qualified players in the field is one of the most pernicious aspects of a quota system.
Quotas and affirmative action have worked successfully in other fields.
Law in the US was a hostile profession to women in the 1950s and 1960s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (first in her class at Columbia) and Sandra Day O'Connor (third in her class at Stanford), for example, both had trouble finding work after graduation. The legal industry addressed sexism by making gender balance an explicit goal. Law schools admitted equal numbers of men and women; law firms hired equal numbers of male and female associates. Women now make up 36% of lawyers and the majority of law school graduates.
If you're looking for a historical reference,
(https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...) is 26 pages and covers the history of women in law from 1920 to 1970. Cynthia Epstein's Women in Law should cover this topic but I haven't yet read it.
Someone should push for gender quotas in fields dominated women in earning & number .... just to remind people that both genders , have an edge that causes these disproportionalities
Interestingly, fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay. [1] So even where the playing field is in their favor sexism wise, the system still gets them.
So not sure forcing gender quotas on them will prove any point.
fields in which women dominate tend to have lower pay
Fields where men dominate tend to have greater risk of death or injury on the job. 97% of deaths at work were men. Could it be that when averaged out safer jobs pay less?
I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here.
I imagine that's not the case for tech (approximately the subject of HN) and finance (the topic of the article), so while the fact may be true on average, I'm having trouble seeing its relevance here
I'm replying to a comment which doesn't make that distinction either. But finance is notorious for the health problems in the field. Heart attacks and other stress related fatalities are not uncommon. And in tech there's burnout.
Cry me a river: she and all of us had *decades* of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles. Now the hammer has come down.
Sure, this is a crude and ugly way to force the matter, but private industry f*ked this up bigtime. If you don't want government regulation, you have to step up.
Success example: Google and the other cloud hosting providers got ahead of environmental regulation by many years for the "green"ness of their data centers - yeah yeah greenwashing whatever, the point is that they're making a much more serious attempt than anybody else, and unsurprisingly, nobody's talking about mandating green data centers, because they're demonstrated leadership.
>she and all of us had decades of notice that this was coming, and yet we all did nothing to nurture leadership and force "old white men" to accept different cultures and communication styles.
How many unqualified board members does it take before paying qualified men to take estrogen shots saves the company money? A good board can be worth billions
Hiring the right person is hard problem even if you ignore the gender part. So you just replaced one problem we don't know how to solve by another problem we don't know how to solve.
Though from certain perspective, it gives us extra motivation to find out who is the right person for the job.
> Board positions also tend to be taken up by people toward the end of their careers, most of whom are men, Potts said, adding that this may shift in the next generation.
I guess I don't understand the argument:
1. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates. (The argument implied by the very first paragraph of the article.)
2. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates who the same age as the typical male board member. (The argument implied in this quote.)
3. I'm going to say there are too few qualified female candidates to generate a title suitable for much clicking. Then in the interview I'll switch to talking about how I've met a lot of perfectly capable female candidates of the younger generations and speculate about how they'll probably eventually fill board positions in the future. (The argument implied by the "smell" I get from clicking on stories like these and leaving with no more knowledge than I had before I clicked.)
4. Something completely different.
Which is it? I can't tell because it appears a stenographer wrote down utterances from an ostensibly well-known person in their field, and didn't press for clarification or supporting evidence.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] threadThis argument always appears when discussing improving diversity: e.g. fewer women engineers so it makes sense to hire fewer women, women not as a good football players as men so it makes sense to pay them less, etc.
My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards (even though they might not be as good now as men) then the pool of such women will always be smaller than men. Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. Women are second class people for literally thousands of years and now we want to make it right but we're not willing to pay even a small price?
> In this case, especially for smaller companies already battling bigger companies for the best candidates, it’s not easy to find good non-execs
This sounds like a separate problem requiring its own solution - any extra regulation benefits big companies.
EDIT:
multiple replies are questioning "inspiring the next generation". I'm talking about inspiring small girls to choose IT in school, so that there is a big pool of women in tech. That's where the problem is fundamentally but you can't just fix it by spreading flyers in schools. Girls get motivated by seeing successful women.
This is a good point but it's likely to boil down to everyone's favioute idiom: You First.
Citation needed.
I do also have a citation that showed how the number of women signing up for archery was minuscule prior to the Hunger Games series, but subsequently ballooned and stayed high since. So the above assumption – that visible token women in a particular field makes a huge impact on the number of girls in that field – is based in some fairly well-known effects.
[1] – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-com...
[2] – https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-exho-t...
Isn't the basic assumption behind this entire movement that women are NOT different from men?
In any case, if what you need is "token women", then why not highlight the presumably very competent women that already work in finance (my co-founder is one), rather than forcing quotas?
If your assumption is correct then it's not about the percentage that are women, it's about having a few well known role-models.
Most of the movement acknowledges real differences from men, aside from a subset of the movement that subscribes to the gender assignment idea, and its mutability. I would say it's a loud and educated minority, since the lived lives of most women includes childbirth and insisting "NOT different" runs into some pretty obvious problems here.
But yes, if my hunch is correct, it is about having a few powerful role models so that the image of pursuing this option becomes viable. It's also about removing patent ideological blocks (she's just not a "culture fit"), lessening the barrier to entry (she needs to have a proper engineering degree), etc. But doing the latter without the former yields poorer results.
So it seems at least a modicum of women are somewhat interested in "launching startups," and many of them already do in domains outside of tech. But the hostility to them in tech in the west is tricky. It's not overt, which is easier to protest, but subtle, sometimes even well-intentioned – for instance, your claim in this very comment, when spoken "around the water cooler" during a lunch hour with many coworkers present will make many of the women in the room question themselves – is this true? ("Is there something wrong with me that I am interested in this?") Those instances aggregate – how often do you think that your personal failure might be a failure of your entire demographic? How debilitating is that for productivity? They'll think of the lack of female Elon Musks and hang their head in shame, and many who were considering doing something like that will be a little more discouraged, despite many powerful figures in domains outside of tech.
Again, this is encapsulated into my theory of greater acquiescence to social acceptance for this group of people, and greater measures needed to fight it.
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/south-korea-wome...
And afaik the reason female programmers were the majority in the beginning was mostly sexism combined with the view that writing the programs was a trivial task comparable to simple data entry jobs. Which inevitably was proven wrong after a while.
Inspire the next generation how exactly? "Your predecessor was filling a quota but you're here on merit, honest"?
The main difference between an average female physics student and Isaac Newton is not their gender, she is just as different from him as I am.
Trying to argue counter to this makes you an enemy, or confirmation bias for being a racist (as seen in such chartoppers as "White Fragility")
> In both studies, results indicated that female participants were more inspired by outstanding female than male role models; in contrast, gender did not determine the impact of role models on male participants.
If you for some reason want more female fund managers, clearly the better way is to improve the pipeline, encourage women to study business. Forcing companies to hire people they didn't want to hire is obviously a very bad idea.
More importantly, why is the number of female fund managers relevant?
> If you don't take a hit now and put more women on the boards
"Dear Alice, we are happy to tell you that XYZ Asset Management has decided to take the hit and hire you for the position as fund manager, congratulations!"
> My counter argument is that you must break the cycle somehow. > Include women now and they might not be as good but they will inspire the next generation and will catch up eventually. > Women are second class people for literally thousands of years
You're saying that because women were/are second class citizens, non-women that may have worked harder, and LITERALLY BE BETTER, should not get the position.
Your implementation details in fixing the problem is sexist and naive.
You and the rest of twitter should stop fixing SYMPTOMS and start fixing the UNDERLYING PROBLEMS.
It's not about what 'makes sense' - it's literally that there are fewer of them. If women make up 10% of the hiring pool (say in tech) and your company employs 50% women, all that means is that every other company now has fewer than 10% women.
One reason boards stay demographically skewed is because everybody on them vehemently opposes taking concrete action to address said demographic skew. Members of underrepresented minorities tend to favor active steps, disqualifying them as candidates from the perspective of the status quo.
A similar effect preserves the demographic skew of Hacker News. HN is overwhelmingly male dominated, and thus disproportionately unreceptive to views typically held by women and not typically held by men. That disagreement gets expressed through downvoting, which is ultimately indistinguishable from animus even if the intent was benign. And thus people who hold views common among women, finding this forum unfriendly, go elsewhere.
I imagine this as part of the political purpose of the assault on the concept of merit. If merit is just a cover for miscellaneous class, race and gender supremacisms, and people are largely the same in capability underneath achievement-skewing social conventions, then the above quote makes no sense. Of course there are plenty of women for these posts. Just pick some random suitably intersectional people and the overall competence of the board won't likely change much, but fairness will increase.
Why don’t you think it would change? If you select from random people then of course it would be worse. A good chef can come from anywhere but that doesn’t make everyone a good chef.. Maybe we should select Olympic athletes randomly too since Olympic training is a form of class supremacy
Of course, if we're not good at selecting competent people, one might argue that we should address that issue, instead of substituting the goal of competence for the goal of fairness. Who knows, we could even focus on properly training a more diverse set of people in addition to making things more meritocratic...
I really don't understand your reasoning, here. I'm at a complete loss.
One of the most competent people I've ever known is one of them. He told me that Elon Musk is somewhat intelligent, but his success is due to luck and underhandedness, and he could be easily replaced by another somewhat intelligent and similarly underhanded person. He seemed sincere in believing that merit wasn't much of a thing and meritocracy is a racist trope. I got roundly mocked on twitter for arguing that merit is real. I'd like to understand that point of view better, because I'm at a loss too.
If you want other examples of people who are pissed off at the concept of merit for other reasons, talk to some PhDs (or other holders of high academic merit) that are struggling to find work.
I'm very new to the understanding that the word "merit" is now politicized, and I find it very unfortunate.
For the sake of humanity, I would hope that at least the _definition_ of "merit" could be commonly accepted..
If you find a definition of merit that everyone can agree on, please let us know, because that would be news to me. In my experience in the US at least, most people seem to object to there being a central organization that decides who has merit and who doesn't.
Almost all successful people are somewhat intelligent coupled with a lot of luck/street-smart/hard work/underhandedness etc. These are what constitute "merit" in a businessman.
So your friend is partly right. But certainly you couldn't just replace Musk with someone of the same intelligence, that is not what determines success at that level.
However Quotas I don't think are the answer.
1) because they reinforce negative stereotypes (you are only here because you are x, rather than being qualified)
2) They make the candidate feel like they don't belong/less valued
3) they don't fix the underlying issues
Now, this is from a UK perspective, so the next points are less universal.
In the UK we have a training issue. It is hard as a startup to source mid/senior "diversity" candidates because they are rare.
Therefore we as an industry need to get into schools and provide mentorship to allow children of all types to come into IT. UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.
since 2019, there are apprenticeships that provide 2 days a week tutoring. before you had be of a certain company size to qualify for funding. However the battle is to get enough people to apply for the apprenticeships. From a business perspective its a brilliant way to source cheap, loyal and effective workers. For companies like the financial times, its worked out pretty well. They have something like 70 apprentice/apprentice grade employees in a tech team of 400.
Right, you can't solve pipeline problems near the end of the pipeline. You have to provide robust support as far back as possible. Quotas are a lackluster response to outrage porn and a desire to implement quick fixes, when thoughtful, long term policy decisions are what provides the desired outcome (equitable power distribution).
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
That actually sounds universal.
I think a big part of choosing a career/education track is having role models. If there are no women now in tech, then girls will not be inspired. Imagine how many boys are inspired by Elon Musk to work on cars and rockets.
Quotas are not the end game. It can be seen as a necessary hack to kick start the process.
Boys don't need role models. They don't do things "because Elon Musk is cool". You speak about things you really don't understand. Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all. Boys obsess over things. Taking things to sometimes absurd extremes. And they're not doing any of it because they want to be rich, or want women, or want to be Elon Musk. Trust me. I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?
Lol. Well what I've noticed is that it is women who obsess over their gender, men far less so.
Freud got it right I think - penis envy is real!
Boys are surrounded by role models in lots of areas in a way girls are not (and that was even more true a couple generations back.) They don't need any special effort to provide them because their social context is suffused with them, both real and fictional.
> Boys do things because they are driven to do them for seemingly no reason at all.
No, if you pay much attention to boys, there's plenty of direct inspiration from specific role models and images from their social context.
its not role models, its expectations.
I as a man am not expected to become a carer. I am not expected to be a nurse. I am not expected to show emotion. I am expected to fight, talk through grunting and like sports.
Girls are taught to be girls, they must be nice, they must smile, they must care, they must be demure.
Now, this is automatic. You treat others how you see others being treated, unless you have reason to change your behavior.
> I've spent all my evenings of the last month on my latest electronics project. Do you think I'm doing that just because Charles Babbage also had a penis?
nope.
but, try this: obsess over caring for orphans, injured animals, restoring habitats, etc etc. Kinda naff right?
Its equally as hard as electronics, requires the same level of science. But its not done by boys because its "what girls do"
I don't think that sort of attitude comes from anywhere but the family unit. All this talk of orgs needing to cater to otherwise non-applicants and governments needing to intervene is just barking up the wrong tree.
I am not asking for state mandated _anything_ I am arguing for a societal change.
For example I'm asking for adults to stop telling my daughter that her mum isn't a doctor, that I am.
I want them to stop telling off my daughter when she says that I am the one that combs/washes/plaits her hair.
I want them to stop yanking soft toys from my son saying "only girls play with soft toys"
> All this talk of orgs needing to cater to otherwise non-applicants
Nothing I have suggested is this.
Guess what, I wasn't "expected" to become a programmer either. I was outcast and bullied in school for being a geek and a boffin. I still did it, though, because I don't give a toss what you or anyone else says I should do. I don't fight, nor do I like sports.
As for girls being taught to be nice etc., are you suggesting we teach them to be not nice? Or maybe you think they are all naturally unpleasant but they've been taught to have a nice façade? Personally I think girls who are nice are nice because they are nice. But that's just me.
Who says caring for orphans or injured animals is naff? You? Certainly not me. I honestly don't know a single person who thinks that.
You vastly overestimate the importance of nurture in all of this. Think about it: even if we assume boys and girls are treated differently, why is it that some boys grow up to be programmers while others grow up to wipe shit off toilets? They had exactly the same education. Exactly the same opportunities. Why would did one choose to earn a pittance wiping shit over earning loads sitting at a desk?
a working class boy has the same education and opportunities as a boy going to a boarding school?
At my school I was expected to become a builder, farm hand or similar. Its only because I had parents with enough time and education to _expect_ me to be different. My genetics are not superior, had I been adopted at 3 weeks and given to a posh couple, I'd have been a lawyer, or "business man". Had I been given to an inner city working class couple, most likely I'd be in jail now, knowing the shit I got up to as teenager.
I didn't say that, but even within the same school, people end up doing different things. I went to one of the worst schools in the country. When it was closed down the OFSTED report said it was in the "most deprived area in the country".
We could certainly talk about the differences in opportunities between being rich and being poor in this country. The class system is alive and well. No matter how hard I try I will never be part of the elite Oxbridge club in this country. And realistically speaking poor people can't become rich just by hard work. Being rich requires inheritance.
But that's a different issue. Rich people have just as many girls as boys. Rich girls have far more opportunities than poor boys, yet still we see more boys end up in tech than girls. You might say the same barriers exist throughout all layers of society, but then tell me why if I go on Github and pick any random project, it was in all likelihood written by a man? There are rich women out there with not a shred of responsibility and all the time in the world to dedicate to programming. But they don't. Because they don't want to.
Women outnumber men as graduates, in medicine, in law. What is the difference between those fields and IT?
For at least the last decade, the “feminist” movement in Western countries has been a force for misandry, not equality.
Arguably, the feminist movement in education has been a force for misandry since women became the educational majority in the 1980s and feminism in education became a sexist power movement by the majority in education.
I'm not sure about the UK but law and medicine in the US used affirmative action to address sexism in the profession.
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
I'm not sure what changed, but its seen as something that a career minded middle class girl _should_ do. it certainly wasn't any sort of legal discrimination.
I'm not sure of the exact stats, but the slim majority of first year doctors in the UK are women
Now this is the million dollar question. I don't have a succinct answer. I _suspect_ that a strong part of it is that IT is notorious for having handsy/abusive colleagues. but that cant be the entire reason, especially given Law's reputation.
This is probably not the answer anyone wants... but in medicine and law, you need a university diploma, or it is illegal to do the job. So you can simply set quotas at schools, and thus shape the future workforce.
In IT, many people do not have formal education. So even if you would set 50% (or even 100%) quotas at schools, it wouldn't necessarily achieve the same change at workplace. I suppose people are aware of it, so they don't even try this way.
If you want to fix gender ratio in IT using the same strategy, the first step would be to make it illegal for people without diploma to program computers. Then you can restrict the number of men at workplace by limiting the diplomas.
Of course, if you would want to fix gender ratio in IT using a different strategy, you could e.g. listen to Damore and make overtime illegal, perhaps require companies to provide part-time jobs, and otherwise remove things that women actually try to avoid.
Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence to back it up or is this just a feeling?
> UK society has decided that girls are not destined for IT and that needs to fucking stop.
Any evidence for this? Or just another feeling?
If folks (and society as a whole) are going to push diversity, we should all be clear on whether this is a moral issue or a practical issue because the implications are very different and it dictates which one takes priority.
monocultures have explosive growth, but are vulnerable to the same threats, this means that one small change can bring a company to its knees. Its the same throughout nature.
> Any evidence for this? Or just another feeling?
https://www.bcs.org/more/about-us/press-office/press-release...
shows improvement, but its far from equitable
https://www.stemwomen.co.uk/blog/2021/01/women-in-stem-perce...
is for university, and shows a less rosy picture.
given the numbers, its pretty clear there is something significant stopping women studying computing. Given the attitudes, and general conditioning that programmers are male, I can see how it arises.
As a thought experiment, try this: imagine being a boy at 16 and standing up in front of class and saying that you want to be a nursery assistant. Its not going to end well.
Almost the same level of ridicule and "raised eyebrows" would be given to a "normal" girl at 14/15/16 standing up and saying that she was going to be a developer.
Or that they are free to do what they want and choose to do something else.
I strongly encourage you to expose yourself to people who are not like yourself. Especially women, because they are most unlike you. Believe it or not, vast swathes of the general public have no interest at all in computers or programming. And this is despite it having lower barrier to entry than other technology. The GNU project is coming up to 40 years old and today not only is there more free software than ever before, it's more easily available than ever before. There is a wealth of free training material out there ranging from excellent interactive tutorials for the latest frameworks to full University lecture series. Anyone who wants to do it can do it. But most don't because they are not like you!
I don't hang out with programmers. I live in a council estate in a rough part of london. I am fully aware of the world outside tech. Why? because I spend my time trying to unfuck what the council/government are doing to the people around me.
I'm going to level with you. why do I want more women in tech? two reasons:
1) I want my daughter to walk into my job and feel at home. I don't want her to be constantly creeped on like my colleagues are now. (or worse just being told they are wrong because they are different) I want them to feel comfortable like I do.
2) I worked at a number of companies where we had almost parity, it was wonderful. Its hard to describe what it was like, the only way I can think of is when your really loud tinnitus suddenly disappears.
> Anyone who wants to do it can do it
yeah nah.
I had to change my accent to get a job. Nobody hires a country bumpkin. I have coached a number of people, I know they are good programmers, excellent communicators, brilliant interviewers. They have been rejected for "culture fit" reasons, because they are brown, have a vagina, or worse still a long name.
At one company, my boss overruled my teams hire because they didn't find a candidate attractive enough. We lost a cheap and brilliant engineer because my boss was being a shit.
The last point is this: on the minimum wage, in rented accommodation, getting enough time, space and privacy to learn programming is a herculean task. especially if there only one TV, and you can't just shove your pi in at any time.
Undermining the credibility of existing, properly qualified players in the field is one of the most pernicious aspects of a quota system.
Quotas and affirmative action have worked successfully in other fields.
Law in the US was a hostile profession to women in the 1950s and 1960s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (first in her class at Columbia) and Sandra Day O'Connor (third in her class at Stanford), for example, both had trouble finding work after graduation. The legal industry addressed sexism by making gender balance an explicit goal. Law schools admitted equal numbers of men and women; law firms hired equal numbers of male and female associates. Women now make up 36% of lawyers and the majority of law school graduates.
Gender ratios are widely tracked within the industry, though, e.g. (https://ylw.yale.edu/top-firms/). Also clients for legal services often have their own diversity requirements (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/02/business/dealbook/faceboo...).
If you're looking for a historical reference, (https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...) is 26 pages and covers the history of women in law from 1920 to 1970. Cynthia Epstein's Women in Law should cover this topic but I haven't yet read it.
Setting hard quotas is pretty different than tracking diversity as a key performance metric
Wonder why.
So not sure forcing gender quotas on them will prove any point.
1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=women+dominated+fields+pay+gap&t=h...
Fields where men dominate tend to have greater risk of death or injury on the job. 97% of deaths at work were men. Could it be that when averaged out safer jobs pay less?
https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf
I'm replying to a comment which doesn't make that distinction either. But finance is notorious for the health problems in the field. Heart attacks and other stress related fatalities are not uncommon. And in tech there's burnout.
I also suspect the parent comment wasn't referring to tech and finance as the dangerous male-dominated jobs.
Sure, this is a crude and ugly way to force the matter, but private industry f*ked this up bigtime. If you don't want government regulation, you have to step up.
Success example: Google and the other cloud hosting providers got ahead of environmental regulation by many years for the "green"ness of their data centers - yeah yeah greenwashing whatever, the point is that they're making a much more serious attempt than anybody else, and unsurprisingly, nobody's talking about mandating green data centers, because they're demonstrated leadership.
I generally am in agreement with you.
Slightly tangential but still related subject, my take on why organizations decline: https://realminority.wordpress.com/
Though from certain perspective, it gives us extra motivation to find out who is the right person for the job.
I guess I don't understand the argument:
1. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates. (The argument implied by the very first paragraph of the article.)
2. Too many quota slots for too few qualified female candidates who the same age as the typical male board member. (The argument implied in this quote.)
3. I'm going to say there are too few qualified female candidates to generate a title suitable for much clicking. Then in the interview I'll switch to talking about how I've met a lot of perfectly capable female candidates of the younger generations and speculate about how they'll probably eventually fill board positions in the future. (The argument implied by the "smell" I get from clicking on stories like these and leaving with no more knowledge than I had before I clicked.)
4. Something completely different.
Which is it? I can't tell because it appears a stenographer wrote down utterances from an ostensibly well-known person in their field, and didn't press for clarification or supporting evidence.
Edit: clarification