>But wow on the woman quota, I can’t imagine how easy they had to make those interviews to hit that number.
:/
They said the same about MIT (50-50 gender ratio). In reality smart women just like studying with other smart women. I doubt it's different in the workplace.
Realistically assuming a 4-8x larger pool of potential male engineers, as well as assuming equal average skill among males and females, hiring 50% women is what's disgustingly sexist.
If 10 woman and 40 men apply and you hire 5 each based only on sex, you are sexually discriminating against the 35 other men some of whom are statistically highly likely to be better candidates than some of the 5 women hired.
Get your identity politics off this forum, it does not belong here.
Can we agree that men and women are equally capable and intelligent? You have 40 male candidates and 10 female candidates. Let's say only the top 20% of all candidates are good enough. That would mean 40/5 =8 male candidates and 10/5=2 female candidates would be suitable hires.
If instead you hired 5 male and 5 female candidates under these conditions, then you would've been discriminating against male candidates in that you hired female candidates that didn't meet your "top 20% of total candidates" criteria.
Best I could find was "SAT patterns and engineering and computer
science college majors: an intersectional,
state-level study"
It looked at Virginian public school graduates. Non-URM (underrepresented minority) men and non-URM women who majored in computer science scored similarly on the math part of their SATs. Women scored 3% better on their verbal.
Your quote doesn't address the self-selection question.
In fact, taking that paper, it suggests that males are about 30-100% or even more more likely to enroll in an ECS major across the range of math scores.
For example, among those participants with a math score of 700, about 15% of females vs 30% of males end up enrolling in an ECS major.
The only data I have is that males tend to be inherently better at abstract thinking and logic, seem to be inherently more interested in systems as opposed to women.
So if anything, any data would suggest that males are more skilled engineers than women, but I'd like to go easy on the critics here and assume males and females on average are hypothetically equal in that regard.
you forget the effect of self-selection into the field, which could easily override whatever attribute you're referencing, that's why we need supporting data before assuming they're the same
Women engineers on an average aren't any brighter than men. The way twitter was hiring it seems women outperform men in interviews by a factor of 4-5x given their huge numbers. I am sure if somehow you could remove gender from the process, women won't be more than 20% of any bigtech company.
Because the pool of male engineers is ~4-8x larger than female candidates, so hiring 50% women is intentionally hiring worse employees because of their genitals.
The interview process may be the same but the hiring choices ultimately must be discriminatorily skewed to achieve 50% women in the workforce if the percentage of women among the applicants is way less.
I've been part of a number of recruiting exercises to hire 20-100 SWEs at different levels. DE&I is front and center, both implicitly through corporate culture and explicitly through reminders, comments, etc in the process. It very clearly influences outcomes.
I've come to terms with it as the results have been pretty impressive in the last place I worked. It creates a 'put up or shut up' environment where excuses don't really get much traction. I led a team of eight SWE and six were women, representing both the top and bottom of skillset and teamwork in my crew, one in particular being easily top three engineers I've worked with in my 25 year career. She has the potential to go very very far.
The pool is skewed male because of sexist bullshit. Computers used to be viewed as predominantly clerical and thus women were far more prevalent. And it’s patently false to assume it has to effect hiring quality at all.
Nonsense, in countries with higher gender equality women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths, tech is not one of them. Men and women are not equal.
Ok, but why is the pool of engineers 80% men when the population is 50% women?
I'll offer one explanation: because the women that go into the field get treated like shit and burn out. There are many documented examples of tech businesses with systemic sexual harassment problems[0]. If your business takes steps to ensure its corporate culture does not fall into that same trap, then women who don't want to be sexually harassed will flock to you. That's how you get 50% women in a sexually-discriminated field: do the hard work of actually rooting out sex pests.
Because it is not representative of the underlying demographics. There are vastly more men trained to work in the field (one representative datapoint: there's an 80/20 gender difference in computer science degrees).
If you are hiring equal numbers of women and men from a talent pool which is 80% male then you are almost certainly illegally discriminating on the basis of a protected class.
Also, they're saying: "At least half of our Tweepforce will be women". So they're suggesting that more than 50% of one gender is ok, as long as they're women.
Only 28% of software developers are women, so it’s impossible for all of tech to get to 50%. The only way to actually get 50% representation is by promoting tech careers to women, or by barring jobs/training to men
In my university not too long ago, my classes were maybe 14% women? May have been slightly more in others, but I remember counting at one point
We need to stop accusing companies of being sexist, they are bending over backwards to try to be the ones who get closer to 50%, which reduces the available female talent pool for other companies.
All these sexism allegations are completely toxic
The fix comes from outreach towards teen and preteen girls to convince them to consider stem. I’ve attended lectures on this
No, this is bad. Because the whole point of a diversity program is to reduce hiring based on race[0].
If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance. Like, "all the fast molecules in a can of air moving to one side" levels of impossible. If you want to argue that the problem is education or qualifications instead of overt refusal to hire minorities, that's one thing[1], but that's not an argument against measuring the company's diversity at all. That's an argument against affirmative action policies.
As far as I'm concerned, deleting this page is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the problem.
[0] Or sex, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, etc...
[1] Though I will disagree vehemently with the idea that it's purely an education problem. The minorities are here, they just don't stick around because big tech treats them like garbage.
The crucial piece you're missing is that the problem is further upstream. Most American commercial pilots are white men. Most job applicants are too.
Forcing airlines to hire people who are not qualified just to meet a quota is the absolute worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it exacerbates it. What do you think happens when you force employers to hire people who are unqualified, and those people are all women or minorities? Well, now you just might create a perception that women and minorities are inherently less capable. Obviously untrue. But let's fix the pipeline instead of mandating "equity".
We should also work towards accepting that people are different and they have different drives and passions in their life. I imagine most Hindu women do not aspire to being professional rappers, or construction workers, for example.
No, "fixing the pipeline" is also a red herring. The problem isn't "tech businesses should hire more women just for their gender" or "more women need to get CS degrees". The way you get to, say, all white men in your field is from attrition; i.e. all the women and minorities burning out and changing careers. That burnout comes from exploitative labor practices and workplace harassment, which are rampant in the tech industry - and especially in games development.
If your business is able to properly enforce workplace rules against harassment, then you will have more women and minorities than other firms purely because they will remain at the company. No need for quotas, diversity hires, or affirmative action.
There's a difference between having a quota and having a target.
Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.
That said, I agree with you that quotas are problematic. They are the wrong solution for the problem of lack of diversity.
> Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.
And if it's not, surely the company can find a hiring manager "a bit more motivated to hit company diversity targets".
If you run a mom and pop shop and need a new employee, sure, this strategy is great. Codifying it at major corporations creates all of the same bad incentives as quotas, just implicitly.
> If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance.
Affirmative action is indeed based on this fundamentally flawed premise. Such statistical bias occurs quite frequently, even in the absence of racism/discrimination. This is, among other things, evidenced by some minority groups being disproportionally successful in many societies. I strongly recommend Thomas Sowell's book on the topic: "Discrimination and Disparities".
No one there seems to be over 40. I feel excluded, and am being entirely serious here.
Also - Twitter have offices in Ireland, don't they? How is religious diversity coming along in the Dublin office? The Catholic-Protestant conflict is less bitter in Dublin than in Belfast, but one cannot pretend discrimination and division is about race everywhere.
Not just the diversity page - it looks like they removed a bunch of pages from the careers site - e.g the "early career" page that is in the header is also removed. Only the "search jobs" button remains.
Bonus: almost half of Meta employees are from Asia.
Reminds me of a screenshot of WPengines ‘diversity’ pledge on their website that proceeded to state nearly 80% of their staff were female. They changed it not long after.
This last paragraph reminds me of a all hands monthly meeting a while ago during which the DE&I lady reported that we did great with diversity during the past month by hiring ~80% women.
LOL this happened with us too. We were 2 indians and 2 white guys from norway in the team. We needed to add more jr devs to our team to carry out some of the tasks. They only ever sent us resumes for women and when we finally hired 2 women they thanked us for being a open and accepting team. We had to weed out 18 candidates before we settled on the only good ones. so it was almost 2/20 hit rate
Is it not useful to highlight that we have no idea how to measure “the best,” so defending hiring practices because they’re filtering for “the best” is silly?
Access to education and infrastructure could be the reason for disparity. But real challenge to solve is to have 60% of giant corps coming from Asia, run with proper corporate controls.
The idea is moreso that Meta abuses the visa system to hire SWEs on the cheap.
Because America has a moderately[0]-restrictive immigration system, people who come here on a visa are committed workers. If you decide you don't want to work for one company after moving here, your options are to leave the country in 30 days or find another firm knowledgeable enough about the immigration system to adopt your existing visa application.
The reason why this happens is because the system is designed to be deliberately difficult to use. The idea being that if it's hard to hire an H1B visa worker, you'll hire an American instead. But because this works as intended, companies that know how to work the system get access to hordes of cheap, pliant labor. So instead of protecting American workers, we protect well-connected businesses that can screw over American workers.
I meant to say that Europe is harder to get into than the US. Their visa processes are probably more exploitative than US H1B, but I know less about it so I left it in a footnote.
It's interesting that they had to hire from abroad. Meanwhile Latine people are the least represented demographic. It's not just Trump and racism at the border. Racism against Latine is everywhere. And worse is how accepted it is.
I’m frankly just disappointed. There’s a comment in this thread questioning how much they had to “dumb down” the interviews for women. It’s fucked up in this field and it frustrates me to no end because the women I’ve worked with are far and away some of the best and they constantly deal with this attitude. It’s not okay and the bar should be higher for this orange website.
> “Here’s a reality check for you with a completely different scenario but a conclusion that reaffirms my bias”
It’s really a terrible argument to compare hiring for a physically intensive job to hiring for technical and administrative roles. it borders on bad faith.
If they're bold enough to do it for a physically intensive job despite the clear absurdity, why wouldn't they do it for something else where it's easier to get away with? The people driving this phenomenon are the same in both cases. Good riddance.
It's hard to have diversity when you've got three employees left and some South African douchebag shouting at them to write code in between making coffee and fixing the air ducts.
91 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadBut wow on the woman quota, I can’t imagine how easy they had to make those interviews to hit that number.
:/
They said the same about MIT (50-50 gender ratio). In reality smart women just like studying with other smart women. I doubt it's different in the workplace.
In other words, there's a positive feedback loop.
Realistically assuming a 4-8x larger pool of potential male engineers, as well as assuming equal average skill among males and females, hiring 50% women is what's disgustingly sexist.
If 10 woman and 40 men apply and you hire 5 each based only on sex, you are sexually discriminating against the 35 other men some of whom are statistically highly likely to be better candidates than some of the 5 women hired.
Get your identity politics off this forum, it does not belong here.
The men aren’t being “sexually discriminated” against, they’re being competed against and that threatens you. Grow up.
Just keep it fair!
Can we agree that men and women are equally capable and intelligent? You have 40 male candidates and 10 female candidates. Let's say only the top 20% of all candidates are good enough. That would mean 40/5 =8 male candidates and 10/5=2 female candidates would be suitable hires.
If instead you hired 5 male and 5 female candidates under these conditions, then you would've been discriminating against male candidates in that you hired female candidates that didn't meet your "top 20% of total candidates" criteria.
It looked at Virginian public school graduates. Non-URM (underrepresented minority) men and non-URM women who majored in computer science scored similarly on the math part of their SATs. Women scored 3% better on their verbal.
In fact, taking that paper, it suggests that males are about 30-100% or even more more likely to enroll in an ECS major across the range of math scores.
For example, among those participants with a math score of 700, about 15% of females vs 30% of males end up enrolling in an ECS major.
do you have data to back this assumption, given the effect of self-selection within each group?
So if anything, any data would suggest that males are more skilled engineers than women, but I'd like to go easy on the critics here and assume males and females on average are hypothetically equal in that regard.
I've come to terms with it as the results have been pretty impressive in the last place I worked. It creates a 'put up or shut up' environment where excuses don't really get much traction. I led a team of eight SWE and six were women, representing both the top and bottom of skillset and teamwork in my crew, one in particular being easily top three engineers I've worked with in my 25 year career. She has the potential to go very very far.
Explain what you mean by this, without making a hacked butcher job of it.
I’ve got a fresh drink and plate of snacks, I’m actually giddily excited to see how you do (and of course have the X-posts drafted out already)
I'll offer one explanation: because the women that go into the field get treated like shit and burn out. There are many documented examples of tech businesses with systemic sexual harassment problems[0]. If your business takes steps to ensure its corporate culture does not fall into that same trap, then women who don't want to be sexually harassed will flock to you. That's how you get 50% women in a sexually-discriminated field: do the hard work of actually rooting out sex pests.
[0] Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard-King, Microsoft, etc
Is it conceivable to you that women may also be inherently less interested in tech- and more so in people-jobs compared to their male counterparts?
Maybe this interesting talk titled "Autism and the male brain" can serve to enlighten you on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8
If you are hiring equal numbers of women and men from a talent pool which is 80% male then you are almost certainly illegally discriminating on the basis of a protected class.
Also say what you will about it, once a company/team gets known for having women other women will flock to it.
Edit: haha people downvoting for the reality that women like working with other women.
In my university not too long ago, my classes were maybe 14% women? May have been slightly more in others, but I remember counting at one point
We need to stop accusing companies of being sexist, they are bending over backwards to try to be the ones who get closer to 50%, which reduces the available female talent pool for other companies.
All these sexism allegations are completely toxic
The fix comes from outreach towards teen and preteen girls to convince them to consider stem. I’ve attended lectures on this
It’s just not possible to get 50% of women in without significant handicaps to the interview process.
If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance. Like, "all the fast molecules in a can of air moving to one side" levels of impossible. If you want to argue that the problem is education or qualifications instead of overt refusal to hire minorities, that's one thing[1], but that's not an argument against measuring the company's diversity at all. That's an argument against affirmative action policies.
As far as I'm concerned, deleting this page is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the problem.
[0] Or sex, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, etc...
[1] Though I will disagree vehemently with the idea that it's purely an education problem. The minorities are here, they just don't stick around because big tech treats them like garbage.
Forcing airlines to hire people who are not qualified just to meet a quota is the absolute worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it exacerbates it. What do you think happens when you force employers to hire people who are unqualified, and those people are all women or minorities? Well, now you just might create a perception that women and minorities are inherently less capable. Obviously untrue. But let's fix the pipeline instead of mandating "equity".
We should also work towards accepting that people are different and they have different drives and passions in their life. I imagine most Hindu women do not aspire to being professional rappers, or construction workers, for example.
If your business is able to properly enforce workplace rules against harassment, then you will have more women and minorities than other firms purely because they will remain at the company. No need for quotas, diversity hires, or affirmative action.
Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.
That said, I agree with you that quotas are problematic. They are the wrong solution for the problem of lack of diversity.
And if it's not, surely the company can find a hiring manager "a bit more motivated to hit company diversity targets".
If you run a mom and pop shop and need a new employee, sure, this strategy is great. Codifying it at major corporations creates all of the same bad incentives as quotas, just implicitly.
Affirmative action is indeed based on this fundamentally flawed premise. Such statistical bias occurs quite frequently, even in the absence of racism/discrimination. This is, among other things, evidenced by some minority groups being disproportionally successful in many societies. I strongly recommend Thomas Sowell's book on the topic: "Discrimination and Disparities".
Also - Twitter have offices in Ireland, don't they? How is religious diversity coming along in the Dublin office? The Catholic-Protestant conflict is less bitter in Dublin than in Belfast, but one cannot pretend discrimination and division is about race everywhere.
See the header at https://careers.twitter.com
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/meta-facebook-layoffs-h...
Bonus: almost half of Meta employees are from Asia.
Reminds me of a screenshot of WPengines ‘diversity’ pledge on their website that proceeded to state nearly 80% of their staff were female. They changed it not long after.
That seems low for a global company as around 60% of the global population is in Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_and_contine...
Edited for clarity
Because America has a moderately[0]-restrictive immigration system, people who come here on a visa are committed workers. If you decide you don't want to work for one company after moving here, your options are to leave the country in 30 days or find another firm knowledgeable enough about the immigration system to adopt your existing visa application.
The reason why this happens is because the system is designed to be deliberately difficult to use. The idea being that if it's hard to hire an H1B visa worker, you'll hire an American instead. But because this works as intended, companies that know how to work the system get access to hordes of cheap, pliant labor. So instead of protecting American workers, we protect well-connected businesses that can screw over American workers.
[0] Compared to EU nations, at least
Sincerely, someone who dealt with the nonsense of multiple European visas.
"Fire brigade relaxes strength and fitness test to make entry easier for women" [1]
This stuff has precedent.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375381/Fire-servic...
It’s really a terrible argument to compare hiring for a physically intensive job to hiring for technical and administrative roles. it borders on bad faith.