5 ms·

I can imagine many scenarios where even without biasing your hiring that your company doesn't look, demographically, like your hiring pool. For example, if your

by x1798DE 10y ago

I can imagine many scenarios where even without biasing your hiring that your company doesn't look, demographically, like your hiring pool. For example, if your candidate pool is 80% foreign and you have a limited number of visas to offer. One can also imagine that if you are a particularly "female-friendly" company, word of mouth and primarily-female contact networks (e.g. women who know each other through female-only meetups or "girls who code" style events) would naturally bias your most qualified candidates towards being women, particularly if almost all your competitors are either seen as "female unfriendly" and/or don't have access to the primarily-female contact network.

drawnwren 10y ago
Your first argument is satisfied by 2 and 3 of the post you replied to. Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  Well, I'm assuming "applicant pool" means the pool of all people applying. My point was that even if women are a small portion of the applicant pool, they may represent a larger quality-weighted portion of the total applicant pool. I agree that if as your population becomes large, you should asymptotically be approaching the demographics of your quality-weighted applicant pool. Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")
redthrowaway 10y ago
How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them. If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend. Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.
- dsp1234 10y ago
  Have a public track record (company policy, actual actions) of preemptively dealing with the topics that those groups care about (sexual harassment, glass ceiling, transgender friendly accommodations, etc). I don't think that falls under any of the three items from above, unless you feel like taking those actions, and having those people seek your company out is a form of "get lucky".
  - amyjess 10y ago
    So, off the top of my head, largely inspired by the Vox article on how to eliminate the wage gap [0]: - Have strong sexual harassment policies and aggressively enforce them. - Require employees to keep up-to-date documentation on everything they work on so somebody else can jump in and take over their stuff in an absence. - Nobody should ever work more than 8 hours in a day. Even voluntary overtime should be strictly banned (if it's not banned, then people who work overtime voluntarily will look better on performance reviews than people who can only put in 8 hours). - If there's truly an emergency situation where someone has to be called in, those emergencies should be exceedingly rare, should only happen when there is an existential threat to the company, and accompanied by a massive bonus and/or extra vacation days ("hey, I know it's Saturday, but the servers are on fire, and we'll get sued if they're not back up ASAP, so if you come in and fix them now we'll give you the next week off"). If anything actually needs 24/7 attention on the regular, then hire people to work in shifts instead of calling people in on their days off. - Flexible hours. As long as an employee works ~8 hours a day, it doesn't matter what those 8 hours are. They don't even have to be contiguous. If you want to work 11:00-14:00, go home for a few hours, and then come back and work 19:00-22:00, you should be able to do that. - Absences should only count against PTO if you take off at least four hours in a day. If you have to leave two hours early for your kid's doctor's appointment, it won't count against you. (this is actually policy at my employer, and it works very well) - Allow people to work from home whenever they want. Imagine you're a parent, and your kid is stuck at home sick and needs you to stay home and keep an eye on them: you won't have to eat a vacation day to keep an eye on your kid. - Avoid any other hallmarks of brogrammer culture I can't think of right now. Basically you want to create an environment where women, especially mothers, would kill to work at. [0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explained-real http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

by x1798DE 10y ago

drawnwren 10y ago

Your first argument is satisfied by 2 and 3 of the post you replied to. Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.

x1798DE 10y ago
Well, I'm assuming "applicant pool" means the pool of all people applying. My point was that even if women are a small portion of the applicant pool, they may represent a larger quality-weighted portion of the total applicant pool. I agree that if as your population becomes large, you should asymptotically be approaching the demographics of your quality-weighted applicant pool. Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")

redthrowaway 10y ago

How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them. If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend. Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.

dsp1234 10y ago
Have a public track record (company policy, actual actions) of preemptively dealing with the topics that those groups care about (sexual harassment, glass ceiling, transgender friendly accommodations, etc). I don't think that falls under any of the three items from above, unless you feel like taking those actions, and having those people seek your company out is a form of "get lucky".
- amyjess 10y ago
  So, off the top of my head, largely inspired by the Vox article on how to eliminate the wage gap [0]: - Have strong sexual harassment policies and aggressively enforce them. - Require employees to keep up-to-date documentation on everything they work on so somebody else can jump in and take over their stuff in an absence. - Nobody should ever work more than 8 hours in a day. Even voluntary overtime should be strictly banned (if it's not banned, then people who work overtime voluntarily will look better on performance reviews than people who can only put in 8 hours). - If there's truly an emergency situation where someone has to be called in, those emergencies should be exceedingly rare, should only happen when there is an existential threat to the company, and accompanied by a massive bonus and/or extra vacation days ("hey, I know it's Saturday, but the servers are on fire, and we'll get sued if they're not back up ASAP, so if you come in and fix them now we'll give you the next week off"). If anything actually needs 24/7 attention on the regular, then hire people to work in shifts instead of calling people in on their days off. - Flexible hours. As long as an employee works ~8 hours a day, it doesn't matter what those 8 hours are. They don't even have to be contiguous. If you want to work 11:00-14:00, go home for a few hours, and then come back and work 19:00-22:00, you should be able to do that. - Absences should only count against PTO if you take off at least four hours in a day. If you have to leave two hours early for your kid's doctor's appointment, it won't count against you. (this is actually policy at my employer, and it works very well) - Allow people to work from home whenever they want. Imagine you're a parent, and your kid is stuck at home sick and needs you to stay home and keep an eye on them: you won't have to eat a vacation day to keep an eye on your kid. - Avoid any other hallmarks of brogrammer culture I can't think of right now. Basically you want to create an environment where women, especially mothers, would kill to work at. [0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explained-real http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...