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I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

• needlessly2 9y ago
  what if we started young boys to get interested in gender studies?
  • sctb 9y ago
    Would you please not troll here? If that wasn't your intention, you need to make this comment more substantive and connect the dots to the current topic.
    • needlessly2 9y ago
      because we shouldn't encourage young boys gender equality?? you're dumb
      • dang 9y ago
        We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?
• scierama 9y ago
  TL; DR Woman startup CEO fires women, hires men who work for peanuts because men love coding and thus are higher "energy"; takes advantage of recent controversy to get free advertising on HN. Side note, said woman lacks professionalism and uses profanity in an appeal to the peanuts working, 20twenties'ish men reading the article.
• tptacek 9y ago
  Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing. The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place. Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares? Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)
  • ksk 9y ago
    >But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. From the article: >>Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech. >>Start a mentoring program. >>If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized. >>Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases. >>Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective. Which part of her list of suggestions is a cop-out? >It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline I fail to see how any reading of the article will give you that impression.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    Compared to her anecdote about her kids, she spends more space recounting how she tried to hire and retain women with no appreciable success. EDIT: Also she recommends these at the bottom of her piece: """ Start a mentoring program. If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized. Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases. Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective. """ ...the mentoring program could be for girls and young women, but it could also be for women already on the payroll. The rest of the recommendation are for after hiring has already taken place.
    • tptacek 9y ago
      It's not news to anyone that the candidate pool for software developers is comprised almost entirely of men. You can't have have hired a single software developer without confronting that fact. Exactly what was interesting about her reported experience hiring?
      • humanrebar 9y ago
        That's a fair point. Her recommendations also look a lot like current corporate diversity best practices as far as I can tell. Likely it's interesting because she's a coder, a founder, a hiring manager, and a woman. That gives her a lot of credibility in one person that is fairly unique. I suppose, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an argument from authority. But people do make decisions that way.
• eddigo 9y ago
  I like realistic posts like this. She presents her experience and the problems associated with trying to diversify a tech team. She's sincere in her efforts, yet still finds she can't achieve her goals. Also, she brings up two points I've long believed about the troubling lack of women in tech. She's 100% correct about the fact that it's too late to make a difference in industry when you're only dealing with women who just graduated from college. You have to start earlier and teach young girls that technical skills are necessary. Even if they don't like technical subject matter, they should be made to learn it. It's no longer an option. Aiding men in industry who want to help is crucial. I see a lot of rhetoric online about how all men in tech are a problem and that they should be excluded from this whole process. "Men can't speak for women." If you believe that, you're contributing to the problem. Perhaps men can't speak for women, but they can at least speak with them. Patience will be required because this situation isn't going to be solved overnight, or even in 10 years. It'll take a generation of concerted effort to really make a difference.
• jpfed 9y ago
  >Feminist outbursts are driving even the most genuine of men away from us. I think this depends on what "genuine" refers to in this sentence. Many issues have loud and/or shrill advocates on any or all sides, but that has nothing to do with the actual merits of any side. Anyone who is seriously interested in arriving at the best estimates of truth or utility available should disregard whether or not advocates are shrill and simply focus on facts.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    When part of your pitch relies on trust and goodwill (open dialogues, open corporate culture, leaders worth voting for, etc.), there is a component you cannot neglect: trust. If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.
  • JohnnyConatus 9y ago
    Serious != genuine. Serious people are people willing to put their time and/or money into a cause. All power to these people but they are a fraction of the critical mass needed in any social campaign. Genuine people are people who are sympathetic and have good intentions. They will do / not do what is helpful to the cause but it's not on of their top X priorities. Every movement needs lots and lots of these people. But these people will flee if a situation becomes toxic or they feel like they have more to lose than they can risk. For example, few "genuine" men would ever write the article written by the OP, which essentially says, it's a pipeline problem. Why? Because even if they could prove with hard data that the biggest factor is the lack of female applicants they would still get torched by the ideologues. So the safe choice is not to engage, give a little extra consideration to the few female applicants received, and move on with your day.
  • throwaway14159 9y ago
    Maybe in some imaginary utopia. Here in the real world, being shrill or hateful is a great way to drive people away from your point of view, regardless of its merits.
• whipoodle 9y ago
  It has been kind of strange to watch the diversity programs and the conversations around it, because it all seems partially designed to sorta try to fix the problems, but also not be confrontational or force any hard questions to be asked/answered. It seems more important to do something, and to be seen doing something, than to get real about what will work, and what won't, and why.
  • stlHusker 9y ago
    People have been using this tactic for ages, whether it be for political, professional or personal gains. The software engineer who is rewarded for putting out the fires, when in reality they are a serial arsonist... Modern progressivism (https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberal...) ... So on and so forth... No one wants to put in the real, hard work and society continues to reward the facade.
• smokeyj 9y ago
  And your contribution is.. Mansplaining?
  • michaelmrose 9y ago
    Mansplaining is one of those words like libtard or freetard that indicates that the user is unlikely to say anything insightful or deep.
    • reitanqild 9y ago
      In this particular case I think it was used to a particular effect. The irony here is tptacek (a man) is out to explain why this woman is wrong - in order to help women.
      • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Which of course is impossible because the sex of the person who uses/states an argument is the most substantive part, nothing else matters. Thus dismissing a person's argument based only on their sex is just right. /s Calling someone's comment "mansplaining" is the mirror image of asking to see "the man in charge"; it's dismissal based on the sex of the person being addressed.
        • smokeyj 9y ago
          Here we have a straight white male telling a woman she's wrong about her experience. I don't subscribe to identity politics, but if you do - there's a fishy smell here. Of course the logical thing is to evaluate all ideas for their merit. But that's not what we're doing here.
          • tptacek 9y ago
            Yes. I am a straight white male. That is what I'm doing. I would say exactly the same set of things to her face as well. Next question?
• Icedcool 9y ago
  "In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech." Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas. Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.
  • cycrutchfield 9y ago
    Which companies are hiring based on quotas?
  • JimboOmega 9y ago
    So quotas are terrible, yes. But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone? My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing. It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's noticeable. It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs to be corrected most in today's tech workplace. Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.
    • alexandercrohde 9y ago
      So how would you counteract that stereotype/bias? Author would suggest lowering the bar [for women] would only reinforce such stereotypes, do you agree or disagree?
      • iainmerrick 9y ago
        I keep thinking about orchestras, where simply auditioning performers behind a curtain completely fixes the bias problem. Of course the trick is that you don't need to see the candidates or talk to them, just listen to their playing. In software, we would need to find some similarly effective way to measure anonymized performance. In fact, completely aside from fixing gender and racial biases, that's something we could really use just to make good hiring decisions! I don't believe anyone really knows how to make consistently great hires in software. For a start, the hiring decision could be based on gender-anonymized feedback from the interviewer(s), although that obviously wouldn't fix any underlying biases in the feedback itself.
• TarpitCarnivore 9y ago
  My one complaint with this is the authors tone as it relates to her daughters interest in design. I understand the main focus of diversity in tech is in engineering, but it kind of felt it was implying she wouldn't have a place in tech by going into design. If the point of this is to fix the problems from the bottom, or the 'pipeline', wouldn't some of that also have to do with breaking down the stigma that programming is all that matters in tech?
  • ballenf 9y ago
    Or to flip around your statement: it's a special kind of out-of-touch arrogance to assume that programming is the mecca of career paths. Great way to judge anyone who chooses a different field. While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their own decisions they'd be engineers.
• rootedbox 9y ago
  Poorly written. Also does not contain facts to back up what she see's in the market. I think this article just shows more that CEO's and upper management lack the facts to properly asses their own hiring pipeline and what may be the actual problem to their hiring diversity.
• magic_beans 9y ago
  > Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap. What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? This tells me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her company. This woman is NOT someone we should be listening to when it comes to closing the gender gap in software engineering.
  • halloij 9y ago
    > And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? Because men and women have entirely different brains. They have entirely different strengths and weaknesses. Hate to break that to you. The rise of "lets pretend everyone is equal even though they're obviously not" is one of the worst things going on right now.
    • halloij 9y ago
      I love that this is getting down-voted. Because the liberal agenda is more important than scientific biological facts to some people :)
      • sctb 9y ago
        You're violating the guidelines by complaining about being downvoted for violating the guidelines. Please stop doing this and (re-)read them. > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • mistermann 9y ago
    You don't sound curious, you sound angry, as if you somehow already KNOW the answers to your questions. Do you feel highly certain that she is lying? To understand one's mind, you should observe it.
• j45 9y ago
  Is diversity only defined as gender diversity?
  • alexandercrohde 9y ago
    I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What minorities need protection and rebalancing? We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity? She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.
    • arkitaip 9y ago
      Diversity is intersectional and people who actually fight for diversity absolutely talk about and work so that Mexicans, Asians, latinos, the disabled, gay people, trans people, etc, etc are given equal opportunities and treatment in the workplace. There are literally thousands of organizations in just the US advocating for workplace diversity for pretty much any and every minority you can imagine. I suspect the problem is your "we" has little to no contact with minorities and a even poorer understanding of their everyday struggles.
      • msla 9y ago
        And none of that matters because the "face" of diversity is a neurotypical White woman with no obvious disabilities.
      • metaphorm 9y ago
        this seems off, based on my observed and experienced reality. the incredible lack of empathy for the neuro-diverse is one of the most shocking failures of the diversity movement.
      • alexandercrohde 9y ago
        I disapprove of this response on a number of levels. One of the biggest reasons I avoid these discussions is ironically, the "safe-space" crowd has managed to offend, insult, and ignore me more effectively than almost any other group, and ironically, they do so because of my race and gender [white, male]. Working in tech I work with probably 80% minorities (Indians, Asians, women, gays, Iranians, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Russians, one Venezualen, one Egyptian). There was at least one time I was the only white guy on a team of 9. Most of those I asked did not feel discriminated against. So you tell your sob stories all you want, but the reality is most americans couldn't afford $500 in an emergency, and however bad you think skin color X or gender Y has it, that gulf pales in comparison to the problem of class-ism in America (and I don't here any SJWs speaking to that, and so I really have to question the motives at play). And you're just dishonest to us and yourself if you are insinuating you, or Google, or SJW-crowd cares 1/10th as much about hiring an proportionate number of hispanics/jews/ugly-people/tatooed-people as it does a proportionate number of women.
• d--b 9y ago
  She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against? This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'. She could have gone with the stats: in a pool of candidates, you have 3% of very good people. And in that same pool of candidates, you have 90% of men. Given that there is not really any compelling reason that would explain why women would be better or worse than men at engineering, only 0.3% of your candidate pool are very good women. Plus given that pretty much every company out there will try to retain their exceptional women worker (in the name of diversity), exceptional women engineers are a rare sighting in the job market. Hence the diversity issue cannot be solved by forcing people to hire women. No need to involve personal stories about how teenage girls are more interested in clothes than in assembly programming...
  • civilian 9y ago
    If "subliminal biases" is a reference to "Implicit association" and the IAT-- IAT has lost it's scientific footing. The problem with it is that: Just because people have Implicit Associations doesn't predict that they will act in biased way. Scott Alexander (penname for a psychiatrist) wrote about it here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psychology/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psycholo... > Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral. (All PDF downloads) - 1 http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictivevalidityoftheiat.pdf http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictiv... - 2 http://www.academia.edu/download/41431928/Reassessing_the_predictive_validity_of_t20160122-13160-1o95yg0.pdf http://www.academia.edu/download/41431928/Reassessing_the_pr... - 3 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/publication/239732934_Predicting_Ethnic_and_Racial_Discrimination_A_Meta-Analysis_of_IAT_Criterion_Studies/links/0a85e53a9a75e2ec00000000.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public... - 4 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstra...
• mberning 9y ago
  A truly revolutionary idea in this era of authoritarian social justice causes.
  • virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
    In what way are social justice causes authoritarian?
    • reitanqild 9y ago
      Not in itself. I'll even sometimes step up myself and at some point managed to get my boss to hire the girl who cleaned our offices since she was qualified only hadn't been considered since she was Polish. The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences (wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.
      • Frondo 9y ago
        I'm going to push back on the critique of shaming. It's literally the only consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have. It bears no force of law. It creates no consequence directly except for a little discomfort on the part of the recipient. Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with? The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.
        • virgil_disgr4ce 9y ago
          Well put—thank you.
        • reitanqild 9y ago
          It's literally the only consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have. To me it seems it is more used by resourceful people.
        • 9y ago
• guiomie 9y ago
  "Men who reported to me liked and respected me. Men who managed me liked and respected me." Starting straight off with this makes me wonder if it's a perception she had or if it was the reality. The majority of people to not tell someone if they dont like them or dont respect them.
  • apk-d 9y ago
    Most people are entirely capable of reading the general attitude others have towards them. We occasionally make mistakes but a large sample goes a long way ("Jerry respects me" vs "most people at work respect me"). Is there any rational reason to think she's wrong?
• CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  The author's post is odd. She's sick of "our" approach to diversity, by which I assume from the headline she means "Google's", although that's not clearly laid out in the text. Her specific advice is: > Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech. > Start a mentoring program. > Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases. These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.
• graycat 9y ago
  Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt, scars, bruises, etc. Believing that stuff was by far the worst mistake of my life. Strong advice: Don't do that. For all the attempts at gender diversity in STEM fields, f'get about it or, except in very rare cases as in the OP, suffer from pain to the agonies of the damned to serious harm to your life (I did) and worse, maybe death, literally, for the associated female. I'll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are interested in people and the boys, in things. Sorry, that's just the way it is. They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time. There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that's the fact, Jack. Sorry 'bout that. A really simple argument shows that the difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years. Gads, from some recent research, the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has held for some millions of years. I tried that: As a college sophomore she told me "Women don't just have to be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career." Well, since she had been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class, with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her way to Summa Cum Laude, PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of which she got, I believed her. Wrong. Dumb. Later I was on the team that did IBM's artificial intelligence language KnowledgeTool. Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample programs. KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM's PL/I, a huge language. From one of the world's best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS usage, etc. All of that was easy for her. So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM/CMS account, use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage. Then I gave her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool. A week later she had a nice, first sample program running. It did what she wanted. I gave her a 30 minute lecture explaining the intended role of rules as knowledge representation, and two weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw. She was genuinely brilliant. She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble. I kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got better faster than I did until the difference was absurd. The OP mentions GRE scores of 800 -- that's exactly the score I got on the Math GRE. So, I was bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject. She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it. A STEM field diversity success? Heck no. She hated the STEM fields, including computing. Her view of the STEM fields was "I'm not that kind of person.". What she wanted was "A career that helps people.", and that mostly meant volunteer work. The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she had no future in business. To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM. She was miserable, desperately miserable. In a training class, she made the highest score in the class, but she was miserable. She went into a depression and clinical depression, was trying to recover with her mother at her family farm, and soon her body was found floating in a lake. Diversity? A grand failure. To believe her "women can do things, too" for anything like the world of work, business, technology, computing, or the STEM fields, she could do it, best in class, for a while but HATED it and too soon found it fatal. Instead she desperately wanted a career that "helped people". Bluntly, she was interested in people and not in things, technology, applied math, etc. Are we learning yet? Can some small fraction of women, as in the OP, do well in the STEM fields? Yup. Did I mention a "small fraction"? Generally for "diversity", do everyone, men, women, universities, companies, society, a huge favor -- f'get about it. Certainly don't push it, encourage it, urge women to get into fields with things instead of people. Don't do that. To do that is dumb de dumb dumb, dumb, harmful, and sometimes fatal. Instead? Let women pick their own directions. Stop pushing women to be like a dog that walks on only two legs -- usually they can do it, but they nearly never do it well. For this diversity stuff, to borrow from an Indiana Jones movie character Marcus Brody “You are meddling with forces you cannot possibly comprehend.”. I tried, HARD. Biggest mistake of my life. Diversity good? Don't believe that stuff, not for your sisters, girlfriends, wife, or daughters. DON'T do that. The author of the OP? She's one of the rare exceptions. Leave it at that.
• narrator 9y ago
  The central idea at the core of all the diversity ideology is that everybody can do anything, they just have to try and people who fail to become Google engineers or sports stars only have themselves to blame, or even better, since people are loath to blame themselves, some other dominant group. Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever dreamed of.
• jcmoscon 9y ago
  1984 is now!
• qub1t 9y ago
  I'm going to illustrate why I think the points brought up by this post have at minimum some level of validity with a toy example, that takes sex out of the equation completely. Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of individual programming skills, and assigned them randomly into two categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) = E(skill of a candidate in B) Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst, and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates from B) There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get the result that A is on average better than B. In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, given the current ratio of men to women in tech we would expect to see a skill disparity in the average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women. Edited to add some further points: 1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal experience, but I have seen people make this argument. 2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill] then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero correlation. 3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like google.
  • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Re 3) it mightn't make an appreciable difference to the skill set as a whole, but it's sexist. Why do something sexist that didn't have a benefit. How is it OK to respond to a candidate for hiring "sorry you're the wrong sex" if they're otherwise the best candidate. That's completely wrong IMO.
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  People are still trying to make weak links between biology and interest in a subject, as if there are some mysterious laws of nature that link work to body chemistry. There's no overwhelming scientific evidence proving this. Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the barriers they'll face when they get there. A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work) could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach parity in tech employment, they would actually have to want to reach parity, and fight for it. Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the system to account for a perceived natural imbalance. In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy, and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed. What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today? Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc. Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees! Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats. To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers. Can someone please tell me why a woman would want to work in tech in the first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in tech?
• sjg007 9y ago
  An interesting point in the post is about the Google interview itself, and how she had to appeal in order to hire candidates who then turned out to each have a big impact. Google calls this the false negative problem but it seems to be a big problem. Google itself has already have shown that GPA and academic credentials do not correlate with job performance.
• msteffen 9y ago
  I worked at Google, and Alan Eustace, Google's most emphatic champion of gender diversity when I worked there, repeatedly emphasized that Google couldn't lower its hiring bar for women candidates, because that would hurt the reputation of women already there The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2) programs for women in college, to advocate for their studying computer science, and 3) the grace hopper conference for women who are engineers now. All those seem in line with the author's suggestions. This article (and the letter last week, and similar rhetoric) really feel like they're attacking a strawman to me. I left a while ago, but have things changed that much?
  • aoeuasdf1 9y ago
    Wouldn't it violate US equal-opportunity laws to lower the hiring bar for women?
    • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
      Nope. Affirmative action towards historically marginalized groups is explicitly permitted by the law, and in some instances there's even a duty to do so (for .gov stuff mostly). There are some complexities and details to all this, but generally speaking, affirmative action is legal in the US.
  • solipsism 9y ago
    Exactly. The author says we shouldn't check boxes to fill quotas... and then doesn't accuse anyone of doing so. She tosses that strawman out there, getting people to nod their heads in vigorous agreement, but she never makes any claims that any particular company is engaging in the behavior she criticizes. Of course, the implication is that Google is doing so. But if Google was doing so, they wouldn't have the poor diversity stats they've been accused of having. You can't have it both ways! Either Google is lowering the bar to achieve satisfactory diversity stats... or they are failing to achieve satisfactory diversity stats.
• iainmerrick 9y ago
  This seems to be another version of: "the pipeline of potential talent from colleges has very few women, so if we go out of our way to hire extra women, we'll reduce our overall hiring quality. The college pipeline needs to be fixed first." Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often: hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix the college pipeline in future. If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.
  • Danihan 9y ago
    That a big maybe, it's completely unproven. Maybe hiring slightly less qualified people just because of their demographic group will cause all sorts of strange resentments across the board. That seems to be what our current hiring protocols are doing now.
  • davehtaylor 9y ago
    > If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place. Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career? On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.
  • eterm 9y ago
    It can, and it can also harm it. If you reduce your quality bar to fill a quota for a group, then that group can end up having a lower quality than the majority group, which then works to reinforce bad stereotypes in some of the majority against that minority. That can then harm those in the minority group who were in fact above the bar and for whom the bar did not need to be lowered. I'm not against quota systems but they need to be aggressively monitored so you don't get unintended effects.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• falcolas 9y ago
  The most unfortunate thing about this article is how often the author has to say "I'm not a traitor" in different ways. Regardless of the diversity issue, do we really value a culture where we branding people with opinions in tech as traitors? Sure, she's preempting name calling that may never occur - but that means we're in a culture of discussion where being called a "trator" for expressing an opinion is even a possibility in the first place!
• danans 9y ago
  > Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did. This seems like false reasoning. She is using an intentionally biased sample (the candidate pipeline in a narrow subspecialty of software engineering) to draw conclusions about the larger software engineering candidate pipeline, which actually has a higher representation of women - not high overall - but higher than both her subspecialty and more importantly, higher than the current representation of women at tech companies. > If we increase the inflow of women into tech education, we will automatically increase diversity in hiring. This is not enough. She would have us believe that companies are automata that will just adapt to the changing composition of the pipeline with no other action needed. It's an absolution of corporate responsibility for diversity (that perhaps reflects her self interest as a founder/executive). But companies are not automata, they are entities with their own inertial biases, and in the case of large companies, these biases often are often rooted in the communities from which the companies sprang. Companies, especially major tech companies, are major cultural influencers - their businesses are based in part on the power of their cultural influence, and with that comes disproportionate responsibility to act, especially when society at large has not been successful enough at solving the pipeline problem.
  • SilkRoadie 9y ago
    It is not false reasoning. She is relating to her specific experiences. Where I work 80-90% of applications are from men. We now have 2 women on our team but it is still male dominated. The women are there because they were best we could find when we was hiring just like everyone else we have employed. They have earned it with their knowledge and skill. Employing for any other reason will likely demoralise the team because they will likely under perform. They will likely under perform because instead of finding the best person, you find the best person based on a subset of arbitrary equality rules. There is no reason why 50% of tech jobs cannot go to women. The main barrier we come across is there aren't enough skilled women applying. I think the author hit the nail on the head. It reflects my experiences. You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they can lead the way on equality. To have equality for equalities sake. It's wrong. Where there are descrepancies between genders we should ask why they exist. Take child care, the majority of people in childcare are women. Should we be passing over women with years of experience and excellent qualifications to bump the number of men in the industry? I would love to see a few guys at my kids nursery. However they should be there because they were the best for job. I would pull my kid out of the nursery if they passed over better candidates to fix this gender ratio. I want the best outcome for my children. The same is true with business. Merit is the measure that matters. More women in tech will lead to more meriting jobs in the industry, which in turn will lead to the male/female ratio improving.
• KirinDave 9y ago
  One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues. The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out. I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem" people want to point to as a source of the gender gap in hiring will become our primary issue when we first iron out the issues with the atrittion and harassment we see for women in the workplace. As for gender essentialism, I think this woman has every right to her opinion and I support her efforts, but I think she's approaching the problem wrong. She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter (who has almost certainly had positive modeling for a lot of other roles) isn't interested.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
    > objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques Any pointers to specifics or resources on this?
  • hackinthebochs 9y ago
    >She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter... isn't interested. And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?
    • KirinDave 9y ago
      So you spend your days working arbitrary logic puzzles in a gross language like Python? I know I'd have never gotten into this field. It's so easy to say, "Gosh this confirms our stereotypes!" But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to "women are worse at programming and math."
      • 9y ago
• stared 9y ago
  On a lighter tone, here are some lessons I've learnt at !!con (a conference by Recurse Center aka Hacker School alumni): http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming, accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed transgressors Sure, not all of these things may scale, or be copy-pastable to workplace environment.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
    Thanks for posting this. It was a really interesting read, and I think it's an under valued point in these discussions that there are lots of small things we could do better that add up in a big way.
• cylinder 9y ago
  Is anyone aware of how many female engineers come out of Iran? This has everything to do with education quality. Our math education is an absolute joke in the US, even mine and I went to a supposedly amazing public school. Add in cultural biases such as parents and teachers pushing bright girls to "girly" fields instead of math and you end up like this. Then in typical American fashion we try to impose quotas or other bandages at the endpoint rather than fixing the system itself.
  • arkitaip 9y ago
    I dislike the blog post for being poorly written but one of the author's points is that it's too late to attack diversity during recruiting because your pool of women applicants will already be tiny due to attrition. She is advocating approaching women in college but at you point out, even that's way too late. You can't have a society that instills shitty values into people from their first breath and then expect to undo all those years of mindfuckery because you work at a progressive place and are really passionate about diversity.
  • deorder 9y ago
    The following documentary covered it and according to them it is not because bright girls are pushed to "girly" fields: https://youtu.be/E577jhf25t4 https://youtu.be/E577jhf25t4 Also watch the other episodes at: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd9_g7lAICxtlGbxh4_z8ik178o8CDPnv http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd9_g7lAICxtlGbxh4_z8i... https://youtu.be/Ve6uK00AvNo https://youtu.be/Ve6uK00AvNo It also covers why women in for example India and the Middle-East are more into computer science. You can read more about the series at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
  • flukus 9y ago
    > Is anyone aware of how many female engineers come out of Iran? Because it's a poor country. As wealth increases and women start taking careers they want to instead of careers that pay well they amount of women going into IT drops.
• turc1656 9y ago
  "In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech." Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. By doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance. Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of the hiring loop: "After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to" The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because "we have to". That's a problem. Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a higher rate than they currently are doing.
  • kurthr 9y ago
    I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds. Once you're into real hiring statistics you have to be very careful of confirmation bias and "I just like this guy"ism even after the fact... they look and act like your successful hires. It's hard to even say, unless you're personally looking at their work on a regular basis and know what direction they're being given.
    • microcolonel 9y ago
      > I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds. Well, make me a multi-billionaire, I now present to you: BLIND SOURCING AND HIRING I should only share the details in private, you say it's a multi-billion dollar idea and I'd hate to tip off the competitors. In all seriousness, though, I know this is challenging. Especially at Google, there's still an opportunity for trouble after you've been hired but not yet assigned; though I doubt it would be enough of a problem to trash the whole system. The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.
• brightball 9y ago
  I can't remember who said it, but there is a great quote that applies to management in general that seems to apply here. "As soon as a good measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
  • gaius 9y ago
    Goodhart's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
• nthcolumn 9y ago
  Women are sick of being 'women in tech'. Being 'women speakers' at cons. They just want to be judged on their merits. Quotas are a check balance FOR quality not instead of. That you are finding and eliminating barriers to the best candidates in the hiring process because if you were doing it properly then there would be a balanced hire reflective of society at large. There should be no need for the quotas because as we all know there is no scientific evidence of any gender-based aptitude advantage. However it is evident from the numbers and in the wrongheaded attitudes of some people that there is some considerable adhesion to outdated, backward stereotypes. Yonatan Zunger also ex-Googler explains the diversity policy when he replied to the memo: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... I concur with him 100% and find it extremely frustrating that these old prejudices persist among otherwise intelligent people.
• unit91 9y ago
  Can anyone provide insight as to how transgendered people count in the "women in tech" discussion? As I see it, there's now a quadrant of biological (fe)males and psychological (fe)males. Would a woman in tech mean only biologically and psychologically female, or also biologically female, also psychologically female, depends on who's counting? I ask only because I see this already hyper-sensitive topic very soon becoming nearly impossible to discuss without somebody taking offense due to the combined effects of the biological and psychological gender sensitivities.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
    So to start with, don't conflate sex with gender. Next, I'll make it really easy for you: women are women, and you can just count them as one group. That doesn't mean we should erase away the specific challenges and bigotry trans women face, but we also shouldn't be forcing them into a separate "quadrant" of women.
    • unit91 9y ago
      Wait...this didn't make it easy at all. When you said "women are women" were you speaking in terms of gender or sex? After that you said "trans women", so I take it you mean gender only? If so, does that mean a biological female who identifies as a male does not count as a woman in tech?
      • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
        Gender. A trans man is a man.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nodesocket 9y ago
  If this were written by a male, do we really think the reception would be so positive? > To solve diversity, we must start at the source of the problem — encouraging women to pursue engineering in college! That is absolutely right. The solution is not to give people who aren't qualified or deserving jobs just so companies can fill a quota or prevent media backlash. Hire the best candidates for positions.
• li4ick 9y ago
  >Sooner or later, some such opinions get out there Very carefully chosen words, regarding the Memo.
• hnnsj 9y ago
  Yes, yes, yes. You have to go to the root of the problem. It's impossible to solve the problem by (only) changing the recruitment processes. It starts way earlier than that. You can't expect to have the current gender distribution in education and job applications that we have today and then expect the numbers to magically even out in recruitment no matter what policies the companies have. It basically doesn't matter what way you measure differences in programming interest, at every level there are vastly more men than women that are interested in programming, let alone has anything more than cursory experience with it. I believe that can be changed. I don't think it's biological. But the changes needed are wide and deep. If you want it to change, you have to actually change something about culture. That also means letting go of things you are familiar and comfortable with, maybe even some thing you really like. Gender norms need to change. I'm not so sure a lot of people even actually want that. Many seem to want to fix some negative symptoms, but not fix the root cause.
  • averagewall 9y ago
    Why does it need to change? Maybe both men and women are happy in their common jobs? Whatever the reason, nurses seem to choose nursing and programmers choose programming so they all get what they want. There may be a sub-minority of women who want to be programmers but are discriminated out of it. That's not good but it's surely a tiny fraction of humans. Not worth changing everyone else's job for.
    • hnnsj 9y ago
      Do everyone seem to be fine with it? Why do we have these massive discussions about economic and work equality, then? Obviously a lot of people think it's a major problem. I think there's clear evidence for that. It's just that, in my opinion, most people are not really prepared to do what needs to be done to change, they'd rather just try in vain to treat the negative symptoms.
• JelteF 9y ago
  What I find really weird is that this post is at the bottom of the frontpage, even though it has the most upvotes of the entire frontpage (443 at time of writing) and achieved this in only 2 hours. This was the same case for the article containing the 10 page manifesto from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 Could @dang or some other moderator shed some light on why these specific posts are disapearing from the front page so fast? Because this seems like a failure of the ranking algorithm.
  • frinxor 9y ago
    was wondering the same. the explanation i can think of is that people are flagging this and the algo lowers flagged posts? its better than the alternative of @dang and friends manually moving this item down/off the front page.
• luckytobby 9y ago
  Hiring quotas are bad. Let's have quotas in engineering schools instead... O_o
• alistproducer2 9y ago
  At this point, I find these discussions tiresome. Enough with the politics on HN. Everyone has picked a side and the last place a mind will be changed is the context free world of Internet arguments. The fact that these post get so many votes doesn't mean they're valuable discussion. It just means that even among the supposedly enlightened, we are attracted to drama just like everyone else. I wish the mods would do more to kill these garbage posts.
• jorgemf 9y ago
  > I have told my daughter it isn’t optional to learn coding and that she must stick with it until she’s good at it and then she can choose not to do it This is what I don't understand of society. If someone is bad at something and I think it is important, then I force them to learn it. They will hate it more in the future. All those hours wasted instead of letting her doing what she is good at, and improving that skill. Just for the records, few years ago it was important for the woman to know how to do the house work and things like cooking and sew. I see no difference with the coding thing. She has tried, she doesn't like it and she is bad at it. Let her move on and do something she will enjoy.
  • averagewall 9y ago
    Absolutely not. I never liked math at school. I was bad at it too. But now it's a major part of my career and I love it. I would never have this opportunity if adults had let me just do what I felt like when I was a child. Children are too young to make decisions for their future. Adults might not always be right but they're better at it than children. That's why school is compulsory, not "if the child feels like going"
    • jorgemf 9y ago
      There is a difference between having a bad teacher and not liking something. You always loved math, you didn't like how teachers were teaching you math. I have been a teacher, I know what a difference a teacher can do.
• okreallywtf 9y ago
  I see some good points on both sides of the discussion here but one thing occurs to me about the current diversity-pushback that I'm seeing(I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful). We've surprisingly quickly moved from periods where it was common to simply refuse to even consider minorities or women in many fields to a time when many people see political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism as a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves. I'm glad to see people being very thoughtful about fairness and equality, but I have an honest question: Before quotas and social justice warriors, were you thinking about fairness and equality when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender? I'm asking honestly, not trying to point fingers but I would like to know because this community, while left-leaning on many issues (I think) tends more towards libertarian on issues of race and gender and seems especially defensive when it comes to the tech industry (especially when the term "privilege" is used, it turns downright hostile). If you were active in supporting equality and diversity (by resisting arbitrarily exclusionary practices) when it wasn't popular to do so and now you are seeing the negative aspects of a push for artificial diversity I would like to know that. If you have never even considered diversity issues until recently when seeing hiring practices that could negatively affect you I would like to know that too. Do you believe any specific action needs to be taken to promote diversity or will the problem solve itself, or does the problem even exist at all?
  • mooseburger 9y ago
    When was the tech industry deliberately excluding people based on race and gender? The 50s? 60s? I don't believe any specific action needs to be taken to promote diversity. As far as I can tell, people can work wherever they will, as long as they can pass the interview. >arbitrarily exclusionary practices Please name these.
    • taysic 9y ago
      The women who get hired at Google only do so if they pass a stringent interview. So how is this different from what you're saying?
• bachaco 9y ago
  Everyone seems to agree that only the best should be hired. But may I ask isn't that a form of discrimination as well?. Being the best in an intelectual activity such as programming is highly corelated with the level of intelligence of an individual. No matter how hard you try if your IQ is below 80 you will never enter in Google. I even dare to say that even if you are in the normal range of intelligene your chances of entering in Google are still very low. Isn't intelligence a biological attribute in the same way of the color of the skin or a gender?. Who decided its own IQ level before they were born?.
  • cjcenizal 9y ago
    I understand what you're saying but I think this perspective may be mis-framing the issue. One immutable requirement to a solution to the company diversity problem is to form an effective company. Another requirement is to ensure applicants don't suffer discrimination either during the hiring process or the employment period. Ensuring the entire pool of humanity has an equal opportunity to work anywhere / do anything is incontrovertibly not a requirement.
• likelynew 9y ago
  To everyone agreeing with this post, I will ask you a question: Will YOU join a company with 40% females or 10% females with everything same. If the answer is former, there is a real value in hiring more females.
• curun1r 9y ago
  One thing that's becoming increasingly clear to me is that lumping everything under a single "diversity" label is becoming counterproductive. There are many types of diversity that we should be striving for and most have their own causes, concerns and there's limited overlap between the two. And, more importantly, the actions we need to take to address them are different. Racial diversity is mostly inter-tribal. All jokes about the "I have black friends" protestations aside, the percentage of people who socialize primarily within their own race is high. It's very easy for people to go through life without making a deep connection with someone from a different race. Gender diversity is very much intra-tribal. Most men still have very close relationships with women and vice versa. Whether it's mothers/fathers, brothers/sisters, girlfriends/boyfriends, wives/husbands or just close acquaintances, it's very difficult to go through life without caring deeply for someone of the opposite gender. At my last company, we didn't have any explicit diversity quotas, but we tried harder to hire women and minorities because we felt it would add a diversity of perspectives that would make our products appeal to more people. Trying harder meant things like giving phone screens to candidates we might have otherwise rejected based solely on the resume or trying to arrange an interview panel that we felt would appeal to the candidate and, should they pass the interview, make them choose us over other companies. We never "lowered our bar" and accepted minority/female candidates that were unqualified. But we started to notice an interesting phenomenon with how we composed our interview panels. When we had minority employees interview minority candidates, the results were good. Candidates tended to choose us more often, tended to be more comfortable in interviews and it was meaningful to our interviewers that we were making an effort and, in a way, validating their value to the company. The same cannot be said for when we had our female employees interview female candidates. They almost always found fault with and opposed hiring the candidate. It got so ridiculous that the male interviewers would often get on IM before the post-interview decision meeting so we could have our decision made before letting the women on the panel weigh in. Otherwise (and somewhat ironically), without providing that unified front and appearance of certainty, the women on our interview panels felt less heard and didn't feel like their input was appreciated. When we equivocated in that meeting, they'd notice and their opposition would be all the more sure. And that's just one example of a concern that's different when considering the two most-scrutinized forms of diversity. There are many other forms of diversity that we should be striving for too...age diversity, socio-economic diversity, language diversity (related to, but not the same as racial diversity...a Russian speaker is still considered to be white)...even something as rarely-considered as diversity of physical attractiveness will lead to a team that's more resilient and has diversity of insight on the various subjects the business needs to consider to succeed. And each of these forms of diversity requires specific considerations be made during the hiring and review processes. Too many of the discussions on diversity lack the nuance necessary to improve the situation. We need to drop the generic "diversity" label and start discussing specifics of each kind of diversity.
• exabrial 9y ago
  Bravo! Every point here is spot on!
• interlocutor 9y ago
  Good article, but I was disappointed by her implying that "women lack energy". That's too broad a statement. The women she hired may have lacked energy but you can't generalize based on that small sample. I agree that we need to fix the problem at the source, i.e., encourage more girls (actually, kids in general, why limit it to girls?) to be interested in tech while they are still in middle and high schools. There is ample evidence that there is a cultural problem in the United States in this regard. The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe. So there is something in the US culture that makes American women not want to take up tech. The diversity memo doesn't address the fact that more women take tech jobs when impediments are removed, as evidenced by the larger percentage of women in tech jobs in other countries.
• RealityNow 9y ago
  Great article. Sad that if this article had been written by a man, it would not be getting any attention and the comments would be calling the author "sexist". Here are my 2 cents as a male (thus my opinion on the issue automatically doesn't carry any weight to most of you). Women chose to pursue tech less than men (just look at any open source project), and this starts way before college. I took CS in high school - not because anybody encouraged me, but because I taught myself how to code as a kid in order to make videogames and cheat at them - and there were very few women in that class. That's why it boggles my mind when people act as if discrimination is the reason why women are underrepresented in tech. Girls are underrepresented in introductory CS courses in high school, meaning they're clearly not even choosing to pursue the field as much as men. You can't claim discrimination if they're not even signing up for the introductory classes. And anyone who's taken a CS course in college knows that at least half the students there have been coding since they were kids (I graduated a while ago so I'd imagine that's even more the case now) - again, not because anybody told them to, but because they sought that knowledge out themselves - which can be intimidating to newcomers who've never seen "Hello, World". Videogames are probably the main reason why men pursue CS more than women. The naive feminist will say "videogames are targeted towards boys". Yes they are - but that's because videogame developers are predominantly male, and game developers are more likely to create games that they themselves would enjoy. Videogames being male-dominated is simply a reflection of gendered biological differences, not some conspiracy to exclude women. Any sort of discrimination on the basis of gender/race is a problem, that's a given and nobody will dispute that. But it should not be considered a problem that women choose to pursue tech less than men, just like it's not considered a problem that men are less likely to pursue nursing, primary/secondary education, psychiatry, fashion, and yoga teaching. Men who like yoga don't give a fuck about the underrepresentation of men in yoga classes. At the end of the day, this "diversity" debate gets way too much attention. There used to be a time when the focus was on the tech and doing cool things, not what people looked like.
  • urahara 9y ago
    You're completely missing one of the main points of the whole gender discrimination discourse: that there are strong social influences that prevent women from going to tech long before your 'before college', as well as during college and after college. There are many turning points at which girls are influenced the way that discourages them from tech instead of helping them to develop interest in it. So yes, discrimination is definitely the reason why women are underrepresented in tech, even if there would not be 50/50 women/men ratio without discrimination. You can claim discrimination if the environment subtly discourages you with constantly signalling that you shouldn't pursue a certain path. And yes, men who'd like to pursue 'non-male' careers also often choose not to because of the social pressure. And no, the diversity debate doesn't 'get too much attention'. It gets significantly less attention than it should, given the scale of this problem and devastating effects the lack of diversity has on societies, working environments, women, men, children - basically, any social group.
• unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech." And, why aren't these genuinely amazing women in tech otherwise being found? How is it that things are so easily "f'd up" for them?
  • unlmtd1 9y ago
    Dilution of merit.
    • unclebucknasty 9y ago
      >Dilution of merit. Well, my question was rhetorical, but your answer underscores my point: when a man performs poorly, the "merit" of other men is not "diluted". And, it certainly doesn't lead to the risk of other "genuinely amazing" men going undiscovered, which doesn't seem to be a problem in the first-place. In fact, it would be silly to make any of these assertions about men. Such statements only apply to women and other "out-groups". By uttering them, the author is making the argument against her own case.
• rbanffy 9y ago
  Funny... Many others were flagged. This one, for some odd reason, wasn't. Go figure. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992859
• unlmtd1 9y ago
  Google is obsolete.
  • arkitaip 9y ago
    I wish I could be as obsolete as Google. God, I might even start believing that you exist for Google level of obsolesce. Amen.
• perfectstorm 9y ago
  Finally someone is talking like a matured person about this whole issue. If you really wanted to fix this issue, you've to fix it at the source. i.e encourage girls to take up engineering courses in college. I went to college in 2005 and there was only 1 girl who graduated with me from my engineering class. There were tons of girls/women in my optional classes (Geography, History) but very few (2 or 3) in some of the core engineering classes. You can't fix this by sending women to coding bootcamps. It's like - what we call - a bandaid fix i.e applying patches without fixing it at the root level. I've tried my best to convince my cousin to take up a career in STEM but she refuse to even consider that possibility. She claims Math is too hard for her and is choosing nursing as her major. I'm sure she will be a good nurse and there's nothing wrong with nursing as a career. In the end it's her choice and all I can do is talk and try to convince her.
• ajdkjafklds 9y ago
  It's all very well and good to increase the pipeline. But we also need to continue our efforts to support women who are currently working as many of them experience sexual harassment. But we also need to keep in mind that some people don't like tech and don't like tech and are happy with their jobs that are less challenging and pay less money. For example, an acquaintance who is a secretary told me that she thought programming was a boring job and she was glad to be a secretary even though it's a low wage and low prestige job.
• sajfklasjfsd 9y ago
  One thing I think we should keep in mind and that worries me in our diversity efforts is that some cultures seem to me to be hostile to women. For instance as I've been walking around I've noticed that I've been harassed by one race more than the others. I've also been harassed at work by that race more than the others despite that race only being a small percentage in tech. I think we need to plan so that increasing the number of people from that race doesn't lead to fewer women because harassment increases.
• goodbye- 9y ago
  So masking the interview... doesn't mean women will do better. You might be surprised why if your disposition leans towards social conspiracy theories. http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
• euske 9y ago
  I'm going to ask a practical advice here. As a male teacher, what can I do in a classroom to encourage more female students for math/logic/programming? I sometimes talk about how there are great female software developers out there and how gender shouldn't be hindering their talent, but that's about it. And when a female student isn't performing well and being bummed, I can't do much other than general vague-sounding encouragement. At the same time, I don't want to sound too pushy. I live in a very sexist country compared to the US (Japan) and there's not much advice on this kind of things from other educators. Is there anything else that I can do to help the cause?
• unityByFreedom 9y ago
  Interesting. She's saying something different from Damore, > "These women show up at work and perform not as great as we want them to" Damore said his female coworkers were equally capable. > "After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to" It sounds like somebody in her chain misunderstood or misapplied Google's hiring practices. From what Google and Damore said, all the women and men there are equally capable.
• ksec 9y ago
  My Biggest grasp with the whole thing, ( If you think this is a well done post ), is that Intelligent and Wise have little correlation. It takes a person with GRE 800 to figure all this blatantly obvious answer. Now before you downvote me, it is also obvious this diversity topic is especially a problem in Silicon Valley ( Because most people in Silicon Valley are Liberal ? ) and mostly in US. We dont see this being blow up in huge news anywhere else, the US neighbour Canada, or anywhere else in Europe. Why is there such a difference? And it seems you aren't even allow to talk about it in US. Where in most places inside EU they will likely have an open discussion without Calling an All Hands meeting off. Note: Never been to US. So there may be some cultural difference i am not getting.
  • urahara 9y ago
    Not sure about Canada and Europe, but many countries just didn't reach the level of development where this discussion can start. They are not grown up and are stuck on the lower level, having problems like absence of basic human rights and protections.
• lazy_throwaway1 9y ago
  I overheard a discussion between my HRG and department head, the discussion was about hiring temporary replacements for female employees who were on maternity leave, the HRG told that approval had to come from the country head and it will take almost 3 months because of a hiring freeze, and each case has to be dealt individually, the HOD was worried at this and said this sort of rules will hurt female hiring, the HRG was schocked to hear those words and remainded him that, all his reportees including him has an appraisal goal for diversity and he doesn't have an option