10 ms·

Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far

89 points by mulcahey 9y ago

deepnotderp 9y ago
One interesting thing of note is that Warren Farrell used to be a feminist.
cwackerfuss 9y ago
It's sad to see men regressing at the idea of diversity in tech. It can't just be a boys club. The value in employment diversity is that we give people of all backgrounds a fair shot at opportunities. IMO it's actually a very complex issue strategically leveling the playing field. At Google, something like only 1 in 5 tech workers are female, and their diversity practices are fairly extreme compared to the norm. It's logically more difficult to find qualified female coders because there are less of them applying for positions. REQUIRING a certain benchmark of females to be hired each month or year, when HR is picking from a much smaller candidate pool, is going to result in hiring potentially less qualified individuals. That could actually cause a greater gender bias if women are being hired to hit a metric but potentially performing at a lower quality than their male counterparts. I say "potentially" because obviously there are a ton of great female coders, but there are a lot of shoddy ones too. Same with men. As an example: You have ten applicants for one position. 2 are female, 8 are male. Just for fun, lets say "33% of all programmers, male and female, produce good code and have a qualifying resume". The chances that you will have a qualified male candidate are going to be greater based on those two facts alone. If you need to hit a 50% men/50% women hiring metric, you're taking a gamble on the work quality of women hired. ~BUT~: WE HAVE TO OFFER STRONGER INCENTIVES FOR WOMEN IN TECH IN ORDER FOR THE PLAYING FIELD TO BE LEVELED. Future female coders aren't going to feel inspired or motivated to enter a workforce that's dominated by men. The solution sometimes looks faulty when viewed on a case-by-case basis, but we need to offer an olive branch in the form of better job placement opportunities until women are inspired to pursue tech and have equal rights and job prospects.
- gambiting 9y ago
  I brought it up before, I will bring it up now - my sister was going to go into CS until her career adviser(also a woman) told her she's made a great choice since someone will have to hire her because she is a woman. She changed her course choices the next day. I'm all 100% for giving everyone an equal chance. I am not for hiring because someone is <insert underrepresented group here>.
  - ooopsnevermind 9y ago
    "Hiring because someone is <insert underrepresented group here>" isn't the goal, IMO, and I think it sounds like your sister's career advisor did her a disservice by describing it that way. I also don't think her career advisor's POV is true, FWIW. As a woman in STEM, I don't want someone to hire me just because I'm a woman. I want someone to 1) think I'm awesome at what I do, and 2) by the way I happen to be a woman. But I also think it's true that if 2) is a fact about you, it's harder for you to prove 1) than it would be otherwise, and that's not right. My belief is that the reason for encouraging diversity initiatives are that there are lots of talented women (and other minority groups) out there who are being overlooked but deserve to get noticed and hired, and the goal is always to surface talented people to hire, women or otherwise.
    - fsociety 9y ago
      Yes but is the issue here solved by diversity hiring i.e. doing whatever it takes to hire more women or is the issue here solved by redefining how the workplace operates and making it something that enables women to succeed and enjoy the work without being highly aggressive? Actually it isn't just about women in software development, men should be included too. Plenty of men in software development are atypical compared to other men. I'm a man in STEM - weird to put it that way - but I have a lot of issues in dealing with hyper aggressive people in the workplace. Unfortunately I've found that sometimes the only way to be heard in the workplace is to be aggressive and repeat myself over and over again. Being aggressive in the workplace has resulted in me, against a company full of people who don't appreciate methodical software development, introducing less bugs, having more time to work with customer issues, and spending more time on testing and maintenance. Admittedly, it's very emotionally and mentally fatiguing. As I write this I'm thinking about nurses and how insanely aggressive you have to be in a hospital, which is a women dominated field. I suppose that the difference is that the work is incredibly high-impact whereas it's easy in software development to feel that your work is for nothing because often it is. I don't know what the solution is, or if the question I'm asking is the right question, but I'm fairly certain that the current practice of diversity hiring doesn't help the issue but instead hurts it more. Same thing with this unconscious bias training. Now, I do strongly believe that encouraging women to consider STEM in school is a very good idea and that it opens a lot of doors that otherwise may of not been open. I believe this, in the long-term, is a giant step in the right direction because of cultural pressures and norms for people at a very young age.
s_kilk 9y ago
Hard to take Damore seriously given he's been making a fool of himself on Twitter since getting fired. He's clearly not that bright of a guy. Most likely explanation? He feels threatened by actually-competent lady engineers.
- Klockan 9y ago
  > Most likely explanation? He feels threatened by actually-competent lady engineers. Damore basically said that he thinks that women will never dominate tech no matter how much we try so I doubt that he is afraid of competent lady engineers taking his job. Instead I think he is afraid of losing his current work environment due to diversity programs trying to change it to fit women better. Currently tech caters mostly to men since it is mostly men who work there and not everyone will be happy when we try to change that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
the_evacuator 9y ago
I wish threads about this clown would get disappeared down the HN memory hole the same way threads about Trump get handled.
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  This comment made me upvote the post. There are legitimate issues being brought up and I'm glad they're not automatically silenced on here.
  - the_evacuator 9y ago
    There are also legitimate issues being brought up in other political posts but they have been banned anyway.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  One sticking their head in the sand is a valid response? This is way more important than what license Facebook uses for its open source JS frameworks. It's Hacker News, not Hacker Echo Chamber.
- Klockan 9y ago
  Two copies of this have already gotten killed and this one is about to get killed so you already got your wish.
PrimalDual 9y ago
So there are somethings I don’t quite understand about the pro-diversity argument. My understanding of the claim is that companies should want to have a diverse workforce because people of different backgrounds are fundamentally different. Different to the point that without inclusion of all their viewpoints you will fail to optimally solve some problems. It makes sense that if you don’t have enough women in tech your company, may fail to notice opportunities that cater specifically to women. Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion? Furthermore, is proportional representation necessary to achieve optimal gains from having diverse viewpoints?
- RoboticWater 9y ago
  The argument is two-pronged (probably more, but let's restrict it to two): firstly, yes, that diversity can improve gains, but secondly that the current skewed proportions were created by both active and passive discrimination which, to some extent, still exists today (though mainly in the passive form). Considering it from a purely utilitarian perspective doesn't quite do the issue enough justice. It's essentially a moral argument: women and minorities deserve equal treatment and opportunity, but due to stereotyping and social inertia (i.e. girls don't grow up seeing many women in technical fields, so they aren't compelled or don't even think to join them), they don't currently get it. To answer the question: > Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion? I think we'd like to assume that everyone can essentially do whatever they want, but just choose not to, but we simply can't because we've never had an equal starting position to begin with.
- rainsford 9y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of the utilitarian argument for diversity because it suggests the primary motivation should be the benefit to the employer and that the underrepresented group needs to provide EXTRA value over their over-represented peers to make it worth including them. To use your example, that women are only worth hiring if they can find opportunities their male counterparts can't. They don't just have to be equal, they have to be better. I think a better argument for diversity is that people who are underrepresented in a job deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, not because they bring wise insights not otherwise attainable.
grondilu 9y ago
Today on HN I've learnt about KaTeX, a math typesetting system for the web[1]. As I looked into it, I was intrigued by the names of the two authors, which suggested they are females. That looked odd to me, as I thought typically this kind of project is made by men. The last time I had this kind of surprise was with Audrey Tang, the developer of Pugs, an early Perl 6 implementation. Turned out she was not born female. So, just by curiosity, I looked into the authors of this KaTeX thing. To my amusement, I guessed well : at least one of them is a trans[2]. There are certain kinds of IT projects in which women are formidably rare. I can't quite put my finger on what kind of projects I'm talking about, but let's just say it's a case of "I know it when I see it". At some point we should consider admitting that there is something, I don't know what, that draws men towards this kind of projects much more than for women. And that this thing, whatever it is, may be a reason for the observed gender disparities in the tech industry. 1. https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX 2. https://sophiebits.com/2017/08/26/hi-im-trans.html https://sophiebits.com/2017/08/26/hi-im-trans.html
- UnpossibleJim 9y ago
  It might help if it were not frowned upon to admit that women and men are different, and that isn't a bad thing. Male nurses are still a rarity, and that's ok (though, all nurses, regardless of sex, should get paid more). Different doesn't mean better or worse, just different. Is a frog better than a toad? Well, what situation are you asking about? Are women better than men? Well, what situation are we talking about? (And, yes, I just compared men and women to frogs and toads, because no hidden reason whatsoever...)
  - tnzn 9y ago
    It would help to stop with the strawmen. Feminists don't say men and women are not different at all, they say that the gender roles are based on cultural factors more than biological ones.
    - UnpossibleJim 9y ago
      https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain-differences-between-genders https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/2014... https://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html
throwaway2619 9y ago
The thing that sucks about this is that there is a spectrum of opinions on this issue, but we choose to categorize people as either progressive or prejudice. I think the whole "men's rights" movement is bullshit. But last week I was in a meeting and recruiting was giving an update. At the end, our VP said "I don't want to waste our time interviewing anyone who isn't a diversity hire." This is illegal. This is 100% illegal. The moment you say "hey, maybe we're doing something wrong with diversity hiring" you're suddenly sexist and racist. That's bullshit. We have headcount to fill and I don't give a fuck who you are. That's equality.
throwaway2619 9y ago
Can we get a reasoning behind this flag?
ssijak 9y ago
"Her company, Paradigm, designs diversity strategies.", That sounds like a useful company...not.
egwynn 9y ago
This sounds like a lot of smoke and no fire to me. Are men having trouble finding jobs in tech because of their gender? Is Damore even having trouble finding a job in tech despite his claims that he’s the target of a witch hunt? Was there some kind of law passed that forces tech companies to hire more women?
talindras 9y ago
Shame the author shows their bias so very clearly.
GnwbZHiU 9y ago
I think it's not gone too far; It's gone astray.
OnlyTruth2 9y ago
We live in a democracy, women have the vote, they are politically powerful. When they decree that they shall be paid the same as men even though they work less and produce less, well, they shall be paid the same. Votes equal power, ability does not equal power, at least not as much power as votes do.
eevilspock 9y ago
Why is this flagged? That HN or HN users would flag gives even more credence to criticism of tech culture, its sexism and denialism.

89 points by mulcahey 9y ago

One interesting thing of note is that Warren Farrell used to be a feminist.

It's sad to see men regressing at the idea of diversity in tech. It can't just be a boys club. The value in employment diversity is that we give people of all backgrounds a fair shot at opportunities. IMO it's actually a very complex issue strategically leveling the playing field. At Google, something like only 1 in 5 tech workers are female, and their diversity practices are fairly extreme compared to the norm. It's logically more difficult to find qualified female coders because there are less of them applying for positions. REQUIRING a certain benchmark of females to be hired each month or year, when HR is picking from a much smaller candidate pool, is going to result in hiring potentially less qualified individuals. That could actually cause a greater gender bias if women are being hired to hit a metric but potentially performing at a lower quality than their male counterparts. I say "potentially" because obviously there are a ton of great female coders, but there are a lot of shoddy ones too. Same with men. As an example: You have ten applicants for one position. 2 are female, 8 are male. Just for fun, lets say "33% of all programmers, male and female, produce good code and have a qualifying resume". The chances that you will have a qualified male candidate are going to be greater based on those two facts alone. If you need to hit a 50% men/50% women hiring metric, you're taking a gamble on the work quality of women hired. ~BUT~: WE HAVE TO OFFER STRONGER INCENTIVES FOR WOMEN IN TECH IN ORDER FOR THE PLAYING FIELD TO BE LEVELED. Future female coders aren't going to feel inspired or motivated to enter a workforce that's dominated by men. The solution sometimes looks faulty when viewed on a case-by-case basis, but we need to offer an olive branch in the form of better job placement opportunities until women are inspired to pursue tech and have equal rights and job prospects.

gambiting 9y ago
I brought it up before, I will bring it up now - my sister was going to go into CS until her career adviser(also a woman) told her she's made a great choice since someone will have to hire her because she is a woman. She changed her course choices the next day. I'm all 100% for giving everyone an equal chance. I am not for hiring because someone is <insert underrepresented group here>.
- ooopsnevermind 9y ago
  "Hiring because someone is <insert underrepresented group here>" isn't the goal, IMO, and I think it sounds like your sister's career advisor did her a disservice by describing it that way. I also don't think her career advisor's POV is true, FWIW. As a woman in STEM, I don't want someone to hire me just because I'm a woman. I want someone to 1) think I'm awesome at what I do, and 2) by the way I happen to be a woman. But I also think it's true that if 2) is a fact about you, it's harder for you to prove 1) than it would be otherwise, and that's not right. My belief is that the reason for encouraging diversity initiatives are that there are lots of talented women (and other minority groups) out there who are being overlooked but deserve to get noticed and hired, and the goal is always to surface talented people to hire, women or otherwise.
  - fsociety 9y ago
    Yes but is the issue here solved by diversity hiring i.e. doing whatever it takes to hire more women or is the issue here solved by redefining how the workplace operates and making it something that enables women to succeed and enjoy the work without being highly aggressive? Actually it isn't just about women in software development, men should be included too. Plenty of men in software development are atypical compared to other men. I'm a man in STEM - weird to put it that way - but I have a lot of issues in dealing with hyper aggressive people in the workplace. Unfortunately I've found that sometimes the only way to be heard in the workplace is to be aggressive and repeat myself over and over again. Being aggressive in the workplace has resulted in me, against a company full of people who don't appreciate methodical software development, introducing less bugs, having more time to work with customer issues, and spending more time on testing and maintenance. Admittedly, it's very emotionally and mentally fatiguing. As I write this I'm thinking about nurses and how insanely aggressive you have to be in a hospital, which is a women dominated field. I suppose that the difference is that the work is incredibly high-impact whereas it's easy in software development to feel that your work is for nothing because often it is. I don't know what the solution is, or if the question I'm asking is the right question, but I'm fairly certain that the current practice of diversity hiring doesn't help the issue but instead hurts it more. Same thing with this unconscious bias training. Now, I do strongly believe that encouraging women to consider STEM in school is a very good idea and that it opens a lot of doors that otherwise may of not been open. I believe this, in the long-term, is a giant step in the right direction because of cultural pressures and norms for people at a very young age.

s_kilk 9y ago

Hard to take Damore seriously given he's been making a fool of himself on Twitter since getting fired. He's clearly not that bright of a guy. Most likely explanation? He feels threatened by actually-competent lady engineers.

Klockan 9y ago
> Most likely explanation? He feels threatened by actually-competent lady engineers. Damore basically said that he thinks that women will never dominate tech no matter how much we try so I doubt that he is afraid of competent lady engineers taking his job. Instead I think he is afraid of losing his current work environment due to diversity programs trying to change it to fit women better. Currently tech caters mostly to men since it is mostly men who work there and not everyone will be happy when we try to change that.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

the_evacuator 9y ago

I wish threads about this clown would get disappeared down the HN memory hole the same way threads about Trump get handled.

jimmaswell 9y ago
This comment made me upvote the post. There are legitimate issues being brought up and I'm glad they're not automatically silenced on here.
- the_evacuator 9y ago
  There are also legitimate issues being brought up in other political posts but they have been banned anyway.
toomuchtodo 9y ago
One sticking their head in the sand is a valid response? This is way more important than what license Facebook uses for its open source JS frameworks. It's Hacker News, not Hacker Echo Chamber.
Klockan 9y ago
Two copies of this have already gotten killed and this one is about to get killed so you already got your wish.

PrimalDual 9y ago

So there are somethings I don’t quite understand about the pro-diversity argument. My understanding of the claim is that companies should want to have a diverse workforce because people of different backgrounds are fundamentally different. Different to the point that without inclusion of all their viewpoints you will fail to optimally solve some problems. It makes sense that if you don’t have enough women in tech your company, may fail to notice opportunities that cater specifically to women. Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion? Furthermore, is proportional representation necessary to achieve optimal gains from having diverse viewpoints?

RoboticWater 9y ago
The argument is two-pronged (probably more, but let's restrict it to two): firstly, yes, that diversity can improve gains, but secondly that the current skewed proportions were created by both active and passive discrimination which, to some extent, still exists today (though mainly in the passive form). Considering it from a purely utilitarian perspective doesn't quite do the issue enough justice. It's essentially a moral argument: women and minorities deserve equal treatment and opportunity, but due to stereotyping and social inertia (i.e. girls don't grow up seeing many women in technical fields, so they aren't compelled or don't even think to join them), they don't currently get it. To answer the question: > Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion? I think we'd like to assume that everyone can essentially do whatever they want, but just choose not to, but we simply can't because we've never had an equal starting position to begin with.
rainsford 9y ago
I'm not a huge fan of the utilitarian argument for diversity because it suggests the primary motivation should be the benefit to the employer and that the underrepresented group needs to provide EXTRA value over their over-represented peers to make it worth including them. To use your example, that women are only worth hiring if they can find opportunities their male counterparts can't. They don't just have to be equal, they have to be better. I think a better argument for diversity is that people who are underrepresented in a job deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, not because they bring wise insights not otherwise attainable.

grondilu 9y ago

Today on HN I've learnt about KaTeX, a math typesetting system for the web[1]. As I looked into it, I was intrigued by the names of the two authors, which suggested they are females. That looked odd to me, as I thought typically this kind of project is made by men. The last time I had this kind of surprise was with Audrey Tang, the developer of Pugs, an early Perl 6 implementation. Turned out she was not born female. So, just by curiosity, I looked into the authors of this KaTeX thing. To my amusement, I guessed well : at least one of them is a trans[2]. There are certain kinds of IT projects in which women are formidably rare. I can't quite put my finger on what kind of projects I'm talking about, but let's just say it's a case of "I know it when I see it". At some point we should consider admitting that there is something, I don't know what, that draws men towards this kind of projects much more than for women. And that this thing, whatever it is, may be a reason for the observed gender disparities in the tech industry. 1. https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX 2. https://sophiebits.com/2017/08/26/hi-im-trans.html https://sophiebits.com/2017/08/26/hi-im-trans.html

UnpossibleJim 9y ago
It might help if it were not frowned upon to admit that women and men are different, and that isn't a bad thing. Male nurses are still a rarity, and that's ok (though, all nurses, regardless of sex, should get paid more). Different doesn't mean better or worse, just different. Is a frog better than a toad? Well, what situation are you asking about? Are women better than men? Well, what situation are we talking about? (And, yes, I just compared men and women to frogs and toads, because no hidden reason whatsoever...)
- tnzn 9y ago
  It would help to stop with the strawmen. Feminists don't say men and women are not different at all, they say that the gender roles are based on cultural factors more than biological ones.
  - UnpossibleJim 9y ago
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201402/brain-differences-between-genders https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/2014... https://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html

throwaway2619 9y ago

The thing that sucks about this is that there is a spectrum of opinions on this issue, but we choose to categorize people as either progressive or prejudice. I think the whole "men's rights" movement is bullshit. But last week I was in a meeting and recruiting was giving an update. At the end, our VP said "I don't want to waste our time interviewing anyone who isn't a diversity hire." This is illegal. This is 100% illegal. The moment you say "hey, maybe we're doing something wrong with diversity hiring" you're suddenly sexist and racist. That's bullshit. We have headcount to fill and I don't give a fuck who you are. That's equality.

throwaway2619 9y ago

Can we get a reasoning behind this flag?

ssijak 9y ago

"Her company, Paradigm, designs diversity strategies.", That sounds like a useful company...not.

egwynn 9y ago

This sounds like a lot of smoke and no fire to me. Are men having trouble finding jobs in tech because of their gender? Is Damore even having trouble finding a job in tech despite his claims that he’s the target of a witch hunt? Was there some kind of law passed that forces tech companies to hire more women?

talindras 9y ago

Shame the author shows their bias so very clearly.

GnwbZHiU 9y ago

I think it's not gone too far; It's gone astray.

OnlyTruth2 9y ago

We live in a democracy, women have the vote, they are politically powerful. When they decree that they shall be paid the same as men even though they work less and produce less, well, they shall be paid the same. Votes equal power, ability does not equal power, at least not as much power as votes do.

eevilspock 9y ago

Why is this flagged? That HN or HN users would flag gives even more credence to criticism of tech culture, its sexism and denialism.