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I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women w

I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem The goal isn't to add bias. It's to seek out the source of a bias we think might exist and then remove it. For example, if we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are, and find similar quality in both pools (keep in mind, when you interview graduates you get to select for quality), then it makes sense to recruit from both pools. By excluding the latter pool, even if not for discriminatory reasons, we're implicitly biasing our inputs.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are I agree with the sentiment, but isn't the situation exactly the opposite of that? Top-tier schools work to balance gender distributions, and many of them succeed well above industry averages. Other schools spend less effort, and get predictably thinner results. Compare, say, RPI and MIT. (I know RPI is uncommonly skewed, but I wanted to compare tech schools to one another. Otherwise specific stats are swamped by the ratio of tech to non-tech majors.) - RPI, overall: 32% female - MIT, overall: 46% female - RPI, computer science: 16% female - MIT, computer science, 32% female As I understood the stats, a company that pulls students at the same rate as their candidate schools will see worse gender diversity as they broaden their pool. (Among CS programs at 4 year US colleges; outside that I don't know.)
  - hexane360 9y ago
    Using this data: http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N47/women/tables.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N47/women/tables.pdf MIT's computer science program is 31.7% women. MIT's school of engineering is 39.87% women. I think even comparing tech school to tech school, non-tech majors have a significant impact. MIT especially has a surprising number of non tech majors.
s73ver_ 9y ago
Who said anything about bias? Looking in places that you don't traditionally look isn't bias.
AgentME 9y ago
Rather than try to counteract the bias with an opposing one on the input pool, the answer can be to try to find new less-biased input pools to draw from.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language. Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a problem and I applaud people making an effort to rectifying that. Unless the universities the OP was pulling from are really out of synch with the industry I have a hard time understanding why being proportionate is a problem. In fact, it seems like the right place to want to be.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision. We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on your product teams (at the very least). [1] http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reaction_to_Women_in_IPOs.pdf http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reac... IPOs [2] http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1778&context=articles http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Fund management [3] http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4486&context=nclr http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4... Boards [4] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publication/23534553_Gender_Diversity_in_the_Boardroom_and_Firm_Financial_Performance/links/54512e7b0cf285a067c6854f/Gender-Diversity-in-the-Boardroom-and-Firm-Financial-Performance.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publicatio... Boards

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem The goal isn't to add bias. It's to seek out the source of a bias we think might exist and then remove it. For example, if we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are, and find similar quality in both pools (keep in mind, when you interview graduates you get to select for quality), then it makes sense to recruit from both pools. By excluding the latter pool, even if not for discriminatory reasons, we're implicitly biasing our inputs.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are I agree with the sentiment, but isn't the situation exactly the opposite of that? Top-tier schools work to balance gender distributions, and many of them succeed well above industry averages. Other schools spend less effort, and get predictably thinner results. Compare, say, RPI and MIT. (I know RPI is uncommonly skewed, but I wanted to compare tech schools to one another. Otherwise specific stats are swamped by the ratio of tech to non-tech majors.) - RPI, overall: 32% female - MIT, overall: 46% female - RPI, computer science: 16% female - MIT, computer science, 32% female As I understood the stats, a company that pulls students at the same rate as their candidate schools will see worse gender diversity as they broaden their pool. (Among CS programs at 4 year US colleges; outside that I don't know.)
- hexane360 9y ago
  Using this data: http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N47/women/tables.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N47/women/tables.pdf MIT's computer science program is 31.7% women. MIT's school of engineering is 39.87% women. I think even comparing tech school to tech school, non-tech majors have a significant impact. MIT especially has a surprising number of non tech majors.

s73ver_ 9y ago

Who said anything about bias? Looking in places that you don't traditionally look isn't bias.

AgentME 9y ago

Rather than try to counteract the bias with an opposing one on the input pool, the answer can be to try to find new less-biased input pools to draw from.

Consultant32452 9y ago
We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased" because bias goes both directions. In fact almost all universities go out of their way to get women into their tech programs. I think what you're talking about is trying to find a candidate pool that is more biased towards minorities than average, which is fine, but let's use the correct language. Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a problem and I applaud people making an effort to rectifying that. Unless the universities the OP was pulling from are really out of synch with the industry I have a hard time understanding why being proportionate is a problem. In fact, it seems like the right place to want to be.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > We have to be careful about using the phrase "less biased Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision. We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on your product teams (at the very least). [1] http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reaction_to_Women_in_IPOs.pdf http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reac... IPOs [2] http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1778&context=articles http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Fund management [3] http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4486&context=nclr http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4... Boards [4] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publication/23534553_Gender_Diversity_in_the_Boardroom_and_Firm_Financial_Performance/links/54512e7b0cf285a067c6854f/Gender-Diversity-in-the-Boardroom-and-Firm-Financial-Performance.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publicatio... Boards