8 ms·

How Duolingo achieved a 50:50 gender ratio for new software engineer hires

57 points by doppp 9y ago

microcolonel 9y ago
> We started our hiring reboot by analyzing where we were spending our hiring time and effort. Perhaps not surprisingly, we were spending time at colleges and universities based on past experience, rather than their percentage of female computer science undergraduate majors. The national average of female computer science degree graduates is 18%.2 We made a decision to revisit our typical list of schools and only visit the universities that had more than 18% of female undergraduate computer science majors. More or less "We realized we were looking solely at candidate performance when we were selecting a candidate pool. That wasn't producing the warm fuzzies, so we ignored our best indications of candidate performance, and instead hired from a pool that made us feel good about our arbitrary political goal while hopefully just stopping short of illegal discrimination.".
- tomlock 9y ago
  > They also came up with other great ideas, including adding a tool that automates the first coding task and removes a candidate’s identifying information. This doesn't really fit that narrative.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    That's great and all, but why go to the trouble of finding a politics-oriented candidate pool, instead of a performance-oriented one if removing identifying information and automating the first prescreening task (among other things) are the meat of the operation? It seems like they sorta quickly move past the questionable candidate selection process to talk about the stuff they can be more proud of.
  - tomp 9y ago
    Hm... I wonder what the influence of that process was. I.e. how does the outgoing percentages (50:50) compare with the incoming percentages? The article doesn't say, but unless it's also 50:50, their process is still biased / sexist, possibly even more than at companies that don't achieve a 50:50 outcome.
  - jon_e_pizza 9y ago
    Correct, because they're trying to mislead you: > They also came up with other great ideas, including adding a tool that automates the first coding task and removes a candidate’s identifying information. Based on the feedback, we’ve implemented a number of changes to our internal process for recruiting. At no point do they say they implemented removing candidate information. They say it was suggested, and then _separately_ they state they implemented a number of changes. You can't randomly pick 50:50 out of 18:82 and they very much didn't.
- eganist 9y ago
  Or, the correct perspective: "we realized we were contributing to the problem of inadequately motivating women to re-enter the programming workforce¹ through our selection of candidates from schools which likewise perpetuated the problem, so we switched to hiring from institutions which were also investing towards balancing the talent pool, with the goal of creating a positive feedback loop motivating more corporations to do the same, and therefore motivating more schools to aim to diversify their software engineering recruitment efforts." ¹ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > likewise perpetuated the problem I think before you say that the highest performing schools "perpetuated the problem", you're going to need to substantiate that. > https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi... . I haven't thought about this topic for a while, but an analysis I heard goes a bit like this: Typist used to be a "woman's job" as well. My understanding is that the job was split. What you would call programmers today were typically called "architects" or similar. Lumping them all together you obviously get a serious skew toward women because considerably more technicians/programmers (where the ratio favours women, but not exclusively) were required for computers of the time (trailing off through the '80s as stored program computers became the hotness) than architects/designers (where the ratio favours men, but not exclusively).
    - eganist 9y ago
      > I think before you say that the highest performing schools "perpetuated the problem", you're going to need to substantiate that. I don't actually believe so given that the source link did so for me. The problem was substantiated in Duolingo's own metrics and reasoning for switching, the problem in this case being that their traditional college talent pools were overly biased towards men -- well, colleges select their own students. :)
- FeistyOtter 9y ago
  > For the purpose of this post, we are referring to male and female genders, although we recognize that many other genders exist. https://apath.org/63-genders/ https://apath.org/63-genders/ It's a good thing that there are even more fuzzy feelings in the future: whopping 63 genders to hire equally!
  - jgh 9y ago
    Edgy.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  I don't see why you're being downvoted. They literally say > We secured the best new graduates for software engineering roles, but we noticed something: they were all male. So they did decide to look pass candidate performance. The problem is that they are bragging about simply hiring more females, anyone can do that. How the company will perform as result of that is what matters and they didn't address that at all.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > The problem is that they are bragging about simply hiring more females, anyone can do that. How the company will perform as result of that is what matters and they didn't address that at all. The other rather interesting thing is that they seem to have introduced all of these measures at the same time; so they won't actually be able to analyze or compare the performance outcomes for a given year. The people who like the policies will say they're working great, but the year just didn't produce as many hires which turned out well (except perhaps through candidates from the schools which they did not remove from the list).
  - achompas 9y ago
    > So they did decide to look pass candidate performance. Not quite. Your quote is missing context: they hired the best candidates from the schools they visited. That’s not the set of all schools, though! They tried to correct this by visiting schools whose CS demographics more closely match the general population.
    - curiousgal 9y ago
      They also say > this meant going to some never-before-visited schools as well as cutting out a few schools that had been on our list before They wouldn't have eliminated those schools if the new schools produced better candidates.
      - achompas 9y ago
        Great catch, I missed that. EDIT: Wait, I rushed and misread your comment. Why wouldn't they eliminate these schools if the new schools produced better candidates? I would imagine it was the opposite: remove schools because the new schools produce better candidates, and time is finite.
- reureu 9y ago
  > so we ignored our best indications of candidate performance Judging from the number of "tech hiring process is broken" posts I see on HN, it seems pretty dubious to claim that existing indicators of candidate performance are actually measuring what they claim to be. So, if you look at the situation from that point of view, then there's no reason to elevate existing metrics to anything higher than "meh, maybe it's measuring something."
- aphextron 9y ago
  Can it be possible that there are more relevant skills to software engineering than pure coding ability? The best people I have worked with in my career were not the few “rockstar” geniuses, but the rank and file developers with good communication skills and work ethic who strive to make everyone else’s lives easier.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > Can it be possible that there are more relevant skills to software engineering than pure coding ability? The best people I have worked with in my career were not the few “rockstar” geniuses, but the rank and file developers with good communication skills and work ethic who strive to make everyone else’s lives easier. Those personality traits are part of performance as well; a combination of diligence and intelligence tends to predict both job and academic performance. You can be a genius, but you're not in that pool if you aren't willing to do the work.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I find that suspect; I know there are people with something called "work ethic", but for those of us lacking such characteristic, our willing to do the work depends on the work itself (plus the surrounding environment) - and that can be quite different between college and the workplace. For example, I'd say I'm a better worker than a student.
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  That’s not necessarily the case. (1) They can still sort rank by quality of institution within the subgroup. (2) I also suspect that outside of top 10 CS programs, that universities sort ranked by proportion of women tend to have higher quality candidates than average. (3) If you build a repudiation for attracting female talent then you may be more likely to attract some of the top women in a given pool—women who might normally go to FANG. Personally, I think the last reason provides an arbitrage opportunity that let’s small companies that focus on women compete for talent in a way that FANG can not.
Croso 9y ago
Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere. Also, it's kind of counterintuitive to equality, as you basically just guarantee women get a job in Tech. Regardless of skill set. Which in itself is kind of sexist. In my opinion anyways, based on my anecdotal experience holding the door for feminists. I don't know why people think turning women into "butts in seats", as opposed to genuine respect and admiration of skills and abilities is going to make this problem better.
- eganist 9y ago
  > Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere. Correct. But the goal here I suspect is to get enough corporations onboard such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) are now motivated to select for and encourage balanced talent pool participation for fear of missing out on "hip" companies.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    It'll be interesting to see in five or ten years if all of this effort bears results. Being willing, and taking satisfaction from beating your head against a computer to get it to do what you want it to do is something I just don't observe as being wide-spread in any population group. But we need as many of those people as we can find, wherever they happen to be and whatever they look like.
  - pedrosorio 9y ago
    > such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) I guess some universities care about which companies recruit there (for marketing purposes, being able to say companies A,B,C recruit there), but does this really apply to k-12? Also, if most "hip" companies chose to only recruit at universities with gender ratios exceeding some threshold (and by causality this happens before universities are "properly motivated" to encourage balanced gender ratios in CS), won't they be hurting themselves by competing for an arbitrarily chosen much smaller pool of talent?
    - 9y ago
reader5000 9y ago
How is this not illegal?
- eganist 9y ago
  Because they're not declining candidates because of their gender. They're hiring from talent pools where both genders are more properly represented. None of this stops a candidate from applying to duolingo directly. There's no discrimination going on against humans, and discriminating against a school is totally fine so long as there's no suspect reason to do so (e.g. discriminating against Howard because they've got primarily African-descended students). Not a lawyer. Would welcome a legal opinion.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    This seems to be some double speak.
    - eganist 9y ago
      Interesting. What didn't you understand?
      - adamnemecek 9y ago
        You misunderstand. I'm saying you just restated something illegal in a way that might make it seem less illegal when it fact it's not.
        fixermark 9y ago
        Does title IX dictate where a company is required to focus its talent recruiting process?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - 9y ago
realPubkey 9y ago
The duolingo CEO must be so bad in statisics..
- fixermark 9y ago
  Given that he's the same individual that built reCAPTCHA, probably not.
- andrewem 9y ago
  I've downvoted your comment because it's only an insult (to a person who doesn't even seem to have been directly involved in this work), rather than an argument that you put forth and which others can attempt to either support or refute.
HarryHirsch 9y ago
That's nice. Now that we have successfully defeated gender discrimination in tech, can we proceed to defeat age discrimination?
jankotek 9y ago
Why not hire remotely, if you care about diversity soo much?
infinity0 9y ago
This strategy implicitly assumes that reverse discrimination is an effective policy, i.e. that achieving 50:50 in your own organisation will somehow push the population-wide 18:82 ratio in a different direction. This isn't justified anywhere, it's just taken as an assumption. It would be good if these implicit positions were justified rather than imposed. The Ys getting discriminated against, will understandly be angry about it, especially since only a small percentage of the Ys actually benefitted from historical discrimination against Xs, yet all of them are now eligible to be reverse-discriminated against.
- sethev 9y ago
  It doesn't assume that at all. Any company can choose to implement a hiring goal for (almost) any reason they choose. Maybe they wanted a broader set of perspectives on their team? The idea that Duolingo would have to justify their hiring decisions in terms of changing the demographics of the whole industry is absurd. Also Duolingo has ~100 employees total. There's no way that the industry's demographics are somehow limiting their available talent pool. Having a policy like this sounds like a great way for a small company to attract highly talented women.
  - infinity0 9y ago
    You are right, it doesn't assume that. However if they don't assume that, then they are effectively worsening the 18:82 ratio for other organisations who will be logically and mathematically unable to reach a 50:50 ratio without leaving (82-18)/82 of Y unemployed, so they would be virtue signalling. So either they assume that, or they are virtue signalling, or they are trying to make (82-18)/82 of Y unemployed. Q.E.D. I was trying to Assume Good Faith in my first comment but sure, call me out for not including the "asshole options". edit: yeah sure, downvote me for pointing out that badly-thought out ideological policies don't work mathematically
    - sethev 9y ago
      Even your moved goal posts still try to connect one small company's policies to the industry as a whole. Maybe it's worth emphasizing _your_ unstated assumption that the only reason a company would want 50:50 is to satisfy some external ideological motive rather than careful analysis of what makes for a good team.
arkona 9y ago
> For the purpose of this post, we are referring to male and female genders, although we recognize that many other genders exist Yes, your dogma is not even internally consistent.
eganist 9y ago
The comments here are viscerally disturbing, and not for reasons that might jump to mind, meaning I don't really mind the merit-driven mindset when it's aptly applied. It's not in this case. It's one thing to value merit over politics -- I'd expect nothing less from my peers in the bay. However, it's an entirely different matter to value merit over long term strategic objectives, and from what I can tell, an alarming number of commenters here are bereft of any understanding of the long term implications of not striving to increase the potential engineering talent pool. We in the US are in a situation where: 1) talent is scarce 2) companies, startups more specifically, are now less willing to hire international talent for fear of visa/etc. risks in the current age, 3) politics are disincentivizing efforts to broaden the talent pool via obvious means -- such as by reintroducing and motivating women to participate. The end result of this isn't going to be job security for existing participants in the tech industry here in the US. It's going to be the flight of entrepreneurs to talent centers where talent can be acquired more reasonably, and right now, that's starting to look less and less like the United States given the above. Shoot, even YC is broadening beyond these geographical and political boundaries through tools like Startup School. If your goal's to keep our tech industry in the US from becoming a laggard, it's in your interest to encourage the system to strategically start motivating and representing the population space more accurately. Otherwise, the talent drought will just drive ideas overseas. (I apologize to any overseas readers reading my comment. I hope you understand.) TL;DR: very few people here are thinking about this from a long term strategic angle; it seems like everyone's just concerned about their own jobs.
- realusername 9y ago
  The comments here are pointing the obvious data behind hiring in tech, if you have <10% women working in Software engineering, you can't have 50% women working in every tech company. The issue cannot be fixed in any way by changing hiring policies.
  - eganist 9y ago
    > The issue cannot be fixed in any way by changing hiring policies. ...it's a strategic play. Changing hiring needs influences post-secondary institutions which influences secondary and primary schooling decisions at the policy level, or such is what's envisioned. Same as I've said above. I also made a point about people not understanding the strategic play, which you've evidently validated.
throwaway0255 9y ago
Fewer women go into STEM because women have more and better options in life. STEM is hard and it sucks. Same reason women don’t have to mine coal. They have the luxury of being able to choose not to. Men don’t have that luxury. We either earn or we live under a bridge eating food out of cans. Society puts an enormous pressure on men with the threat of homelessness and isolation, which doesn’t exist to anywhere near the same degree for women, because women have inherent value. Men have no inherent value to society, their only value to society is realized through their work. The result is men work harder and endure harder shittier jobs, including STEM. If you want more women in STEM, then just eliminate all of their societal privileges, consider them inherently valueless like men, and put them under the same level of threat men are under of being isolated and going homeless.
- denverkarma 9y ago
  Brutally worded but I get what you're saying. Our collective ability to not care about mens issues really amazes me.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Women disliking STEM doesn't explain stuff like this: In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full
  - DrScump 9y ago
    Academia not not necessarily represent STEM as a whole.
  - tomp 9y ago
    cherry-picking studies is easy https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/14/study-finds-surprisingly-that-women-are-favored-for-jobs-in-stem/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/1... > And according to their latest study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, women are no longer at a disadvantage when applying for tenure-track positions in university science departments. In fact, the bias has now flipped: Female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
This approach is not a solution to anything. The 18:82 ratio needs to be addressed, which basically means starting to build interest in high school. Duolingo (etc.) would be better served by sponsoring interest groups and clubs in high schools, offering scholarships to graduating high school seniors, offering internships to high school students, etc. They need to market high tech careers to those high school girls who have the interest and proclivity for tech, but not the exposure that helps them realize it.
- ap3 9y ago
  What better way to market to high school girls than to send a team of women engineers to show them there is a spot for them in the workplace ? You can do all the clubs and scholarships you want, but the proof is in the hiring
tzahola 9y ago
I wonder how it feels like to be a female engineer, trying to figure out whether your skills were indeed above the bar, or you got hired only to fill the gaps in some diversity officer’s spreadsheets. Sounds like a recipe for impostor syndrome to me.
- denverkarma 9y ago
  One of the very best programmers I've ever worked with is female. She said almost this exact thing to me, basically: "On the one hand it's awesome that I can have my pick of any job in the business, on the other hand it sucks that I don't know if I'm just a statistic for them."
- ap3 9y ago
  Honestly what does it matter. When I was hired out of college I didn’t know if it was due to my abilities, potential or because I was a cheaper hire than others. I still showed up to work and got paid.
lkrubner 9y ago
A thought experiment I'll quote: "Suppose there was overwhelming evidence that 95% of women were terrible at technology and 5% of women were awesome at technology. There are roughly 7 billion people on the planet, roughly 3.5 billion women, roughly 1.5 billion women who work outside the house for a wage. In this scenario, where only 5% of women love technology, there are 75 million working women who are awesome at technology. According to the Bureau Of Labor Statics, the USA had 1,256,200 software developers in 2016. The BLS also tracks some other minor categories, such as Web Developer, which have about 150,000 jobs. Lump all the sub-categories together, and let’s say there are 2 million such jobs in the USA. Let’s be wildly generous and double the number for the EU, and triple it for Asia. That gives 12 million software developer jobs in all of the advanced and developing economies. So even with exaggerated assumptions about women’s inherent weakness in technology, we still end up with a scenario where every single programming job in the world can be filled by a woman who will be awesome at the job. There is no need for men, at all, in the tech industry." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-women-being-pushed-away-from-the-tech-industry http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-women-being-pus... More to point, women are being pushed out of tech. Women constituted 35% of all software engineers in 1990, but only 26% in 2015 (see above url). Given the rough figure of about 2 million jobs, that 9% difference suggests there are 180,000 missing women from engineering jobs right now. Initiatives like Duolingo help reverse the trend, and therefore should be praised.
- denverkarma 9y ago
  "Pushed out" is an odd narrative for an industry that is bending over backwards to try and draw more women in. Is it even possible that women (on average) are less interested in tech work and thus have chosen (on aggregate) to pursue other careers instead? It seems like even asking that question is forbidden. Why is the same level of angst not applied to education, where <20% of primary school teachers are male? Have the public schools been pushing men out, or are men just not interested? Or maybe it's some of both? Do we even know?
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    If primary school teacher was a valued (well-paid) position, I think we'd be having that very discussion. Historically in the US, teachers were men, and computer programmers were women. As teachers shifted more toward women, and as computer programmers shifted more toward men, the compensation for teachers dropped, while the compensation for computer programmers skyrocketed. The correlation is strong, although causation is debatable. It's no surprise that the efforts to achieve gender balance in a highly-paid industry gets a lot more attention than any gender-imbalance in a lowly-paid industry. Put another way: men weren't too upset about being pushed out of teaching positions because they were able to make better money elsewhere.
vergessenmir 9y ago
I like the approach here. Follow the data. It keeps everyone honest. All companies cherry pick from the best Universities. The fact they've had to look elsewhere means they're not getting the best from the best Universities (based on rankings). They're getting the best female graduates possible. I assume these are good enough but not the best. Male hires are probably still from the best universities. This creates an imbalance in competence. The female hires are good enough, the male hires are exceptional. Male hires move up the ranks on virtue of their competence. Other male hires leave after a couple promotion cycles expire. Now we have situation where male hires are predominantly in coveted positions in the company and female hires are mostly junior mid hires. The equality problem has now shifted up. What do you do then? How far is a company willing to go with an equality experiment before shareholders start noticing the erosion of the companies competitive advantage and start protesting. I appluad Duolingo for it's boldness. Am doubtful on its sustainability without either the rest of the industries following suit while pre university educational centres attempt to rebalance.
- greenyoda 9y ago
  > Male hires are probably still from the best universities. This creates an imbalance in competence. Is there any objective evidence that people who graduate from the "best universities" become the most competent engineers?
  - vergessenmir 9y ago
    Depends by which metric you use to evaluate the hires. The University where the candidate graduated is certainly used as a metric for predicting competency. Regardless whether this is the right thing to do companies fall back to this approach time and time again.
rdlecler1 9y ago
I can understand why women wouldn’t want to be engineers because I can understand why most men also don’t want to be engineers. Engineers are a small subset of the total population and it’s difficulty to say whether we have optimized for either sex but trying to make a one-size-fits all environment seems sub optimal if the goal is to increase total numbers of CS professionals. CS programs should be as popular as ever for males, but it does seem like they could be more popular for females if there were environmental adjustments. Rather than trying to adjust the entire environment (which may discourage men from entering) to one-size-fits-all, I think it makes more sense for some schools to specialize in attracting and training women and in turn those companies that provide meaningful opportunities and environment that are important to women can also more easily find a larger pool of talent.
tgafpc 9y ago
Unless their applicant pool is exactly 50/50 with no influence, this is even worse because they are actively and purposely discriminating against people. This is not a company that puts it's employees and customers at the top of it's priority list.
pedrorijo91 9y ago
why would anyone want to achieve a 50:50 gender ratio for new software engineer hires? you should simply aim for hiring the best software engineer despite their gender/age/color. The only ratio you could try to achieve would be to have 50:50 applicants for the roles and the select the best candidates. Or will you hire a female even if she sucks at the job because your team is only made of males? Are you filling a sticker collection or building a team?
kingjacob 9y ago
Sidebar: Do any software co’s complaining about a lack of quality female engineering talent have real apprenticeship programs like Parker Hannifin or Chevron?

57 points by doppp 9y ago

> We started our hiring reboot by analyzing where we were spending our hiring time and effort. Perhaps not surprisingly, we were spending time at colleges and universities based on past experience, rather than their percentage of female computer science undergraduate majors. The national average of female computer science degree graduates is 18%.2 We made a decision to revisit our typical list of schools and only visit the universities that had more than 18% of female undergraduate computer science majors. More or less "We realized we were looking solely at candidate performance when we were selecting a candidate pool. That wasn't producing the warm fuzzies, so we ignored our best indications of candidate performance, and instead hired from a pool that made us feel good about our arbitrary political goal while hopefully just stopping short of illegal discrimination.".

tomlock 9y ago
> They also came up with other great ideas, including adding a tool that automates the first coding task and removes a candidate’s identifying information. This doesn't really fit that narrative.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  That's great and all, but why go to the trouble of finding a politics-oriented candidate pool, instead of a performance-oriented one if removing identifying information and automating the first prescreening task (among other things) are the meat of the operation? It seems like they sorta quickly move past the questionable candidate selection process to talk about the stuff they can be more proud of.
- tomp 9y ago
  Hm... I wonder what the influence of that process was. I.e. how does the outgoing percentages (50:50) compare with the incoming percentages? The article doesn't say, but unless it's also 50:50, their process is still biased / sexist, possibly even more than at companies that don't achieve a 50:50 outcome.
- jon_e_pizza 9y ago
  Correct, because they're trying to mislead you: > They also came up with other great ideas, including adding a tool that automates the first coding task and removes a candidate’s identifying information. Based on the feedback, we’ve implemented a number of changes to our internal process for recruiting. At no point do they say they implemented removing candidate information. They say it was suggested, and then _separately_ they state they implemented a number of changes. You can't randomly pick 50:50 out of 18:82 and they very much didn't.
eganist 9y ago
Or, the correct perspective: "we realized we were contributing to the problem of inadequately motivating women to re-enter the programming workforce¹ through our selection of candidates from schools which likewise perpetuated the problem, so we switched to hiring from institutions which were also investing towards balancing the talent pool, with the goal of creating a positive feedback loop motivating more corporations to do the same, and therefore motivating more schools to aim to diversify their software engineering recruitment efforts." ¹ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > likewise perpetuated the problem I think before you say that the highest performing schools "perpetuated the problem", you're going to need to substantiate that. > https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi... . I haven't thought about this topic for a while, but an analysis I heard goes a bit like this: Typist used to be a "woman's job" as well. My understanding is that the job was split. What you would call programmers today were typically called "architects" or similar. Lumping them all together you obviously get a serious skew toward women because considerably more technicians/programmers (where the ratio favours women, but not exclusively) were required for computers of the time (trailing off through the '80s as stored program computers became the hotness) than architects/designers (where the ratio favours men, but not exclusively).
  - eganist 9y ago
    > I think before you say that the highest performing schools "perpetuated the problem", you're going to need to substantiate that. I don't actually believe so given that the source link did so for me. The problem was substantiated in Duolingo's own metrics and reasoning for switching, the problem in this case being that their traditional college talent pools were overly biased towards men -- well, colleges select their own students. :)
FeistyOtter 9y ago
> For the purpose of this post, we are referring to male and female genders, although we recognize that many other genders exist. https://apath.org/63-genders/ https://apath.org/63-genders/ It's a good thing that there are even more fuzzy feelings in the future: whopping 63 genders to hire equally!
- jgh 9y ago
  Edgy.
curiousgal 9y ago
I don't see why you're being downvoted. They literally say > We secured the best new graduates for software engineering roles, but we noticed something: they were all male. So they did decide to look pass candidate performance. The problem is that they are bragging about simply hiring more females, anyone can do that. How the company will perform as result of that is what matters and they didn't address that at all.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > The problem is that they are bragging about simply hiring more females, anyone can do that. How the company will perform as result of that is what matters and they didn't address that at all. The other rather interesting thing is that they seem to have introduced all of these measures at the same time; so they won't actually be able to analyze or compare the performance outcomes for a given year. The people who like the policies will say they're working great, but the year just didn't produce as many hires which turned out well (except perhaps through candidates from the schools which they did not remove from the list).
- achompas 9y ago
  > So they did decide to look pass candidate performance. Not quite. Your quote is missing context: they hired the best candidates from the schools they visited. That’s not the set of all schools, though! They tried to correct this by visiting schools whose CS demographics more closely match the general population.
  - curiousgal 9y ago
    They also say > this meant going to some never-before-visited schools as well as cutting out a few schools that had been on our list before They wouldn't have eliminated those schools if the new schools produced better candidates.
    - achompas 9y ago
      Great catch, I missed that. EDIT: Wait, I rushed and misread your comment. Why wouldn't they eliminate these schools if the new schools produced better candidates? I would imagine it was the opposite: remove schools because the new schools produce better candidates, and time is finite.
reureu 9y ago
> so we ignored our best indications of candidate performance Judging from the number of "tech hiring process is broken" posts I see on HN, it seems pretty dubious to claim that existing indicators of candidate performance are actually measuring what they claim to be. So, if you look at the situation from that point of view, then there's no reason to elevate existing metrics to anything higher than "meh, maybe it's measuring something."
aphextron 9y ago
Can it be possible that there are more relevant skills to software engineering than pure coding ability? The best people I have worked with in my career were not the few “rockstar” geniuses, but the rank and file developers with good communication skills and work ethic who strive to make everyone else’s lives easier.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > Can it be possible that there are more relevant skills to software engineering than pure coding ability? The best people I have worked with in my career were not the few “rockstar” geniuses, but the rank and file developers with good communication skills and work ethic who strive to make everyone else’s lives easier. Those personality traits are part of performance as well; a combination of diligence and intelligence tends to predict both job and academic performance. You can be a genius, but you're not in that pool if you aren't willing to do the work.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I find that suspect; I know there are people with something called "work ethic", but for those of us lacking such characteristic, our willing to do the work depends on the work itself (plus the surrounding environment) - and that can be quite different between college and the workplace. For example, I'd say I'm a better worker than a student.
rdlecler1 9y ago
That’s not necessarily the case. (1) They can still sort rank by quality of institution within the subgroup. (2) I also suspect that outside of top 10 CS programs, that universities sort ranked by proportion of women tend to have higher quality candidates than average. (3) If you build a repudiation for attracting female talent then you may be more likely to attract some of the top women in a given pool—women who might normally go to FANG. Personally, I think the last reason provides an arbitrage opportunity that let’s small companies that focus on women compete for talent in a way that FANG can not.

Croso 9y ago

Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere. Also, it's kind of counterintuitive to equality, as you basically just guarantee women get a job in Tech. Regardless of skill set. Which in itself is kind of sexist. In my opinion anyways, based on my anecdotal experience holding the door for feminists. I don't know why people think turning women into "butts in seats", as opposed to genuine respect and admiration of skills and abilities is going to make this problem better.

eganist 9y ago
> Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere. Correct. But the goal here I suspect is to get enough corporations onboard such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) are now motivated to select for and encourage balanced talent pool participation for fear of missing out on "hip" companies.
- megaman22 9y ago
  It'll be interesting to see in five or ten years if all of this effort bears results. Being willing, and taking satisfaction from beating your head against a computer to get it to do what you want it to do is something I just don't observe as being wide-spread in any population group. But we need as many of those people as we can find, wherever they happen to be and whatever they look like.
- pedrosorio 9y ago
  > such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) I guess some universities care about which companies recruit there (for marketing purposes, being able to say companies A,B,C recruit there), but does this really apply to k-12? Also, if most "hip" companies chose to only recruit at universities with gender ratios exceeding some threshold (and by causality this happens before universities are "properly motivated" to encourage balanced gender ratios in CS), won't they be hurting themselves by competing for an arbitrarily chosen much smaller pool of talent?
  - 9y ago

reader5000 9y ago

How is this not illegal?

eganist 9y ago
Because they're not declining candidates because of their gender. They're hiring from talent pools where both genders are more properly represented. None of this stops a candidate from applying to duolingo directly. There's no discrimination going on against humans, and discriminating against a school is totally fine so long as there's no suspect reason to do so (e.g. discriminating against Howard because they've got primarily African-descended students). Not a lawyer. Would welcome a legal opinion.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  This seems to be some double speak.
  - eganist 9y ago
    Interesting. What didn't you understand?
    - adamnemecek 9y ago
      You misunderstand. I'm saying you just restated something illegal in a way that might make it seem less illegal when it fact it's not.
      - fixermark 9y ago
        Does title IX dictate where a company is required to focus its talent recruiting process?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- 9y ago

realPubkey 9y ago

The duolingo CEO must be so bad in statisics..

fixermark 9y ago
Given that he's the same individual that built reCAPTCHA, probably not.
andrewem 9y ago
I've downvoted your comment because it's only an insult (to a person who doesn't even seem to have been directly involved in this work), rather than an argument that you put forth and which others can attempt to either support or refute.

HarryHirsch 9y ago

That's nice. Now that we have successfully defeated gender discrimination in tech, can we proceed to defeat age discrimination?

jankotek 9y ago

Why not hire remotely, if you care about diversity soo much?

infinity0 9y ago

This strategy implicitly assumes that reverse discrimination is an effective policy, i.e. that achieving 50:50 in your own organisation will somehow push the population-wide 18:82 ratio in a different direction. This isn't justified anywhere, it's just taken as an assumption. It would be good if these implicit positions were justified rather than imposed. The Ys getting discriminated against, will understandly be angry about it, especially since only a small percentage of the Ys actually benefitted from historical discrimination against Xs, yet all of them are now eligible to be reverse-discriminated against.

sethev 9y ago
It doesn't assume that at all. Any company can choose to implement a hiring goal for (almost) any reason they choose. Maybe they wanted a broader set of perspectives on their team? The idea that Duolingo would have to justify their hiring decisions in terms of changing the demographics of the whole industry is absurd. Also Duolingo has ~100 employees total. There's no way that the industry's demographics are somehow limiting their available talent pool. Having a policy like this sounds like a great way for a small company to attract highly talented women.
- infinity0 9y ago
  You are right, it doesn't assume that. However if they don't assume that, then they are effectively worsening the 18:82 ratio for other organisations who will be logically and mathematically unable to reach a 50:50 ratio without leaving (82-18)/82 of Y unemployed, so they would be virtue signalling. So either they assume that, or they are virtue signalling, or they are trying to make (82-18)/82 of Y unemployed. Q.E.D. I was trying to Assume Good Faith in my first comment but sure, call me out for not including the "asshole options". edit: yeah sure, downvote me for pointing out that badly-thought out ideological policies don't work mathematically
  - sethev 9y ago
    Even your moved goal posts still try to connect one small company's policies to the industry as a whole. Maybe it's worth emphasizing _your_ unstated assumption that the only reason a company would want 50:50 is to satisfy some external ideological motive rather than careful analysis of what makes for a good team.

arkona 9y ago

> For the purpose of this post, we are referring to male and female genders, although we recognize that many other genders exist Yes, your dogma is not even internally consistent.

eganist 9y ago

The comments here are viscerally disturbing, and not for reasons that might jump to mind, meaning I don't really mind the merit-driven mindset when it's aptly applied. It's not in this case. It's one thing to value merit over politics -- I'd expect nothing less from my peers in the bay. However, it's an entirely different matter to value merit over long term strategic objectives, and from what I can tell, an alarming number of commenters here are bereft of any understanding of the long term implications of not striving to increase the potential engineering talent pool. We in the US are in a situation where: 1) talent is scarce 2) companies, startups more specifically, are now less willing to hire international talent for fear of visa/etc. risks in the current age, 3) politics are disincentivizing efforts to broaden the talent pool via obvious means -- such as by reintroducing and motivating women to participate. The end result of this isn't going to be job security for existing participants in the tech industry here in the US. It's going to be the flight of entrepreneurs to talent centers where talent can be acquired more reasonably, and right now, that's starting to look less and less like the United States given the above. Shoot, even YC is broadening beyond these geographical and political boundaries through tools like Startup School. If your goal's to keep our tech industry in the US from becoming a laggard, it's in your interest to encourage the system to strategically start motivating and representing the population space more accurately. Otherwise, the talent drought will just drive ideas overseas. (I apologize to any overseas readers reading my comment. I hope you understand.) TL;DR: very few people here are thinking about this from a long term strategic angle; it seems like everyone's just concerned about their own jobs.

realusername 9y ago
The comments here are pointing the obvious data behind hiring in tech, if you have <10% women working in Software engineering, you can't have 50% women working in every tech company. The issue cannot be fixed in any way by changing hiring policies.
- eganist 9y ago
  > The issue cannot be fixed in any way by changing hiring policies. ...it's a strategic play. Changing hiring needs influences post-secondary institutions which influences secondary and primary schooling decisions at the policy level, or such is what's envisioned. Same as I've said above. I also made a point about people not understanding the strategic play, which you've evidently validated.

throwaway0255 9y ago

Fewer women go into STEM because women have more and better options in life. STEM is hard and it sucks. Same reason women don’t have to mine coal. They have the luxury of being able to choose not to. Men don’t have that luxury. We either earn or we live under a bridge eating food out of cans. Society puts an enormous pressure on men with the threat of homelessness and isolation, which doesn’t exist to anywhere near the same degree for women, because women have inherent value. Men have no inherent value to society, their only value to society is realized through their work. The result is men work harder and endure harder shittier jobs, including STEM. If you want more women in STEM, then just eliminate all of their societal privileges, consider them inherently valueless like men, and put them under the same level of threat men are under of being isolated and going homeless.

denverkarma 9y ago
Brutally worded but I get what you're saying. Our collective ability to not care about mens issues really amazes me.
icebraining 9y ago
Women disliking STEM doesn't explain stuff like this: In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full
- DrScump 9y ago
  Academia not not necessarily represent STEM as a whole.
- tomp 9y ago
  cherry-picking studies is easy https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/14/study-finds-surprisingly-that-women-are-favored-for-jobs-in-stem/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/1... > And according to their latest study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, women are no longer at a disadvantage when applying for tenure-track positions in university science departments. In fact, the bias has now flipped: Female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

This approach is not a solution to anything. The 18:82 ratio needs to be addressed, which basically means starting to build interest in high school. Duolingo (etc.) would be better served by sponsoring interest groups and clubs in high schools, offering scholarships to graduating high school seniors, offering internships to high school students, etc. They need to market high tech careers to those high school girls who have the interest and proclivity for tech, but not the exposure that helps them realize it.

ap3 9y ago
What better way to market to high school girls than to send a team of women engineers to show them there is a spot for them in the workplace ? You can do all the clubs and scholarships you want, but the proof is in the hiring

tzahola 9y ago

I wonder how it feels like to be a female engineer, trying to figure out whether your skills were indeed above the bar, or you got hired only to fill the gaps in some diversity officer’s spreadsheets. Sounds like a recipe for impostor syndrome to me.

denverkarma 9y ago
One of the very best programmers I've ever worked with is female. She said almost this exact thing to me, basically: "On the one hand it's awesome that I can have my pick of any job in the business, on the other hand it sucks that I don't know if I'm just a statistic for them."
ap3 9y ago
Honestly what does it matter. When I was hired out of college I didn’t know if it was due to my abilities, potential or because I was a cheaper hire than others. I still showed up to work and got paid.

lkrubner 9y ago

A thought experiment I'll quote: "Suppose there was overwhelming evidence that 95% of women were terrible at technology and 5% of women were awesome at technology. There are roughly 7 billion people on the planet, roughly 3.5 billion women, roughly 1.5 billion women who work outside the house for a wage. In this scenario, where only 5% of women love technology, there are 75 million working women who are awesome at technology. According to the Bureau Of Labor Statics, the USA had 1,256,200 software developers in 2016. The BLS also tracks some other minor categories, such as Web Developer, which have about 150,000 jobs. Lump all the sub-categories together, and let’s say there are 2 million such jobs in the USA. Let’s be wildly generous and double the number for the EU, and triple it for Asia. That gives 12 million software developer jobs in all of the advanced and developing economies. So even with exaggerated assumptions about women’s inherent weakness in technology, we still end up with a scenario where every single programming job in the world can be filled by a woman who will be awesome at the job. There is no need for men, at all, in the tech industry." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-women-being-pushed-away-from-the-tech-industry http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-women-being-pus... More to point, women are being pushed out of tech. Women constituted 35% of all software engineers in 1990, but only 26% in 2015 (see above url). Given the rough figure of about 2 million jobs, that 9% difference suggests there are 180,000 missing women from engineering jobs right now. Initiatives like Duolingo help reverse the trend, and therefore should be praised.

denverkarma 9y ago
"Pushed out" is an odd narrative for an industry that is bending over backwards to try and draw more women in. Is it even possible that women (on average) are less interested in tech work and thus have chosen (on aggregate) to pursue other careers instead? It seems like even asking that question is forbidden. Why is the same level of angst not applied to education, where <20% of primary school teachers are male? Have the public schools been pushing men out, or are men just not interested? Or maybe it's some of both? Do we even know?
- pwinnski 9y ago
  If primary school teacher was a valued (well-paid) position, I think we'd be having that very discussion. Historically in the US, teachers were men, and computer programmers were women. As teachers shifted more toward women, and as computer programmers shifted more toward men, the compensation for teachers dropped, while the compensation for computer programmers skyrocketed. The correlation is strong, although causation is debatable. It's no surprise that the efforts to achieve gender balance in a highly-paid industry gets a lot more attention than any gender-imbalance in a lowly-paid industry. Put another way: men weren't too upset about being pushed out of teaching positions because they were able to make better money elsewhere.

vergessenmir 9y ago

I like the approach here. Follow the data. It keeps everyone honest. All companies cherry pick from the best Universities. The fact they've had to look elsewhere means they're not getting the best from the best Universities (based on rankings). They're getting the best female graduates possible. I assume these are good enough but not the best. Male hires are probably still from the best universities. This creates an imbalance in competence. The female hires are good enough, the male hires are exceptional. Male hires move up the ranks on virtue of their competence. Other male hires leave after a couple promotion cycles expire. Now we have situation where male hires are predominantly in coveted positions in the company and female hires are mostly junior mid hires. The equality problem has now shifted up. What do you do then? How far is a company willing to go with an equality experiment before shareholders start noticing the erosion of the companies competitive advantage and start protesting. I appluad Duolingo for it's boldness. Am doubtful on its sustainability without either the rest of the industries following suit while pre university educational centres attempt to rebalance.

greenyoda 9y ago
> Male hires are probably still from the best universities. This creates an imbalance in competence. Is there any objective evidence that people who graduate from the "best universities" become the most competent engineers?
- vergessenmir 9y ago
  Depends by which metric you use to evaluate the hires. The University where the candidate graduated is certainly used as a metric for predicting competency. Regardless whether this is the right thing to do companies fall back to this approach time and time again.

rdlecler1 9y ago

I can understand why women wouldn’t want to be engineers because I can understand why most men also don’t want to be engineers. Engineers are a small subset of the total population and it’s difficulty to say whether we have optimized for either sex but trying to make a one-size-fits all environment seems sub optimal if the goal is to increase total numbers of CS professionals. CS programs should be as popular as ever for males, but it does seem like they could be more popular for females if there were environmental adjustments. Rather than trying to adjust the entire environment (which may discourage men from entering) to one-size-fits-all, I think it makes more sense for some schools to specialize in attracting and training women and in turn those companies that provide meaningful opportunities and environment that are important to women can also more easily find a larger pool of talent.

tgafpc 9y ago

Unless their applicant pool is exactly 50/50 with no influence, this is even worse because they are actively and purposely discriminating against people. This is not a company that puts it's employees and customers at the top of it's priority list.

pedrorijo91 9y ago

why would anyone want to achieve a 50:50 gender ratio for new software engineer hires? you should simply aim for hiring the best software engineer despite their gender/age/color. The only ratio you could try to achieve would be to have 50:50 applicants for the roles and the select the best candidates. Or will you hire a female even if she sucks at the job because your team is only made of males? Are you filling a sticker collection or building a team?

kingjacob 9y ago

Sidebar: Do any software co’s complaining about a lack of quality female engineering talent have real apprenticeship programs like Parker Hannifin or Chevron?