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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 ba

• 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?
    • pwinnski 9y ago
      Yes, girls are currently switching away from math and computer classes in high school, before they even reach college.
      • pedrosorio 9y ago
        I am not disputing the fact that high school matters as far as gender distribution of people applying to software eng. positions. I was replying to a comment that says: > 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 And asking how will "fear of missing out" motivate k-12 schools to get more girls into those classes. Companies don't recruit in k-12 schools. How would duolingo and "other hip companies" recruiting exclusively from universities whose CS classes exceed a gender ratio threshold influence k-12 schools?
  • autokad 9y ago
    have you ever considered the idea that many women dont want to be engineers? what about the fact that more men are dropping out of school and less are entering college? shouldnt we be encouraging those men to be engineers as well? as far as encouraging undergaduate/graduate to have more 'balanced' classes, since there is a limited number of seats I can't see that going any other way than: you have a penis, thats a negative on your application.
    • eganist 9y ago
      > what about I'm not here to entertain your Tu Quoque fallacies today. :)
      • autokad 9y ago
        Tu quoque "argument" follows the pattern: Person A makes claim X. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X. Therefore X is false I made no claims about your past actions or past claims.
• thinkpad20 9y ago
  I agree with aspects of what you said; in particular the observation that his would be impossible to implement everywhere due to the numbers imbalance of the talent pool. Although I think in general having more women in tech will encourage more women to enter the field (as I assume occurred in medicine and biology), so in the long run it could well be feasible. I definitely think you could have left out the “holding the door for feminists” part though.
  • jgh 9y ago
    The holding the door thing is a marvelous trope. I honestly doubt anyone's ever given him a hard time about it considering it's a perfectly normal thing for people to do for anybody. Maybe somebody didn't do the traditional mumbled "thanks" and he interpreted it as them taking offense?
    • diggernet 9y ago
      Actually, I once worked with someone who adamantly refused to go through a door being held for her.
      • jgh 9y ago
        And some people refuse to take elevators. Just because you came across someone once who behaved in a certain way doesn't mean "ohmagerd feminists hate men holding doors for them!"
    • icebraining 9y ago
      I'm not from the US, but I've had sarcastic (but not acerbic) comments from people who didn't know I hold it for everyone. Sometimes people will judge prematurely, it's not that surprising.
• camus2 9y ago
  Nah, they are just admitting they are not hiring the best possible candidate for the job but the ones that fulfill their political posturing the best. I'd really feel bad working at Duolingo knowing that I'm just a "diversity hire".
  • sidlls 9y ago
    Implicit in your comment is that it's unlikely to hire a woman or member of another under represented population who is the best. Aside from that, nobody hires the absolute best possible candidate for every job, or even most jobs. Most jobs have a sufficient number of candidates that there are multiple "bests" from the choices, with different strengths and weaknesses. It isn't at all unimaginable that one of these bests in every set of candidates is from an under represented population.
    • camus2 9y ago
      > Implicit in your comment is that it's unlikely to hire a woman or member of another under represented population who is the best. I have never said that. It is you who is saying that. Furthermore I'm black myself so I've been in these situations enough to know that most organizations who do things like that are just using people like me as marketing ploy. I'm eager to know whether these "hires" are paid as the exact same salary as their counterparts.
    • sweden 9y ago
      Focusing only on one gender will take your attention away from the other. You will be automatically reducing your pool of talent just to make some numbers look good. So no, you will not be hiring the best talent that way since it can be on both sides and you won't know which one.
      • pwinnski 9y ago
        Since so many companies have people who think like this, and overwhelmingly hire men by default, there are many women out there that are far better than average, and yet unhired. In my experience, it's more likely to find the best candidate among women, where they've been overlooked by hiring managers unwilling to examine their innate biases.
• spraak 9y ago
  > you basically just guarantee women get a job in Tech. Regardless of skill set But how do you know they weren't hired for their skill set? Like, if you have two equally good apples in flavor, but you want to balance the profile of varieties, choose the one you're most lacking?
  • pedrosorio 9y ago
    The supply of apples is limited (and with a distribution of 20:80 in terms of varieties A and B). People can test individual apples for taste before buying and compete with you for the best ones. It's going to be much harder to get 50:50 excellent apples than 20:80 excellent apples.
  • sweden 9y ago
    To me, taking into account gender during the hiring process is the text book definition of sexual discrimination. Whether you mean it in a good way or not. How will you tell you won't be developing some bias over time just to make the hiring process an easier job for you?
  • skellera 9y ago
    It’s literally just has to do with numbers. If men and women are equally good at the job and there are less total women, forcing a 50% split at all jobs means that eventually places need to take on lower skilled workers from the smaller group.
    • pwinnski 9y ago
      These numbers only makes sense if there are literally zero skilled women. Otherwise, you're not dealing with the whole of the industry, you are dealing only with your own team, the one or two positions you are currently trying to fill. The question isn't therefore, "What systemic biases in the pipeline can we have addressed in the past to ensure that I have a reasonably set from which to draw today?" It's simply, "Today, right now, is there one qualified woman that I'm likely to overlook if I don't make an effort to remind myself that being surrounded by nothing but men isn't ideal?" There are an exhaustingly large set of companies that hire exclusively from the set of men, leaving competition for the smaller set of women much easier.
• jankotek 9y ago
  Gender is a choice, there is elasticity in supply of female engineers.
  • tzahola 9y ago
    Trying to cheat the system eh? :^)
    • jankotek 9y ago
      Some people prefer to be part of the solution, not part of the problem...
  • tincholio 9y ago
    Someone mentioned something like this yesterday (on /., IIRC, but I'm not sure). You could have 100% female engineers by simply having all your male engineers declare themselves as such, since "gender is independent of the underlying biology". There, problem solved! :D
• lkrubner 9y ago
  I hold doors open for both men and women and no one has ever said anything to me about it except for "Thank you".
• deleted 9y ago
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