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What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is

What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. Diversity needs to happen from the ground up. Affirmative action is more effective and more appropriate the earlier in life that it is. Special coding classes and programs for underserved groups (e.g. Rails Girls) are the best, because a lot of girls don't get the same opportunities. In New Zealand, a lot of single-sex girls' schools don't teach programming at all. It's the same with schools in lower income areas, they often have very underdeveloped STEM programs. Having lower entry requirements to university for less privileged populations also makes sense, although using ethnicity is a very blunt stick, as there are often external factors that mean that equally talented students have worse educational outcomes in school, such as poor nutrition, working a job after school to help pay the bills, and low quality teachers (most good teachers want to teach at good schools). There external factors tend to be ironed out at university. Obviously not every type of affirmative action is appropriate for every situation. Requiring lower grades for women to get into engineering programs at university probably isn't appropriate, since it's not like women grow up in less privileged households than men. Affirmative action in hiring makes a lot less sense than at earlier stages. There's only a certain percentage of women in the workforce, hiring over that percentage isn't going to help with diversity or inclusion. If only 20% of programmers are women, then your company's programming team should be somewhere around that number. If it's a lot higher or a lot lower than this, there's something wrong.

batiudrami 8y ago
If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  From the perspective of the company, sure. It's in a company's best interests to do whatever they can to attract the best candidates. I'd prefer to work in a company that isn't a complete sausage fest, just like I'm sure most people would. I was more commenting that in general trying to get 50% women on your tech team isn't going to help the industry as a whole.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Mathematically its hard to select a higher percentage of anything than the population of applicants without picking inferior players. I know its challenging to rank people in real world jobs compared to say scores on a test but humor me here. Say you score people on an objective metric from 100 to 0 and you have 5 times more applicants than jobs. One logical way to hire than is to hire the top 20% of the population. If the overall population is 20% female than all things being equal 20% of the top 20% will also be female. How then do you arrive at 50% female while still trying to maintain quality. You have to remove the lowest ranking male and replace him with a female from the applicant pool. All the woman above this man are logically all in the to hire pool already. The only applicants available are those ranked below him so you must be logic replace a more qualified man with a less qualified woman. As you travel from 20% to 50% you must pick increasingly less qualified individuals to hire in order to reach your goals. Presumably your last hire would be from the 35% percentile instead of the 20th? The real world is multidimensional, complicated, and much harder to rank but bias logically has to reduce overall fitness on the larger scale.
  - shalmanese 8y ago
    Companies don't pluck candidates out from an unbiased set at random. Companies that are attractive to women get top tier women to apply which means they're able to select their 50% from the top 5% of women. And guess what, a major factor in a company being attractive to women is a culture where women have a voice roughly equal to men. Increasing your percentage of women increases your candidate quality, not decreases it, because it forces you to address all the issues that make it challenging for you to attract/retain women in the first place.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Seems like this does not scale in any meaningful way. Got any companies with 50% women in jobs where the applicant pool is 20% with a large population of employees? Hint hiring women in marketing to balance the male software developers wouldn't prove much.
      - 8y ago
ckastner 8y ago
> What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. > That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. This was always a mystery to me as well. Unless you are expanding the workforce, it's a zero-sum game, so exhibiting a higher ratio merely means that someone else must have a lower ratio. Aiming for a higher ratio isn't empowering at all. If a 50/50 ratio is to be meaningful, you have to fix the workforce ratio, first.
shalmanese 8y ago
Women aren't some pokemon you collect by tapping in the right cheat codes. They're career professions who are making the choice of employer based on what they believe is best for their lives. If your company is ~50% women then guess what, all that means is that plenty of women have independently decided that your company seems like a great place to work which seems like a thing to be celebrated.
- zakm 8y ago
  Or maybe the company is seeking out women in particular. If there was a company that was made up of 90% men when the workforce was 50%, would you say that "plenty of men independently decided that that company was a great place to work in?"

batiudrami 8y ago

If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
From the perspective of the company, sure. It's in a company's best interests to do whatever they can to attract the best candidates. I'd prefer to work in a company that isn't a complete sausage fest, just like I'm sure most people would. I was more commenting that in general trying to get 50% women on your tech team isn't going to help the industry as a whole.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Mathematically its hard to select a higher percentage of anything than the population of applicants without picking inferior players. I know its challenging to rank people in real world jobs compared to say scores on a test but humor me here. Say you score people on an objective metric from 100 to 0 and you have 5 times more applicants than jobs. One logical way to hire than is to hire the top 20% of the population. If the overall population is 20% female than all things being equal 20% of the top 20% will also be female. How then do you arrive at 50% female while still trying to maintain quality. You have to remove the lowest ranking male and replace him with a female from the applicant pool. All the woman above this man are logically all in the to hire pool already. The only applicants available are those ranked below him so you must be logic replace a more qualified man with a less qualified woman. As you travel from 20% to 50% you must pick increasingly less qualified individuals to hire in order to reach your goals. Presumably your last hire would be from the 35% percentile instead of the 20th? The real world is multidimensional, complicated, and much harder to rank but bias logically has to reduce overall fitness on the larger scale.
- shalmanese 8y ago
  Companies don't pluck candidates out from an unbiased set at random. Companies that are attractive to women get top tier women to apply which means they're able to select their 50% from the top 5% of women. And guess what, a major factor in a company being attractive to women is a culture where women have a voice roughly equal to men. Increasing your percentage of women increases your candidate quality, not decreases it, because it forces you to address all the issues that make it challenging for you to attract/retain women in the first place.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Seems like this does not scale in any meaningful way. Got any companies with 50% women in jobs where the applicant pool is 20% with a large population of employees? Hint hiring women in marketing to balance the male software developers wouldn't prove much.
    - 8y ago

ckastner 8y ago

> What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. > That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. This was always a mystery to me as well. Unless you are expanding the workforce, it's a zero-sum game, so exhibiting a higher ratio merely means that someone else must have a lower ratio. Aiming for a higher ratio isn't empowering at all. If a 50/50 ratio is to be meaningful, you have to fix the workforce ratio, first.

shalmanese 8y ago

Women aren't some pokemon you collect by tapping in the right cheat codes. They're career professions who are making the choice of employer based on what they believe is best for their lives. If your company is ~50% women then guess what, all that means is that plenty of women have independently decided that your company seems like a great place to work which seems like a thing to be celebrated.

zakm 8y ago
Or maybe the company is seeking out women in particular. If there was a company that was made up of 90% men when the workforce was 50%, would you say that "plenty of men independently decided that that company was a great place to work in?"