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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 mig

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.
    - shalmanese 8y ago
      When I talk to my female engineering friends, Stripe, Slack, Patreon, Pinterest & AirBNB consistently come up as great work cultures for women. They preferentially apply for those companies first over other places because of the work culture.

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.
  - shalmanese 8y ago
    When I talk to my female engineering friends, Stripe, Slack, Patreon, Pinterest & AirBNB consistently come up as great work cultures for women. They preferentially apply for those companies first over other places because of the work culture.