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wow - 28 people on the about page and the only woman is the diversity director.
by jgamman 8y ago
wow - 28 people on the about page and the only woman is the diversity director.
- KenoFischer 8y agoYep, that's something we need to fix. So far we've done most of our hiring from the open source community, which is unfortunately overwhelmingly male. We've done some work to try to increase diversity in the community and Jane graciously agreed to take a break from her PhD studies at Caltech to help with outreach as part of that (also thanks to the Sloan Foundation for funding the corresponding effort). Clearly a lot more work is needed on that front, but I'm hoping the work that Jane and others have been doing this past year have helped on the community side. Of course there's work to do on the company side independently, but I imagine the community will continue to be an important hiring channel, so I consider improving diversity there as a necessary ingredient.
- chimpburger 8y agoNothing needs to be fixed. Make the opportunity available to women but do not enforce a gender quota. Candidates should only be selected on merit. Equal opportunity is good. Forcing equality of outcome is BAD.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoNobody said anything about quotas except you. The GP said they were working on sourcing their candidates differently.
- chimpburger 8y ago@lern_too_spel: I know they didn't, but they did not say they were not considering a gender quota.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoWow, what an eloquent argument. Does that means you intend to harass a woman since you haven’t denied planning that?
- chimpburger 8y agoIt wasn't an argument.
- KenoFischer 8y agoNobody is forcing anybody to do anything, but even compared to tech itself, the open source community tends to be less diverse. I think it's fairly clear that there is a large number of qualified people who are not adequately represented in the open source community at the moment. In order to not miss out on these people, we need to a) try to get more such people involved with the open source community through outreach, etc and b) once we get to that point in our hiring, make sure that our hiring funnel is not just restricted to the subset of the population that happens to already be active in the open source community. In my opinion, the key is just to have a sufficiently wide funnel at the top to avoid injecting bias at the top of the funnel.
- chimpburger 8y agoFair enough. Women are generally less interested in engineering, so there will always be a gap. James Damore was fired from Google for writing this memo on the tech gender gap. You may find it interesting. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoHe was fired for being sexist and an idiot, not for “telling the truth” as his sexist supporters would make it.
- orbifold 8y agoHe was an idiot in the sense that you obviously should not write and distribute an essay at work on a sensitive topic, if you are not an “expert” and were not asked to do so. As far as anyone reasonable could tell the facts he cited are correct but his opinions and recommendations were obviously politically incorrect.
- kiriakasis 8y agojust a bit of a factual remark: he was asked to do so. diversity and inclusion committee at google ask employees for feedback, the memo was a feedback saying "current policies do not work as expected, maybe offering more part time and family friendly jobs would allow both men and women that do want to spend time with their family to like working at google".
- cygx 8y agoIf you have a gender imbalance of 27:0 that is not predicated on self-evident physiological differences, there's a cultural problem that artificially limits the pool of potential candidates. It is in a field's best interest to fix that.
- dubya23 8y agoYes the only possible reason is bias, there can be no other explanation.
- snovv_crash 8y agoI was trying to hire specialists in a similar field, in Europe. Applicants were at least 50:1 m:f. Instead we focused on getting diversity based on other things - country of origin, industries worked in before, age etc. It has worked out really well, we have a dynamic team, and yes, once we started hiring for other roles the gender balance of applicants flipped completely.
- cygx 8y agoSure: When hiring, you work with what's available. But as a community, it doesn't hurt trying to figure out where such ridiculously large gender imbalances come from, and if there's something that can be done about it.
- cashsterling 8y agoChimpburger... I think your heart is probably in the right place. But think about the wider canvas. In terms of what might be best for me, were I looking for a job... equal opportunity is fair/good. Of course I would think that... I'm a white male... I am a historically privileged class of person in the workforce. Anything that doesn't adversely my job opportunities is good for me, right? From the perspective of a company that is trying to build a high-output, innovative team... diversity is really, really awesome: diversity of thinking patterns, backgrounds, interests. I have experienced this first hand and am now 100% sold on the importance of diversity and oversampling certain segments of "talent pool" to reach diversity goals. I may I miss out on some opportunities due to how I am categorized in the overall talent pool.... but diversity is really good for the organization and society in general. Some sports analogies apply: you can't make a basketball team out of all shooting guards or a soccer team out of all forwards. You need a lot of different kinds of talent to make a good team. That is just my opinion... I would rather work on a diverse team and I'd rather live in a diverse city/culture.
- chimpburger 8y agoSuppose you had a brain tumor that could possibly be fixed by surgery. You are given the choice of two surgeons. One is a female who graduated from her medical school to fill a gender quota at the expense of other male students. The other option is a more qualified and experienced surgeon but just so happens to be a male. If you are true to your ideology then you should choose the female surgeon. Am I right?
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoThis is not how it happens. So don’t be disingenuous.
- chimpburger 8y agoYou completely missed the point.
- cashsterling 8y ago
- cashsterling 8y agoIIRC, Jane is a Caltech PhD scientist. I imagine she is making a strong contribution to Julia ecosystem. The general problem of diversity is ubiquitous in tech, sort of rough to call out a young startup over this issue. Most good companies strongly desire diversity in their teams because of the real benefits diversity provides.
- jgamman 8y agoapologies to Jane if I implied that her skills weren't on par - that wasn't my intention.
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