6 ms·

Honest question, how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Especially in IT trying to keep a good mix and avoid man only

by kfk 7y ago

Honest question, how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Especially in IT trying to keep a good mix and avoid man only teams? Is this kind of advise even “safe” to ask these days?

idlewords 7y ago
It's a great question to ask, and I hope you get some good advice here.
T2_t2 7y ago
The conjecture - in the article - is it doesn't work at, well at all is strong but certainly not to the degree that is claimed. Also, given the replication crisis in this field, any benefit is possibly noise. By far the better approach than removing information by having blind / limited information applications is to have MORE information, e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/reducing-discrimination-with-more-information.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/re... > We conduct four randomized field experiments among 1,801 hosts on Airbnb by creating fictitious guest accounts and sending accommodation requests to them. We find that requests from guests with African American-sounding names are 19.2 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those with white-sounding names. However, a positive review posted on a guest’s page significantly reduces discrimination: When guest accounts receive a positive review, the acceptance rates of guest accounts with white-sounding and African American-sounding names are statistically indistinguishable.
Crontab 7y ago
In my opinion one should be seeking to hire the best person for the job every single time regardless of the person's race or gender. But I also believe that considering diversity needs is fair when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I think implicit in the parent's question is that a team might be better without you, even if you're the best person for the specific activities a candidate is being sought for. That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers. >considering diversity needs // What are these needs? I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against. My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit. tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.
  - marvin 7y ago
    A curious side note: Norway, often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, has a law from 1978 called "the law of gender equality". The first section of the law states that the law is particularly intended to strengthen the position of women. The systematic interpretation of this law is that it is legal to moderately discriminate in the favor of women when they apply for a position (school, work) that has a male majority, while it is illegal to discriminate in the favor of men when they apply for a position that has a female majority. Examples of male-majority situations where this is applied is CEO or board positions in publicly-owned companies or engineering school, while examples of female-majority situations where this cannot be applied is veterinarian or medical school.
    - Udik 7y ago
      It's funny to think how these positive discriminations and the constant praise of the qualities intrinsic in being female, might stem from nothing else than the traditional sexist "gentleman" attitude towards the "weaker sex".
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  I've worked in IT for many years, and I've never even met two "equally qualified" people. How would you even determine such thing? Everyone has different amount of experience, different achievements, different grades in school, different skillsets.
  - replyguy912 7y ago
    It's hard enough to identify good or bad, let alone assess to the degree that I can say 2 candidates are comparable. When that happens it really means I've got an equally poor measure of both.
  - mort96 7y ago
    You're exactly right, the exact level of qualification is impossible to quantify. Therefore, we can really only go with rough approximations; this person has experience in the field before, or has relevant education, or has done a lot of similar work before in hobby projects, or whatever. From what I understand, the suggestion is that if one person is obviously more qualified than another, you pick the most qualified person regardless of other factors, but if there are multiple people where it's unclear who is better, you pick the person who's from a marginalized group. If we had some kind of ultra-precise scientific way to measure a person's level of qualification, the point would be moot; it would be highly unlikely that two people would measure exactly the same, so we would never be in a situation where we choose based on other factors than qualifications. It's precisely because it's impossible to determine exactly how qualified someone is (probably by the very nature of what we mean by "qualified") that the idea has any merit at all.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- bachmeier 7y ago
  Let's pretend there is a human somewhere able "to hire the best person for the job every single time". Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.
danieltillett 7y ago
Why do you want to avoid "man only" teams?
- kfk 7y ago
  This is not an easy topic to discuss here. What I can say is: 1) I have a good mix now and I like it but new hires are only males so it will change, this mix seems to work very well but I might be wrong here; 2) companies these days see it well and see it as “good” (being honest here)
- stale2002 7y ago
  Well, one reason is that once you get into the state of a male only team, it becomes significantly more difficult to recruit women. I have heard from multiple women, that they will absolutely not join a team if they are the only woman on it. You would miss out on a lot of talent that way.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Making software is about asking questions. You ask the questions necessary to figure out the best solution to a problem. If you have a "man only" team, or "anything only" really, you're less likely to have people asking different questions - they're all going to ask the same questions if they all have the same perspectives, biases, etc. Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Tech companies today seem more homogenous in thought and educational background than gender or race.
  - bufferoverflow 7y ago
    That's a sexist view. Men don't have "the same perspectives" on pretty much anything.
    - CJefferson 7y ago
onion2k 7y ago
how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Run a company that women see as a good place to work, where they won't be harassed and where they're treated fairly. Once the company gets a reputation for being a good place for women to work you'll get a lot more applications from women, and the problem of balance will resolve itself because you can hire on merit if you have a good selection of candidates. The hard part will be firing people who do things that give the company a bad reputation even if they're great workers.
- necovek 7y ago
  In theory, that sounds about right. In practice, each smallish team will be culturally independent, and there won't be enough data to show off how equally your company is treating employees (or it will treat them all equally bad, but that's a different discussion). Let's remember that majority of the companies are small, and not everyone will go out of their way to publicly commend internal policies. Just imagine a 20 person company with 5 women who are being fairly treated: how do they get better gender balance? Even if these five persons were outspoken, how many people could they reach? Not to mention that a true character of a company is only revealed in a crisis (harrasment, known unequal pay, role progression...). This company will never get the breadth of candidates Facebook might to be able to rely on statistics. Without actively pursuing that as a goal, balance never happens. Positive gender discrimination is a societal tool, a tool to fix unfair social treatment of genders at an early age ("here are pink dolls for you dear, your brother can go play games on the computer" just as a blunt example, but it's a lot more subtle in general).
barry-cotter 7y ago
If someone has something you want you can offer them more money, whether what you want are skills or staff you’d have a beer with. Or you can offer them more attractive working conditions. If Posh Tom has to do half as much work as Pavel to get the same respect/promotions/money over time you’ll get more Posh Toms and fewer Pavels until your business is outcompeted.
bubblewrap 7y ago
Most attempts to eliminate bias in IT hiring have resulted in reducing odds of being hired for women (eliminating bias by eliminating clues to the gender of the applicant, I mean). So if you want more women, you have to give them preferential treatment. Also, the pool is limited, so you are competing with the other firms for the few women available.
atoav 7y ago
I think it is fundamentally a question of culture. If you have too much of the same type, you will end up having a single dominant culture. If you have a more diverse team, no single culture might be dominant, which forces your team to develope a team culture on their own. But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc. I always found system theory to be a useful abstraction when thinking about this. System theory asks the question which function a member of the system (the team) will take, given their personality etc. You cannot decide this from top down, it will just happen. Like in a family, where you can visit after 10 years and instantly, without beeing aware of it you put yourself into a certain position. The question is: which function does a team/family member fulfill for the system? A systemic view means the answer to this question depends on the constellation of the whole team and not just on individual members. So my answer would be: make a team where everybody gets to align their personality with the function they will have within that social construct, make everybody a valuable part to the whole and make everybody realize, they are better off as a whole. A good experienced team is like magic just because everybody precisely knows what their function within it is, and having a different background is part of these functions as well.
- scooble 7y ago
  "But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc" To my mind, this is the key point. It may be likely that a team with e.g. diverse skills/personalities will end up being gender diverse. But to assume that it has to be gender diverse, or that you can achieve a diversely skilled team by enforcing gender diversity seems to lapse into lazy gender stereotyping about how e.g. women's skills/perspectives are limited by their gender.
  - atoav 7y ago
    I think you have to try to seperate skill and background. If somebody has sufficient skill, you can decide based on their background. And then you should make a systemic decision: a new person affects the whole team, and how people distribute functions within the group. Bringing in the right person with a different background on the right spot can do wonders. And by background I surely mean gender, but also things like educational background, nationality, personality etc. Nobody should brute force for gender diversity just for the symbolic victory. Diversity done right has its benefits, but like all paradigms you have to use your brains when implementing it. Refusing to do so and then after a half assed attempt declaring it doesn’t work, is what you sadly witness quite often. I know multiple women in tech and every single one of them had their gender used against them many times during their careers. Hiring men and women like in regular fields won’t hurt tech at all. I don’t really get why it has to be a big thing at all.
tptacek 7y ago
I think you need to hire the best people from your pool of candidates, regardless of gender. I think you need to build a process that minimizes bias, and anonymity is one good way to do that. I think if you're concerned about team diversity (and generally I think people should be concerned about that), you address it through outreach --- you address it at the top of your hiring funnel, not the bottom.
jl2718 7y ago
Pay more. In general, women have a higher preference for ‘meaning’, ‘environment’, ‘flexibility’, ‘community’ or family. Your job offers none of that, so you have to pay a lot more to convince them to join your IT dungeon.

by kfk 7y ago

idlewords 7y ago

It's a great question to ask, and I hope you get some good advice here.

T2_t2 7y ago

The conjecture - in the article - is it doesn't work at, well at all is strong but certainly not to the degree that is claimed. Also, given the replication crisis in this field, any benefit is possibly noise. By far the better approach than removing information by having blind / limited information applications is to have MORE information, e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/reducing-discrimination-with-more-information.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/re... > We conduct four randomized field experiments among 1,801 hosts on Airbnb by creating fictitious guest accounts and sending accommodation requests to them. We find that requests from guests with African American-sounding names are 19.2 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those with white-sounding names. However, a positive review posted on a guest’s page significantly reduces discrimination: When guest accounts receive a positive review, the acceptance rates of guest accounts with white-sounding and African American-sounding names are statistically indistinguishable.

Crontab 7y ago

In my opinion one should be seeking to hire the best person for the job every single time regardless of the person's race or gender. But I also believe that considering diversity needs is fair when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I think implicit in the parent's question is that a team might be better without you, even if you're the best person for the specific activities a candidate is being sought for. That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers. >considering diversity needs // What are these needs? I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against. My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me. To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit. tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.
- marvin 7y ago
  A curious side note: Norway, often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, has a law from 1978 called "the law of gender equality". The first section of the law states that the law is particularly intended to strengthen the position of women. The systematic interpretation of this law is that it is legal to moderately discriminate in the favor of women when they apply for a position (school, work) that has a male majority, while it is illegal to discriminate in the favor of men when they apply for a position that has a female majority. Examples of male-majority situations where this is applied is CEO or board positions in publicly-owned companies or engineering school, while examples of female-majority situations where this cannot be applied is veterinarian or medical school.
  - Udik 7y ago
    It's funny to think how these positive discriminations and the constant praise of the qualities intrinsic in being female, might stem from nothing else than the traditional sexist "gentleman" attitude towards the "weaker sex".
bufferoverflow 7y ago
I've worked in IT for many years, and I've never even met two "equally qualified" people. How would you even determine such thing? Everyone has different amount of experience, different achievements, different grades in school, different skillsets.
- replyguy912 7y ago
  It's hard enough to identify good or bad, let alone assess to the degree that I can say 2 candidates are comparable. When that happens it really means I've got an equally poor measure of both.
- mort96 7y ago
  You're exactly right, the exact level of qualification is impossible to quantify. Therefore, we can really only go with rough approximations; this person has experience in the field before, or has relevant education, or has done a lot of similar work before in hobby projects, or whatever. From what I understand, the suggestion is that if one person is obviously more qualified than another, you pick the most qualified person regardless of other factors, but if there are multiple people where it's unclear who is better, you pick the person who's from a marginalized group. If we had some kind of ultra-precise scientific way to measure a person's level of qualification, the point would be moot; it would be highly unlikely that two people would measure exactly the same, so we would never be in a situation where we choose based on other factors than qualifications. It's precisely because it's impossible to determine exactly how qualified someone is (probably by the very nature of what we mean by "qualified") that the idea has any merit at all.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bachmeier 7y ago
Let's pretend there is a human somewhere able "to hire the best person for the job every single time". Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.

danieltillett 7y ago

Why do you want to avoid "man only" teams?

kfk 7y ago
This is not an easy topic to discuss here. What I can say is: 1) I have a good mix now and I like it but new hires are only males so it will change, this mix seems to work very well but I might be wrong here; 2) companies these days see it well and see it as “good” (being honest here)
stale2002 7y ago
Well, one reason is that once you get into the state of a male only team, it becomes significantly more difficult to recruit women. I have heard from multiple women, that they will absolutely not join a team if they are the only woman on it. You would miss out on a lot of talent that way.
onion2k 7y ago
Making software is about asking questions. You ask the questions necessary to figure out the best solution to a problem. If you have a "man only" team, or "anything only" really, you're less likely to have people asking different questions - they're all going to ask the same questions if they all have the same perspectives, biases, etc. Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  Tech companies today seem more homogenous in thought and educational background than gender or race.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  That's a sexist view. Men don't have "the same perspectives" on pretty much anything.
  - CJefferson 7y ago

onion2k 7y ago

how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Run a company that women see as a good place to work, where they won't be harassed and where they're treated fairly. Once the company gets a reputation for being a good place for women to work you'll get a lot more applications from women, and the problem of balance will resolve itself because you can hire on merit if you have a good selection of candidates. The hard part will be firing people who do things that give the company a bad reputation even if they're great workers.

necovek 7y ago
In theory, that sounds about right. In practice, each smallish team will be culturally independent, and there won't be enough data to show off how equally your company is treating employees (or it will treat them all equally bad, but that's a different discussion). Let's remember that majority of the companies are small, and not everyone will go out of their way to publicly commend internal policies. Just imagine a 20 person company with 5 women who are being fairly treated: how do they get better gender balance? Even if these five persons were outspoken, how many people could they reach? Not to mention that a true character of a company is only revealed in a crisis (harrasment, known unequal pay, role progression...). This company will never get the breadth of candidates Facebook might to be able to rely on statistics. Without actively pursuing that as a goal, balance never happens. Positive gender discrimination is a societal tool, a tool to fix unfair social treatment of genders at an early age ("here are pink dolls for you dear, your brother can go play games on the computer" just as a blunt example, but it's a lot more subtle in general).

barry-cotter 7y ago

If someone has something you want you can offer them more money, whether what you want are skills or staff you’d have a beer with. Or you can offer them more attractive working conditions. If Posh Tom has to do half as much work as Pavel to get the same respect/promotions/money over time you’ll get more Posh Toms and fewer Pavels until your business is outcompeted.

bubblewrap 7y ago

Most attempts to eliminate bias in IT hiring have resulted in reducing odds of being hired for women (eliminating bias by eliminating clues to the gender of the applicant, I mean). So if you want more women, you have to give them preferential treatment. Also, the pool is limited, so you are competing with the other firms for the few women available.

atoav 7y ago

I think it is fundamentally a question of culture. If you have too much of the same type, you will end up having a single dominant culture. If you have a more diverse team, no single culture might be dominant, which forces your team to develope a team culture on their own. But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc. I always found system theory to be a useful abstraction when thinking about this. System theory asks the question which function a member of the system (the team) will take, given their personality etc. You cannot decide this from top down, it will just happen. Like in a family, where you can visit after 10 years and instantly, without beeing aware of it you put yourself into a certain position. The question is: which function does a team/family member fulfill for the system? A systemic view means the answer to this question depends on the constellation of the whole team and not just on individual members. So my answer would be: make a team where everybody gets to align their personality with the function they will have within that social construct, make everybody a valuable part to the whole and make everybody realize, they are better off as a whole. A good experienced team is like magic just because everybody precisely knows what their function within it is, and having a different background is part of these functions as well.

scooble 7y ago
"But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc" To my mind, this is the key point. It may be likely that a team with e.g. diverse skills/personalities will end up being gender diverse. But to assume that it has to be gender diverse, or that you can achieve a diversely skilled team by enforcing gender diversity seems to lapse into lazy gender stereotyping about how e.g. women's skills/perspectives are limited by their gender.
- atoav 7y ago
  I think you have to try to seperate skill and background. If somebody has sufficient skill, you can decide based on their background. And then you should make a systemic decision: a new person affects the whole team, and how people distribute functions within the group. Bringing in the right person with a different background on the right spot can do wonders. And by background I surely mean gender, but also things like educational background, nationality, personality etc. Nobody should brute force for gender diversity just for the symbolic victory. Diversity done right has its benefits, but like all paradigms you have to use your brains when implementing it. Refusing to do so and then after a half assed attempt declaring it doesn’t work, is what you sadly witness quite often. I know multiple women in tech and every single one of them had their gender used against them many times during their careers. Hiring men and women like in regular fields won’t hurt tech at all. I don’t really get why it has to be a big thing at all.

tptacek 7y ago

I think you need to hire the best people from your pool of candidates, regardless of gender. I think you need to build a process that minimizes bias, and anonymity is one good way to do that. I think if you're concerned about team diversity (and generally I think people should be concerned about that), you address it through outreach --- you address it at the top of your hiring funnel, not the bottom.

jl2718 7y ago

Pay more. In general, women have a higher preference for ‘meaning’, ‘environment’, ‘flexibility’, ‘community’ or family. Your job offers none of that, so you have to pay a lot more to convince them to join your IT dungeon.