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I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at wha

I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at. If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is. The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you. The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
And the point of criticizing the criticism of "it's a pipeline problem" is that, wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. Working near the end of the pipe, you'll quickly hit diminishing returns. If the input at your segment is biased 4:1, then you can't improve past it. Sure, if your output is 8:1 then it's bad, but you won't get it better than 4:1. You definitely won't achieve parity, despite what the people screaming "it's not a pipeline problem" the loudest would want from you. For further improvement, you have to work on earlier segments of the pipe. EDIT: And another point: moving through the pipeline takes time. So e.g. if you're working on university recruiting and trying to fix the input bias at the high school->university interface, you can't expect to see improvement at the output (university->job) earlier than in 3 to 5 years. But the "it's not a pipeline problem" activists rarely have that kind of patience. EDIT2: "you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment", unless you're willing to start doing corrective discrimination - i.e. throwing overrepresented people out from the pipeline.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment People have been fired from Google for suggesting exactly that.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I know. Google deeply disappointed me with that one.
  - ajross 7y ago
    This isn't a fair characterization. Damore's memo (which I assume is what you're talking about) absolutely did not attribute Google's lack of women candidates to a lack of graduates in the pipeline. It went with a straight on (and largely unsourced) "women are biologically different" argument. Wikipedia's page on the controversy is relatively good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... And even that didn't get him fired per se. He got fired once it went viral and embarrassed his employer.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences.[1][14] Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]" In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the pipeline is biased at every stage, which is "partly explained by biological differences"[0], and that it's wrong to try and solve this by reverse discrimination at the tail end of the pipe (i.e. throwing perfectly good candidates out to improve the ratio). Instead, the memo proposed means to reduce the bias near the end of the pipe without resorting to discrimination. -- [0] - Note that some of the differences - "stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism" - can be also plausibly explained by social factors (instead of biological), but that's orthogonal to those differences existing and biasing the entire pipeline.
wayoutthere 7y ago
The author is leaving unstated what we all know to be true: most of these jobs aren't really that hard. You don't really need the people with pedigreed CS backgrounds, but it's easier than actually figuring out how to screen candidates. The "pipeline problem" is the pipeline itself. So you have to go around the pipeline by avoiding the formal education system, which is where the bias is observed.
- ajross 7y ago
  That's not quite right either, because if these were truly easy jobs someone would have figured that out and won by hiring cheap developers with non-traditional backgrounds. In fact engineering jobs are hard, and there is a big spread in candidate quality. The issue is that heretofore the best proxy for candidate quality is educational background, hence the pipeline problem. And you definitely fix that by going around the pipeline. But we shouldn't be blind to the fact that this has costs. You need to see a lot more bootcamp grads than Stanford alums to fill the same position. It's a cost worth bearing, but still a cost.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > if these were truly easy jobs someone would have figured that out and won by hiring cheap developers with non-traditional backgrounds Note that the same argument works as evidence against recruiting bias and pay disparity. Discriminating against people or paying them less due to factors unrelated to job performance is leaving money on the table. Such discrimination persisting would imply that the market is very inefficient in this aspect.
    - someguydave 7y ago
      The fact that many of the web companies want to crowd everyone in a few hundred square kilometers of the Bay area demonstrates that they don't know what they are doing and are leaving money on the table. That doesn't disprove the fact that women are somewhat more uninterested in pursuing those jobs than men are.
  - 7y ago
leeny 7y ago
Author here. Yeah, I went back and forth on the intro a bunch and couldn't find a clearer way to not dismiss systemic issues while calling out the fact that we're not being fair to the people on the ground by bundling everything up as bias.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aidenn0 7y ago
  I don't think in general people are bundling everything up as bias; many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias. A silly example: if your job description said "We only hire men" (and this weren't illegal), then even if your entire interview process were unbiased, you're probably going to end up with fewer men. There is an argument that individually and as a whole, the tech community has been sending a message of "not for women" in various ways. If this is true, then the communities complaining about the pipeline problem could both be unbiased and a significant cause of the pipeline problem.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias I consider sexism to be a subset of bias, so this is an interesting take. I do not think your example shows something as unbiased, because I consider the statement "We only hire men" to be biased.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      Looking it up, there are many usages of the word bias that support your definition, so I'll concede that point. However, I think GP was using the term bias in the way I tend to think of it which is measurement bias; that is evaluating male and female candidates differently from each other, so I was pointing out a way in which the candidates that show up to interview can be biased in a way which is definitely the fault of the company.
Terr_ 7y ago
Or to play with the metaphor, it may be a pipeline problem but there's also the phenomenon of "back pressure", where cause-and-effect move in both directions.
MarkMc 7y ago
> it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at...you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem Another 'easy out' is to simply lower the bar for female applicants
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Stages at the end of the pipeline obviously get much more starved than stages closer to the beginning. Computer scientists learn this in computer architecture 101. The problem isn’t FAANGs, it’s the rest of the smaller companies that have gone from 20% female to 0% because they can’t compete with google’s salary package and supply really is limited at that stage in the pipe. If you work at a non-FAANG, the problem has gotten much worse than it was 10 years ago.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

And the point of criticizing the criticism of "it's a pipeline problem" is that, wherever you try to improve the pipeline, you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment. Working near the end of the pipe, you'll quickly hit diminishing returns. If the input at your segment is biased 4:1, then you can't improve past it. Sure, if your output is 8:1 then it's bad, but you won't get it better than 4:1. You definitely won't achieve parity, despite what the people screaming "it's not a pipeline problem" the loudest would want from you. For further improvement, you have to work on earlier segments of the pipe. EDIT: And another point: moving through the pipeline takes time. So e.g. if you're working on university recruiting and trying to fix the input bias at the high school->university interface, you can't expect to see improvement at the output (university->job) earlier than in 3 to 5 years. But the "it's not a pipeline problem" activists rarely have that kind of patience. EDIT2: "you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment", unless you're willing to start doing corrective discrimination - i.e. throwing overrepresented people out from the pipeline.

commandlinefan 7y ago
> you cannot expect to make things better than they are at the input of your pipe segment People have been fired from Google for suggesting exactly that.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I know. Google deeply disappointed me with that one.
- ajross 7y ago
  This isn't a fair characterization. Damore's memo (which I assume is what you're talking about) absolutely did not attribute Google's lack of women candidates to a lack of graduates in the pipeline. It went with a straight on (and largely unsourced) "women are biologically different" argument. Wikipedia's page on the controversy is relatively good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... And even that didn't get him fired per se. He got fired once it went viral and embarrassed his employer.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    You're misreporting the very link you quoted. Indeed, the Wikipedia description is pretty fair. I'll quote the relevant paragraph directly: "James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback.[2] The memo was written on a flight to China.[12][13] Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences.[1][14] Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]" In terms of pipeline argument, the memo can be viewed as arguing that the pipeline is biased at every stage, which is "partly explained by biological differences"[0], and that it's wrong to try and solve this by reverse discrimination at the tail end of the pipe (i.e. throwing perfectly good candidates out to improve the ratio). Instead, the memo proposed means to reduce the bias near the end of the pipe without resorting to discrimination. -- [0] - Note that some of the differences - "stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism" - can be also plausibly explained by social factors (instead of biological), but that's orthogonal to those differences existing and biasing the entire pipeline.

wayoutthere 7y ago

The author is leaving unstated what we all know to be true: most of these jobs aren't really that hard. You don't really need the people with pedigreed CS backgrounds, but it's easier than actually figuring out how to screen candidates. The "pipeline problem" is the pipeline itself. So you have to go around the pipeline by avoiding the formal education system, which is where the bias is observed.

ajross 7y ago
That's not quite right either, because if these were truly easy jobs someone would have figured that out and won by hiring cheap developers with non-traditional backgrounds. In fact engineering jobs are hard, and there is a big spread in candidate quality. The issue is that heretofore the best proxy for candidate quality is educational background, hence the pipeline problem. And you definitely fix that by going around the pipeline. But we shouldn't be blind to the fact that this has costs. You need to see a lot more bootcamp grads than Stanford alums to fill the same position. It's a cost worth bearing, but still a cost.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > if these were truly easy jobs someone would have figured that out and won by hiring cheap developers with non-traditional backgrounds Note that the same argument works as evidence against recruiting bias and pay disparity. Discriminating against people or paying them less due to factors unrelated to job performance is leaving money on the table. Such discrimination persisting would imply that the market is very inefficient in this aspect.
  - someguydave 7y ago
    The fact that many of the web companies want to crowd everyone in a few hundred square kilometers of the Bay area demonstrates that they don't know what they are doing and are leaving money on the table. That doesn't disprove the fact that women are somewhat more uninterested in pursuing those jobs than men are.
- 7y ago

leeny 7y ago

Author here. Yeah, I went back and forth on the intro a bunch and couldn't find a clearer way to not dismiss systemic issues while calling out the fact that we're not being fair to the people on the ground by bundling everything up as bias.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aidenn0 7y ago
I don't think in general people are bundling everything up as bias; many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias. A silly example: if your job description said "We only hire men" (and this weren't illegal), then even if your entire interview process were unbiased, you're probably going to end up with fewer men. There is an argument that individually and as a whole, the tech community has been sending a message of "not for women" in various ways. If this is true, then the communities complaining about the pipeline problem could both be unbiased and a significant cause of the pipeline problem.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias I consider sexism to be a subset of bias, so this is an interesting take. I do not think your example shows something as unbiased, because I consider the statement "We only hire men" to be biased.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Looking it up, there are many usages of the word bias that support your definition, so I'll concede that point. However, I think GP was using the term bias in the way I tend to think of it which is measurement bias; that is evaluating male and female candidates differently from each other, so I was pointing out a way in which the candidates that show up to interview can be biased in a way which is definitely the fault of the company.

Terr_ 7y ago

Or to play with the metaphor, it may be a pipeline problem but there's also the phenomenon of "back pressure", where cause-and-effect move in both directions.

MarkMc 7y ago

> it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at...you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem Another 'easy out' is to simply lower the bar for female applicants

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Stages at the end of the pipeline obviously get much more starved than stages closer to the beginning. Computer scientists learn this in computer architecture 101. The problem isn’t FAANGs, it’s the rest of the smaller companies that have gone from 20% female to 0% because they can’t compete with google’s salary package and supply really is limited at that stage in the pipe. If you work at a non-FAANG, the problem has gotten much worse than it was 10 years ago.