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More importantly: who cares? The point of classical equal rights is the MLK, "my children won't be judged by the colour of their skin". The moment you ask a que

More importantly: who cares? The point of classical equal rights is the MLK, "my children won't be judged by the colour of their skin". The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. It's not. It's an entirely expected statistical outcome given the demographics of people who study the profession. And it's inherently political to ask your question because by doing so, you're implying the answer matters, which is very much a political and left-wing stance. Whereas what's actually been encoded in law and up until very recently, culture, is that it's not even an allowed question to ask at all. This blog post by Basecamp is excellent. What a fantastic company it must be to work for. It's too late now because I'm starting my own company and am fully dedicated to that, but part of the reason for doing so was the feeling that there weren't enough (any?) companies with these sorts of policies in the world. I'll add Basecamp to the small list of software firms I'd be willing to work at in future.

mempko 5y ago
> which is very much a political and left-wing stance Then I have to ask, is it then a political and right-wing stance NOT to ask these questions?
matwood 5y ago
> The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. What if someone was judged by the color of their skin or their gender by the system? There are plenty of studies that show how the LSAT/SAT for example, is biased in favor of whites. The school may say they only admitted those with the highest scores and didn't look at skin color, but skin color ended up built into the score. So while the system should correct for this eventually, companies are attempting to correct for this issue now.
educaysean 5y ago
If the status quo was that we were already living in a gender-blind, race-blind society, your comment would be correct. The truth is that we don't know if the 100% male engineering group is a result of perfectly executed meritocratic interview process or a result of systematic bias. It's probably wrong to make blind assumptions either way, but if we're going to make assumptions anyways then we should lean towards the latter.
- thu2111 5y ago
  I think we actually do know that. Firstly, hiring is actually irrelevant to this because the gender ratios of most software companies are the same as the gender ratios of CS graduates, which is what you'd expect on average in a meritocratic process. A few firms like Google have higher numbers of women which they achieve by a variety of means both fair and foul, but the average company does match. The 100% male group is a hypothetical - I've only rarely been in such teams myself and only when they were small. It's clearly possible if the team is, say, 10 people. If you get to 100 and there are no women I'd be wondering if there's something odd going on, but it's still explainable by chance, and it's very dependent on sub-field. For example if you're doing embedded programming for the oil or nuclear industries, then those industries are themselves mostly interesting to men, so you get "interest in software * interest in industry" and you can get lower numbers than pure software companies. This is often the case for industries that are hyper-competitive or risky, for instance, I've seen 100% male engineering teams a lot in the cryptocurrency space. So if there's any debate or action to be had here at all, it's actually by universities, not companies, because company demographics follow CS program demographics.
adamlett 5y ago
More importantly: who cares? There are many good reasons to care. Off the top of my head: * Having a diverse work force makes it less likely that you will be blind to problems caused by unintended side effects of your product that only affect certain groups. * Having no women (or people of color, or people with disabilities, or...) on the workforce, will make you less attractive as an employer to talented people in these groups. Ultimately, you get to hire from a larger talent pool, if you make an effort to cultivate diversity. * Making an effort to attract a diversity of people will make you uncover barriers of entry, that you might not have been aware of, and removing those has the potential to benefit everyone. And finally, even if you believe strongly that your hiring practices are not the cause of the lack of diversity, and that the real problem is elsewhere (in the education system for instance), you can still choose to be part of the solution by providing proof that there is a desirable future to be had for a woman who chooses to go in to a STEM field.
- asabjorn 5y ago
  Generally talented people enjoy working with other talented people, and prefer to be hired and rewarded only for that reason. The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual. Moreover, social justice uses activism to take over the organization to the point where it use as many resources as possible for activism. It is not unusual at this point for activist employees to ask a company to make bad business decisions for political reasons, so a policy putting political activism into the private sphere makes it clear that you are at work to create a long-term sustainable and healthy business.
  - adamlett 5y ago
    Generally talented people enjoy working with other talented people Everything else being equal, sure. and prefer to be hired and rewarded only for that reason. Why would anybody who knew they were talented and got hired or promoted, assume it had to do with anything other than their talent? The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual. It is possible to recognize that a certain groups of people on average face more obstacles and barriers, without equating individuals with the groups they belong to or vice versa.
SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
I care deeply. With a 100 percent male workforce comes a 100 percent male mindset. Say I am creating a site for maternity clothes, I am not sure if I can turn a blind eye to the trade offs all the male engineer may make even though they have the best interests at heart. They may not be significant to the male engineer but it will very much be caught by a female engineer. Unless you are selling shaving kits or male grooming kits, your customers are gonna be woman and so that perspective is much more important than getting the best software engineer.
- Frondo 5y ago
  To reframe this on race, there's been a couple of (from an engineering perspective) gobsmacking demos of how non-diverse developers end up making something that just does not work for people who don't look like them. The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin: https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da... Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni... I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately. Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit." That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.
  - unpolloloco 5y ago
    Diversity doesn't matter in practice if management doesn't want to spend the resources to engineer for diverse use cases. I've been over-ruled too many times when I've pushed for "fringe" use cases - including once with exactly your example of a product not working on Black people (different product, but same ethnicity-based issue). My team intentionally sought out (internal) diversity to test the prototype on. And guess what? When I said this was a big problem and we needed to fix it, I got over-ruled (by my non-White company president) because we were already late shipping the product. (Then product got canned for other reasons later - after I left the company shortly after this decision). I'm not sure how to fix this broader problem - or what else I could/should have done there (other than leave for greener pastures)!
hellomyguys 5y ago
The idea that MLK would think 100% male working environments in tech is ok and also the embodiment of one of his most famous quotes seems slightly off to me...
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  People often don't like the implications of their principles. For example, although MLK Jr. espoused being a good Christian, he did not follow the principles of being a good Christian when he cheated on his wife with multiple different women.

mempko 5y ago

> which is very much a political and left-wing stance Then I have to ask, is it then a political and right-wing stance NOT to ask these questions?

matwood 5y ago

> The moment you ask a question like that, you are deliberately rolling back his vision by implying that a 100% male engineering group is a severe problem that needs a solution. What if someone was judged by the color of their skin or their gender by the system? There are plenty of studies that show how the LSAT/SAT for example, is biased in favor of whites. The school may say they only admitted those with the highest scores and didn't look at skin color, but skin color ended up built into the score. So while the system should correct for this eventually, companies are attempting to correct for this issue now.

educaysean 5y ago

If the status quo was that we were already living in a gender-blind, race-blind society, your comment would be correct. The truth is that we don't know if the 100% male engineering group is a result of perfectly executed meritocratic interview process or a result of systematic bias. It's probably wrong to make blind assumptions either way, but if we're going to make assumptions anyways then we should lean towards the latter.

thu2111 5y ago
I think we actually do know that. Firstly, hiring is actually irrelevant to this because the gender ratios of most software companies are the same as the gender ratios of CS graduates, which is what you'd expect on average in a meritocratic process. A few firms like Google have higher numbers of women which they achieve by a variety of means both fair and foul, but the average company does match. The 100% male group is a hypothetical - I've only rarely been in such teams myself and only when they were small. It's clearly possible if the team is, say, 10 people. If you get to 100 and there are no women I'd be wondering if there's something odd going on, but it's still explainable by chance, and it's very dependent on sub-field. For example if you're doing embedded programming for the oil or nuclear industries, then those industries are themselves mostly interesting to men, so you get "interest in software * interest in industry" and you can get lower numbers than pure software companies. This is often the case for industries that are hyper-competitive or risky, for instance, I've seen 100% male engineering teams a lot in the cryptocurrency space. So if there's any debate or action to be had here at all, it's actually by universities, not companies, because company demographics follow CS program demographics.

adamlett 5y ago

More importantly: who cares? There are many good reasons to care. Off the top of my head: * Having a diverse work force makes it less likely that you will be blind to problems caused by unintended side effects of your product that only affect certain groups. * Having no women (or people of color, or people with disabilities, or...) on the workforce, will make you less attractive as an employer to talented people in these groups. Ultimately, you get to hire from a larger talent pool, if you make an effort to cultivate diversity. * Making an effort to attract a diversity of people will make you uncover barriers of entry, that you might not have been aware of, and removing those has the potential to benefit everyone. And finally, even if you believe strongly that your hiring practices are not the cause of the lack of diversity, and that the real problem is elsewhere (in the education system for instance), you can still choose to be part of the solution by providing proof that there is a desirable future to be had for a woman who chooses to go in to a STEM field.

asabjorn 5y ago
Generally talented people enjoy working with other talented people, and prefer to be hired and rewarded only for that reason. The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual. Moreover, social justice uses activism to take over the organization to the point where it use as many resources as possible for activism. It is not unusual at this point for activist employees to ask a company to make bad business decisions for political reasons, so a policy putting political activism into the private sphere makes it clear that you are at work to create a long-term sustainable and healthy business.
- adamlett 5y ago
  Generally talented people enjoy working with other talented people Everything else being equal, sure. and prefer to be hired and rewarded only for that reason. Why would anybody who knew they were talented and got hired or promoted, assume it had to do with anything other than their talent? The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual. It is possible to recognize that a certain groups of people on average face more obstacles and barriers, without equating individuals with the groups they belong to or vice versa.

SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago

I care deeply. With a 100 percent male workforce comes a 100 percent male mindset. Say I am creating a site for maternity clothes, I am not sure if I can turn a blind eye to the trade offs all the male engineer may make even though they have the best interests at heart. They may not be significant to the male engineer but it will very much be caught by a female engineer. Unless you are selling shaving kits or male grooming kits, your customers are gonna be woman and so that perspective is much more important than getting the best software engineer.

Frondo 5y ago
To reframe this on race, there's been a couple of (from an engineering perspective) gobsmacking demos of how non-diverse developers end up making something that just does not work for people who don't look like them. The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin: https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773 https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da... Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni... I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately. Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit." That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.
- unpolloloco 5y ago
  Diversity doesn't matter in practice if management doesn't want to spend the resources to engineer for diverse use cases. I've been over-ruled too many times when I've pushed for "fringe" use cases - including once with exactly your example of a product not working on Black people (different product, but same ethnicity-based issue). My team intentionally sought out (internal) diversity to test the prototype on. And guess what? When I said this was a big problem and we needed to fix it, I got over-ruled (by my non-White company president) because we were already late shipping the product. (Then product got canned for other reasons later - after I left the company shortly after this decision). I'm not sure how to fix this broader problem - or what else I could/should have done there (other than leave for greener pastures)!

hellomyguys 5y ago

The idea that MLK would think 100% male working environments in tech is ok and also the embodiment of one of his most famous quotes seems slightly off to me...

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
People often don't like the implications of their principles. For example, although MLK Jr. espoused being a good Christian, he did not follow the principles of being a good Christian when he cheated on his wife with multiple different women.