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How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
- luu 14y agoI wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been arbitraged away, but it took decades to get to this point. At the time, people gave many reasons sexism couldn't possibly exist in finance; naturally, more men went into finance because women just didn't like finance, and more men had senior positions because simply didn't want senior positions, and so on and so forth (oddly enough, those same reasons are given today, in discussions of sexism in CS and engineering). In 1987, Townsend-Greenspan shut down, after thirty successful years, because Greenspan became chairman of the Fed. Now, twenty-six years later, the gender gap among MBAs is much smaller than it used to be, but it hasn't disappeared. I hope it doesn't take fifty-six years from the founding of Etsy for someone to be able to make a comment like this about programmers. I'm afraid it might be a while, though. In discussions about the topic here on HN, the top comment is often something along the lines of how there obviously isn't any sexism in the field, or if there is any, it's rare, and certainly not a systematic problem, and how it's simply impossible that the highly skewed male:female ratio in the field is due to sexism. That's usually followed by a paragraph on how any attempts to address the issue are an insidious cause of reverse sexism. The top comment in the previous thread on this topic was a comment about how everything Etsy is doing applies equally to all people, not just women, despite a large body of research indicating that, on average, women are treated differently in the workplace [1], and how some simple changes can neutralize many serious problems [2]. [1] Perhaps someone else can supply a reference to a well-known study that I can't seem to look up. When men react with anger, or act authoritatively, that's seen neutrally or positively, but when women do the same, it's seen negatively. [2] http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511 http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511
- jerrya 14y agoThe article doesn't describe sexism, the article describes scarcity and demand: In Silicon Valley today it's not possible to hire more women simply by recruiting them. Good engineers today have their pick of jobs, and good female engineers are being stalked like the last antelope on the African veldt. Etsy's solution doesn't seem to be to stop sexism, Etsy's solution appears to be train more engineers, take a risk on junior women engineers out of Hacker School, and let their risk taking and boots on the ground approach serve as a signal to senior women engineers. None of this is evidence of sexism in CS and engineering, it was a winning strategy to defeat scarcity.
- subsystem 14y agoThe argument is that sexism is what creates the scarcity in the first place. So by creating an environment where sexism is less of a factor you attract more women.
- enraged_camel 14y agoYep, exactly. By funding this training program Etsy signaled that they value women as much as they value men. As a result, a ton of women applied to the program and many of those ended up getting hired.
- Tichy 14y agoOr maybe it's just thast they paid for their education. Getting something for free could attract a lot of people. I also would like an update on the results in 5 years.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Tichy 14y agoThere is nothing in that experiment supporting that theory, though. So why push it anyway? How does people flocking to free education prove anything?
- erickhill 14y agoLarge previous thread on HN from 45 days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994
- SeanDav 14y agoTrue but probably worth discussing again in light of "adriagate"
- MartinCron 14y agoEspecially because this is a fundamentally positive story. It's not all crusaders and combat out there.
- cantastoria 14y agoWant cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists. I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circles as engineer-centric and something of a dude-fest So the fact that eighty percent of Etsy users were women despite having an all-male engineering team apparently means that you have to hire more women engineers to attract female users? Again I'd love to see evidence that once a core of female engineers were hired significant changes where made to the site that could only have come from a "woman's intuition" (natch). It seems to me that having a female dominated user base in spite of an all male engineering team disproves the assertion that you need hire women to achieve "cognitive diversity".
- readme 14y agoUnfortunately, when approaching an issue like this you cannot do so without adopting a sexist viewpoint yourself. To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist. It's fine and good that companies want to hire more female engineers. But this article is lame, which you should have picked up on when the author used the word "rockstar"
- warmwaffles 14y agoI hate being referred to as a rockstar developer as a male. I couldn't agree more. I want more engineers, not tokens. If I can work with competent people, I am happy. Even if it's an all male or all female workplace.
- steveklabnik 14y ago> To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist. Which is, again, not sexist or racist at all. *-ism implies institutional bias of a society, not an individual instance of discrimination. It is _discriminatory_ against men, for sure. But not 'sexist.'
- niggler 14y agoIt's great to see Etsy hire more female engineers! But really, they had so few female engineers to begin with (3) that the 500% figure is a bit sensationalist
- Ellipsis753 14y agoDoesn't this seem a little sexist? I only hope they give men the equal opportunity to women and don't start "paving the way" to make it easier for women to get a job there than an equally good man. Avoiding sexism isn't about hiring an equal number of men as women. It's about hiring the best for the job regardless of their gender.
- jt2190 14y ago> Doesn't this seem a little sexist? Had the article been: "How Etsy Replaced 50% of our Male Engineers with Females" you might have cause for concern. If we were using startup lingo, we'd be saying that Etsy is disrupting the traditional labor market by finding a supply of software engineers where one didn't (or didn't seem to) exist before. We wouldn't assume that the labor supply remained exactly the same size, and that every software engineer position staffed by a woman meant one less software engineer position staffed by a man.
- lifebar 14y ago>Had the article been: "How Etsy Replaced 50% of our Male Engineers with Females" you might have cause for concern. But it's basically same. If they were hiring blindly (not in sexist/discriminatory way) they would have most likely would have hired few men in process. So basically they replaced few would be male employees with women (because according feminism word 'female' is offensive.)
- Ellipsis753 14y agoIt's not whether they're getting rid of male engineers. I just hope they're not giving an unfair advantage to females over males here as I would consider that to be sexist. Equality isn't making sure 50% of workers in each role are of each gender. Equality is making sure that when recruiting/training you always pick the best candidate regardless of there gender.
- RyanZAG 14y agoThis is a really great plan for hiring top talent in a way that's not immediately obvious. There is a lot of talk of 'sexism' in the tech world, but from my experience, many top male engineers are going to prefer working in a team with a few more females. If the article is correct then this proves this further - they were able to hire some big names simply by having those extra female engineers. Training up female engineers is also positive as the main complaint about 'diversity in tech' is putting less competent female engineers before more competent male engineers to meet ratio targets. (I'm not saying that females are less competent, but female engineers are harder to find.) By training up female engineers first before giving them the jobs, they are hopefully making sure that their female engineers are just as competent as their male engineers. Basically it's a win all around, and is much better than just hiring any female engineer regardless of skill to make quota. "Less headhunters, more hacker school" - Good call, good call.
- jaimebuelta 14y agoWell, more education/vocation HAS to be the key. There are less female engineers. The objective has to be to have more around, not to concentrate them in a few companies.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- auctiontheory 14y agoThe article doesn't really say why they wanted more female engineers, other than "it was vital to the product." I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the near term. I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female product boo-boos, like the time Microsoft offered "bitch" as the equivalent to "male" in a Windows XP Spanish localization.
- asveikau 14y agoI didn't know which company was accused of this, but the version I heard was that "female" was translated as "hembra". It does mean that, but you usually hear it applied to animals.[1] Probably an easy mistake for someone to make if they're told to translate a string without being made aware of the context. [1] The DRAE, considered the "dictionary of record" in Spain, says that female animal is definition 1, and female human is definition 2. http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra
- jaimebuelta 14y ago"Hembra" used to be acceptable some time ago, but right now is controversial and not used in that context. It is still used for female animals, though. The same goes with the male equivalent: "macho", which now is only used for animals and not people. (Macho can be also used in a similar way as in english, but that's a different acception and context usage)
- omonra 14y agoI'd like to see some numbers on how having 500% more female engineers made Etsy ship a better product - which is what I imagine customers ultimately care about. The idea that diversity is good for its own sake in every possible situation is taken as an axiom - which I'd like to see proven. It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given job is based on competence is substituted with one of diversity. Ie that in any group of size n, the personal qualities (gender,race,sexual orientation) of N+1 person joining the group is just as (or more important) that his/her core qualifications. For example - why does company have to have engineers that mimic its customer base? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to have people whose job it is to figure out what customers want and then tell engineers to code it up? Now - I am not saying that diversity is bad, rather that it's presented as a given, with no numerical justification.
- Bakkot 14y agoOn any other problem whatsoever, people would readily grant that having the developers understand the problem domain confers an advantage. I don't see why this should be any different.
- omonra 14y agoI am not convinced that males are incapable of understanding whatever it is that Etsy's clients want. After all - we don't look for programmers who are doctors for medical programs, etc. I'd actually posit that in majority of cases (ie all enterprise software), programmers actually have much less of clue as to what they are working on than in the case of consumer site like this.
- mlent 14y agoActually, you do end up needing a degree of domain-specific knowledge. Do you not think that programmers of medical software don't pick up a ton of medical knowledge while they're working? And that people who are programmers who were, say, pre-med or bio students or whatever wouldn't have an edge? As someone who happens to work in a science/bioinformatics environment with no education on the topic, I can definitely say that I make decisions based on the domain (what I've learned since joining) and the behaviors of our end-users, scientists. When programmers lack domain knowledge, they're likely to make bad assumptions that will hurt them later. Of course you have to know intended use when you're writing software, it can help you design it properly. A very simple hypothetical: Designing a database to efficiently receive some data set. What if Etsy's users aren't interested in that data? And they care more about something else, which would merit designing it differently? Maybe having a female voice to bring that up would be helpful. Obviously, it's purely conjecture, but I think it's a reasonable scenario.
- elptacek 14y agoRecently I watched a documentary in which a researcher told of how he was ridiculed for studying happiness, even though nobody saw anything wrong with studying depression. Then I saw a documentary where a handful of really skinny people were put on a ridiculous diet and their physiological changes were tracked. Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math and engineering disciplines, perhaps we should be talking to the ones who are already there? It seems to me that if we've really had to jump over extra hurdles and deal with lower wages, there has to be something very compelling that keeps us here. We think these answers are obvious. Maybe they aren't? ETA: I interviewed with Etsy in 2010 or 2011. It seemed as if I did very well, but it wasn't a career move that warranted relocating the home to Brooklyn. At the time, I thought they were just excited by me, as a professional. I'm feeling a bit sad that it might have just been a "hire more women" drive instead. Bleh.
- NoahTheDuke 14y agoWhat's different for you about being compared to other women instead of being compared to men, when they were considering who to offer the job?
- elptacek 14y agoI cannot rightly say I've ever been up against another female candidate. But I have a lot of opinions about how I am different, at least from a personality standpoint, from most of the women I work with. None of which are objective. :-)
- Tichy 14y agoWhast extra hurdles did you have to jump over? Are you sure your wages are lower? Those differences are not very obvious for office jobs, in fact the other day I linked to astudy showing women in tech earn more than men ( till age 30 anyway, have no data on otherrs).
- elptacek 14y agoMy degree is in audio tech, not computer tech. I have always found the latter to be far less challenging in the gender bias department, and had a much easier time, in general making a career "in computers." I do have experiences where I was passed over for positions where men with less experience were hired (I trained them). Also where male peers received training I was denied. Also where I was harassed until I resigned while I was pregnant. I've been asked if I was okay with working 40 hours a week because I have kids or what my kids would do during the day while I was working. Even writing one sentence per experience would make this response tedious. I have no personal examples of being paid less, because I've more or less felt I was being paid enough to make it not worth asking anyone else what they were being paid. From what I understand, that is a big no-no. The examples I have of women being paid less are from other women in tech, a couple of these for which there is direct proof.
- Cthulhu_ 14y agoYou know, gender aside, this is what more companies should do; there's an enormous demand for skilled engineers out there, yet very few companies that acknowledge there just may not be any more in the market and they need to create said skilled employees themselves. The problem for employers is that trainees and interns are a risk; you need to screen them beforehand, and then you take a gamble about whether they'll get up to the required skill level in six months or a year to be up to par to the rest of the company's team. I heard about a major consultancy company's success in attracting interns as potential future engineers (Ordina iirc), they said the success rate was about 1 in 20. Which, for smaller companies (<100 people) is simply not enough. The article itself states they hired eight people from Hacker School, which is daring and commendable. I'm curious as to how those people will develop themselves in the coming year.
- GoranM 14y agoCompanies should also be very clear about what they're actually looking for. If you're looking for "world class" talent, don't complain about a "programmer shortage". The fact that there were 600 valid applications (the women applying had code examples to show), basically busts the "programmer shortage" myth. There are a whole lot of people who can program computers, and who could, with some investment, become valuable assets.
- Kudzu_Bob 14y ago500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.
- justinhj 14y agoProgress will be when this kind of thinking doesn't occur
- Kudzu_Bob 14y agoLawyers will see to it that this kind of thinking sticks around for a long time.
- yummyfajitas 14y agoIs this kind of thinking incorrect?
- NoahTheDuke 14y agoYes.
- raganwald 14y agoProbably incorrect. And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour? On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men, I'd say you may have doubled the chances of having a harasser on your staff. I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up.
- kansface 14y agoI find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it? Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).
- furyofantares 14y ago> Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? The reverse of this situation would be a company that sells largely to men but is comprised of 3 male engineers and 47 female engineers making an effort to recruit or train new male engineers, while women continue to make up 70% of their new engineering hires.
- randomdata 14y agoI tend to agree. I thought the whole point of gender equality was to be blind, so to speak, of gender? If you have to specifically hire female people, it says their quality is lower (otherwise you would just always hire the best person female or male), which is not something I am sure I can support. Women are just as capable of being the best. It seems like an insult to give anyone special treatment just because of gender. Isn't that what we are trying to stop?
- mlent 14y agoI mean, being qualified is never the only piece of the "getting hired" puzzle, right? You want someone who fits well in your team, is generally interesting, is eager to learn, and possibly fills some other niche that you feel your team is missing. I think it's a fair question to ask, "Will this person provide a unique perspective within our team?" It seems simply that Etsy is trying to fill a female niche and add female perspective. It's not like they're hiring random ladies off the street, their hires have gone to hacker school and are clearly capable given the opportunity. Software isn't written is silos where you don't talk to other people about what/how/why you are going what you're doing.
- sprash 14y agoWork, after all, is mostly about getting shit done. If there is a shortage of female engineers they are probably overvalued which also means I could hire equally good or better men for less money. Does the little gain of prestige make up for the huge potential loss of opportunity?
- mhartl 14y agoAt that rate, in just over 20 years every woman in the world will be a software engineer at Etsy.
- OGC 14y agoSo, they had 4, and now they have 20 female engineers. That sounds like quite a small sample size and quiet a lot talk about that.
- kushti 14y agoWhat a sexist goal Etsy had, to hire 500% more female(???) engineers. Why engineers are separated by gender? It's 100% sexism.