4 ms·

But by implementing a company-wide balance, you hardly gain anything in particular teams. Even worse, if you let the ‘actual’ development teams be all-male and

But by implementing a company-wide balance, you hardly gain anything in particular teams. Even worse, if you let the ‘actual’ development teams be all-male and the women to take care of the rest (management, secretaries, people drawing up trivial PowerPoint presentations to impress equally trivial people), you might well reinforce stereotypes.

swombat 14y ago
I'm lucky that all the key jobs at GrantTree (Client Management, Sales) are naturally not predominantly male or female. Obviously that's not the case for every company. Ultimately, if 90% of developers in the country you're in are male, it's going to be pretty damn hard to keep any kind of balance in your development team. I think you just have to accept that, and continue to hire based on excellence rather than trying to bias towards gender (which is illegal anyway). However, there are completely legal things you can do to try and tilt the balance in other functions, so that at least the company as a whole is balanced. For example, advertising on sites that aren't themselves predominantly male, and wording your job ads so that they make it clear that women are most welcome, helps to tilt the balance of applicants, which allows you to maintain the company balance while still hiring the best applicants. I don't think you can solve macro-societal issues like gender balance among software developers in general just by tweaking your hiring process (though I'll be happy to be proven wrong), but that's not an issue of sexism, just an issue of reality. I haven't yet considered how you'd solve that problem at huge scales, like if you were Microsoft - probably others might have more useful opinions on this. My points above are more relevant to smaller companies. I'm sure there's a number of people at Microsoft worrying full-time about this.
astrieanna 14y ago
If you development/technical roles are all male, then your supporting (manager/etc) roles must be mostly female if you end up with company-wide gender balance. This form of semi-gender-balance is not uncommon; many supporting roles (HR,etc) tend to skew female. As a female developer, I find the technology differential between the genders to be at least as awkward as having a strong but more uniform gender skew across the company would be. Without any individual behaving incorrectly in any way, it feels awkward to be the only technical female in a company. Having a non-zero number of other women present is better than none, but it's completely different from having a non-zero number of equally technical women. When the information flow of technical information is always male-to-female, it just makes me feel uncomfortable, even though no one is doing anything wrong.
- swombat 14y ago
  How would you solve this problem if you were in charge? (assuming you're not already in charge) (genuinely curious, I have no idea how I'd try to solve it in a large company context)
  - astrieanna 14y ago
    I'm definitely not in charge; I've only just graduated from college, so the sum total of my work experience is two internships. The companies I worked at did both ask for advice/feedback on how they could recruit more women; they both view their lack of gender diversity as a problem. (neither had any full-time female developers; only one had female dev interns other than me) I don't think I had anything useful to tell them at the time, and I'm still don't have especially clear ideas on how to solve the problem. Both companies are full of very nice, very smart people. They weren't doing anything wrong that I could see. It seems to me that the problem might be advertising. They might be (unintentionally) advertising in male-dominated spaces (online or otherwise). This might be somewhat counteracted by the fact that both companies support/advertise-at specifically for-tech-women events (sponsoring a Girl Geek dinner; attending the Grace Hopper conference job fair). Another possible factor is that both companies are known for having challenging interviews. (like a lot of well respected tech companies) It's possible that some potential female applicants talk themselves out of applying; I've seen (male) friends come pretty close to talking themselves out of applying because they felt they wouldn't get the job. This is also something of a circular problem. The lack of female developers makes them less appealing places to work for potential new female hires; the imbalance signals that there might be problems at the company and the situation is a problem in itself. The company might also be less likely to hear about female-focused events to advertise at. I don't claim to have a solution. I just wanted to back up that have enough women in general around does not really help with a lack of technical women.
- claudius 14y ago
  That’s what I meant with ‘even worse…’. Assuming a child would come along on bring-your-child-to-work day, would that child get the impression that women are equally capable of doing technical work as men or would it think that women ‘belong’ in HR?

swombat 14y ago

I'm lucky that all the key jobs at GrantTree (Client Management, Sales) are naturally not predominantly male or female. Obviously that's not the case for every company. Ultimately, if 90% of developers in the country you're in are male, it's going to be pretty damn hard to keep any kind of balance in your development team. I think you just have to accept that, and continue to hire based on excellence rather than trying to bias towards gender (which is illegal anyway). However, there are completely legal things you can do to try and tilt the balance in other functions, so that at least the company as a whole is balanced. For example, advertising on sites that aren't themselves predominantly male, and wording your job ads so that they make it clear that women are most welcome, helps to tilt the balance of applicants, which allows you to maintain the company balance while still hiring the best applicants. I don't think you can solve macro-societal issues like gender balance among software developers in general just by tweaking your hiring process (though I'll be happy to be proven wrong), but that's not an issue of sexism, just an issue of reality. I haven't yet considered how you'd solve that problem at huge scales, like if you were Microsoft - probably others might have more useful opinions on this. My points above are more relevant to smaller companies. I'm sure there's a number of people at Microsoft worrying full-time about this.

astrieanna 14y ago

If you development/technical roles are all male, then your supporting (manager/etc) roles must be mostly female if you end up with company-wide gender balance. This form of semi-gender-balance is not uncommon; many supporting roles (HR,etc) tend to skew female. As a female developer, I find the technology differential between the genders to be at least as awkward as having a strong but more uniform gender skew across the company would be. Without any individual behaving incorrectly in any way, it feels awkward to be the only technical female in a company. Having a non-zero number of other women present is better than none, but it's completely different from having a non-zero number of equally technical women. When the information flow of technical information is always male-to-female, it just makes me feel uncomfortable, even though no one is doing anything wrong.

swombat 14y ago
How would you solve this problem if you were in charge? (assuming you're not already in charge) (genuinely curious, I have no idea how I'd try to solve it in a large company context)
- astrieanna 14y ago
  I'm definitely not in charge; I've only just graduated from college, so the sum total of my work experience is two internships. The companies I worked at did both ask for advice/feedback on how they could recruit more women; they both view their lack of gender diversity as a problem. (neither had any full-time female developers; only one had female dev interns other than me) I don't think I had anything useful to tell them at the time, and I'm still don't have especially clear ideas on how to solve the problem. Both companies are full of very nice, very smart people. They weren't doing anything wrong that I could see. It seems to me that the problem might be advertising. They might be (unintentionally) advertising in male-dominated spaces (online or otherwise). This might be somewhat counteracted by the fact that both companies support/advertise-at specifically for-tech-women events (sponsoring a Girl Geek dinner; attending the Grace Hopper conference job fair). Another possible factor is that both companies are known for having challenging interviews. (like a lot of well respected tech companies) It's possible that some potential female applicants talk themselves out of applying; I've seen (male) friends come pretty close to talking themselves out of applying because they felt they wouldn't get the job. This is also something of a circular problem. The lack of female developers makes them less appealing places to work for potential new female hires; the imbalance signals that there might be problems at the company and the situation is a problem in itself. The company might also be less likely to hear about female-focused events to advertise at. I don't claim to have a solution. I just wanted to back up that have enough women in general around does not really help with a lack of technical women.
claudius 14y ago
That’s what I meant with ‘even worse…’. Assuming a child would come along on bring-your-child-to-work day, would that child get the impression that women are equally capable of doing technical work as men or would it think that women ‘belong’ in HR?