I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds.

Once you're into real hiring statistics you have to be very careful of confirmation bias and "I just like this guy"ism even after the fact... they look and act like your successful hires. It's hard to even say, unless you're personally looking at their work on a regular basis and know what direction they're being given.

I don't have any problem with people having arbitrary standards which guide their hiring process. They could be hiring the worst candidates, and I don't care, it's their business, may be they want to do charity or whatever.

The problem I have is with the "have to" hire such and such, and when they start painting all of that bs as being some sort of scientific thing where if you don't follow suit not only doing what they say, but also agreeing with them, you are the scum of the earth.

The statistics probably are sound, but the conclusions drawn from them are another matter. Anyone that have been exposed to statistics to some degree know that statistics fallacies abound, people that inject their own prejudices to explain out the numbers also exist, and that analysing things with lots of variables is not easy.

For example, they claim "it's just fair" if they hired as much women as women graduate in IT related areas, and otherwise it means people hiring are biased against women. Well, that's just non-sense. What if women perform actually worse? If not so, what if most women don't want to work at Google, I've heard lot of "interesting" stories that don't make me that amused if that was the case. What if women want to work in other areas that aren't as prominent in Google and go to other places instead?

As I said, saying it's just bias is just a premisse disguissed as conclusion. Just shows the bias of the people coming to those conclusions.

I can think of two major obstacles towards that. First, boys from average age of 15 enter a society where their attractiveness and social status is directly correlated to how much wealth they have. As such there is a strong incentive towards getting a job as early as possible or focusing studying towards specific high paying professions like tech. In order to girls to get the same incentive society would need to put similar pressure on them or stop putting the pressure on men to get wealth.

The second obstacles is a gender neutral phenomenon that I have seen several studies reflect on. When a student fail a exam at a university level, the risk that they will switch program is several time higher if their gender is a minority in their class. This factor also don't seem to go away as they advances in the course, but rather seems to grow stronger. One study also included data from when the graduates enter the work force (which share similar gender segregation), and based on the data they speculated that the first few years has the exact same effect, and the phenomenon only seems to go away after people been in the profession for many years.

I don't know a good solution to either of those, and for what I know, there isn't that much research into it.

I encourage you to try, but grand social engineering projects have been devoted to this exact specification in Sweden (and probably elsewhere), and the ratios don't seem to budge. I hope we won't all get so upset if it turns out nothing reasonable can be done.

What the original memo author was railing about, incorrectly, is the perception that spending more time widening the recruiting funnel for "diversity candidates" was lowering the bar. That is not true.

The reason is simple, Google doesn't hire people to fill positions, we hire people who are awesome/pass the interview bar. If there are 10 awesome people, we hire them. If there are 11, we hire them. There are always more positions than qualified candidates.

If you want to talk about if the bar is the correct measurement, etc, that's a completely separate conversation and wasn't part of the little "anti-diversity memo".

The easiest, fairest, more productive solution is to post the job where MORE DI candidates will see it. The next one is to craft positions that aren't built entirely out of "tech-stuff" that are bullshit metrics anyways, the CS Olympiad questions that don't work.

The need for diverse (in all senses of the word) is necessary for successful products.

Where I work, the majority of folks got hired directly out of college, they don't know any other src of truth. They have never had a blue-collar summer job. They came from rich to upper middle class families and their view of the world is similarly filtered. I can immediately tell when someone has "life experience" after 30 seconds of talking with them. To me, this is the bigger problem.

It's your time and energy if you want to do that, but you should probably recognize you're still treating women differently in that case.

Why do you want to pressure or influence people to do something that all the evidence indicates most of them aren't particularly interested in doing?

Shouldn't we be pleased that in an advanced society people have the opportunity to seek out and perform the work they find interesting and fulfilling?

That is exactly what Google's diversity programs (the ones that James Damore advocates eliminating) are intended to do. They are internship programs designed to get girls into computer science at the high school and college levels.

This phrase is itself a loaded non-thing, as it implies that all of this is taking place in a vacuum that was laboratory-generated by white-coated technicians.

But, instead, it's a grimy, imperfect world in which we know that women and other groups have been systematically disenfranchised and continue to be so. So, yeah, maybe someone else whose history does not bear that incredible burden will finally themselves miss out on an opportunity here or there. To those who complain of unfairness, I say "welcome to the world experienced for generations by the very people you now resent because you have to walk in their shoes for a few steps".

>the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions

"Best" by whose standard? People aren't binary or discrete. They exist on a continuum with different strengths and weaknesses. Divergent skillsets, experiences, and perspectives matter, as well as cultivating a culture that at least somewhat reflects your customer base and the wider society in which your business operates. There is actual value to diversity that goes beyond daily LOC output.

Yeah, that may sound cliche, but it is a.) true and b.) vastly underappreciated by many who frequently express their lack of appreciation with statements about "hiring the best person for the job" and the like.

Yes. But, how did said person even get to the interview stage. It has been documented that people will recommend their peers for positions a their company — peers that often look like they do.

Unfortunately, I think it's rather complicated....

The problem is, that hiring only "the best persons" will not create the best company. Diverse viewpoints and experiences create the best products.

Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo, the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.

To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

One thing that could potentially help I can think of is encouraging hiring of women in more junior roles (and I mean hiring junior level candidates, not trying to shove a more senior female developer into a lower level position). If we're not seeing qualified female senior level candidates it could be because they're not getting opportunities to learn those skills in lower level positions. I know from experience it can be hard to make room in a team for a junior employee, but it's something that the industry needs to get better at doing if we want people to eventually have the skills to fill those senior levels roles.

Only if you believe in diversity for diversity's sake, and it's important to realize that not everyone does. Personally I'm much more concerned about equal opportunity for underrepresented groups than what my coworkers actually look like.

If you really, really care about diversity it's very easy to be involved. I can guarantee you there's a program to teach computer skills to young students (often those who are economically disadvantaged) in your city.

EDIT: Also she recommends these at the bottom of her piece:

""" Start a mentoring program.

If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized.

Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.

Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective. """

...the mentoring program could be for girls and young women, but it could also be for women already on the payroll. The rest of the recommendation are for after hiring has already taken place.

I wished more of these conversations around diversity were focused on these types of points, I call these "the small things". Talking about "college pipe lines" and "biological differences" are "the big things" and they make perfect red herrings for arguments.

Indeed if we want to talk about fitness for a job I would expect a major part of that conversation to be getting a fairly good sense of what is it exactly the job entails skills wise...I have a computer science degree (with a minor in math) and an MBA but I spend most of my days working on things that absolutely don't require that level of education. Education and level of skills is definitely important and should not be underestimated but we also need to be honest and realistic about what it takes to do most jobs.

Since you, tptacek, are well known here on HN for your hiring experience, both at Matasano and Starfighter, I'd be extremely curious to know your experience with regard to that and gender. How many men vs how many women completed the crypto challenges? What about people you worked with and placed at Starfighter?

I would say that this woman's credentials, personal experience with hiring at Google and hiring at her startup, and her (seeming) non-idealogical leanings lends weight to her words.

I wouldn't say she writes perfectly but at least well enough that I could see her frustrations, and more importantly, understand why hiring quotas may create vicious cycles.

Finally, to say "who cares?" shuts down a potentially-enlightening discussion before it can even occur. I'm all for dismissing vitriol spewed by randos, but this post was written by someone with good intentions, a clear mind, and above all, feelings that she feels are valid.

Implying she has nothing worth hearing on this subject is rather unkind.

If you've paid any attention at all to the conversation around this (or any other diversity issue), you'd know that _tons_ of people care about this. There are multitudes out there who are unable to rebut an argument objectively and have to fall back on "all we have here is men talking about women's issues" or "no women in tech agrees with this viewpoint: that should tell you something".

For anyone intelligent enough to consider an argument on its merits, this example isn't useful, but unfortunately this type of conversation is always dominated by those who aren't.

Here's the problem : the candidate pool consists of 90% men and 10% women so the gender ratio at companies tends to represent that ratio. How do you propose we fix this to reach a healthier balance of something close to 50-50 without encouraging more women to join tech?

In other words, aiming for 50-50 when the candidate pool is 90-10 is suboptimal. So I agree that work needs to be done at all stages of the pipeline, but as the author suggests, the way to fix this issue is to encourage more women to join tech at the earlier stages. How is this a cop-out?

We try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive.

A lot gets muddied in these few lines. One way to read this: as a startup, we usually pay below-market salaries. But we really wanted some experienced women on the team, so we offered them market salaries. They weren't ready to sign on to 60-70 hour weeks like the men on our team. So we let them go.

With the salty language, I gather the real intent of this blog post was to ride the tails of the Google memo backlash and draw attention to her startup. And maybe find some more male engineers to join her startup at below-market salaries.

From the article:

>>Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.

>>Start a mentoring program.

>>If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized.

>>Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.

>>Find men who are willing to educate other men about this to make the message more effective.

Which part of her list of suggestions is a cop-out?

>It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline

I fail to see how any reading of the article will give you that impression.

The real copout is is saying that much of software engineering does not require a degree. That might be true in a very narrow sense as far as computer science degrees go. But people still need education and degree or certification programs. We don't need a lowering of standards or removal of standards that is the copout.

Wow, this is extremely dismissive and ignorant to what this woman has written. Why?

Since she is a women in tech, the very thing which we don't have enough of and we so desperately want to have more, perhaps we should give her voice a little bit more respect and listen a bit further into what she thinks can help to fix the problem.

Please do not mislabel opinion as fact. You do both yourself and the world a disservice.

Hence most startups avoid them, and only large companies have the means to absorb them in large numbers. The only good right after school engineers I have worked with, had been the types that had started coding at 15. Some of them didn't even go to college, but had at least 5-8 years of practical experience before getting to the point on being hirable to the big cos...

On one hand you are right that CS degree is not required, on the other hand your argument just ignores the fact that it takes years to become decent and at least 5 to 10 years of practice to become really good. Google (and any other large company) is a business at the end of the day.

Are you serious? An ex-Google hiring manager shares her experience hiring software engineers, and you conclude the only contribution this post makes is that "she's a woman". Frankly it's impressive how much of her perspective you ignored to focus on her status as a woman and a mother.

The kernel is what comes before the anecdote, which is just that - an anecdote. One would be hard pressed to view it as an argument for anything.

That's really true of any job where a degree isn't a regulatory requirement.

I think the problem with Google's hiring is less that they are hiring mostly people with degrees and more that the hiring process is a hyper competitive, stressful, multi-week long gauntlet.

I'm female. When I was 7/8 years old I literally cried about having to do multiplication and addition flash cards. I was failing math. My dad said "Listen, you're not going to be a mathematician, but you have to learn multiplication!" Hated hated hated it.

Things started to turn around in middle school. My teachers kept pushing me, I kept taking math, I started to enjoy it. By 16 I was cross-registering at a local community college to take calculus and was in differential equations my senior year. I have a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in software engineering.

The preferences of seven year olds are almost meaningless, and their career aspirations are definitely meaningless. When I was seven I wanted to be either a baker or a manicurist or president of the United States. I haven't been interested in the culinary arts, cosmetology, or politics since. My sister was an avid artist, now she's an actuary who doesn't even do art as a hobby.

Almost every parent (especially parents of mixed-gendered children) I have this discussion with ends up saying something along the lines of "Just wait until you have kids -- boys and girls are super different and my son likes trucks and machines and my daughter likes dolls!" Yeah, but what does that have to do with which classes they enjoy in middle school or high school? I don't know. Maybe I will change my mind, but this extrapolation of early childhood preferences into adulthood career paths bugs the heck out of me.

Yes we should. But if we have College intermediate Computer Science courses with 85% men (which was my anecdotal experience at a large University) this is clearly a massive (if not the largest) bottle neck and should be focused on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967445

It is mathematical and hard to follow. It's very formal.

If you follow the program of study outlined in the above comment you will have an extra tool to decide which articles make the world a worse place. (I realize that not everyone will be able to follow my comment.)

The key point of Damore's memo was that the average members of different groups have different interests and strengths.

This is born out not just in observational studies of the labor market, but also from surveys, and performing personality profiles.

What's with the obsession with with square pegs in round holes, but only for certain classes of squares?

If most people are doing things they have at least some interest in, isn't that a success? Why are so many people running around with their hair on fire, trying to solve a non-existent problem?

The big companies only recruit juniors out of universities, usually the well known ones. An aspiring programmers will never get an interview without a degree.

Once inside the company, you will realize that virtually everyone has a degree. People who don't have a degree are discriminated during every step in the interview pipeline.

We have finite resources to devote to this problem. Prioritizing them to the interventions that work is not merely acceptable, but praiseworthy and necessary.

> virtually none ... requires a college degree in the first place

Absolutely, but the pipeline leaks start far before college.

Then you might have less geeky people and companies, but the overall sentiment that I get is that who does "computers" are geeks, nerds, people with glasses and so on.

Being a male myself, I saw how rare are geeky-type of girls, and usually how many males usually one gets attention from(lots!). It's not that there aren't many, there are many geeky girls, but the pool, in comparison to men, is big. Maybe it's just my eye, but at least I saw how much lonely man there is due to this fact, they lookout for a geek girl, see how much competition there is, much more to the attractive ones and then end up alone. 4chan is an example of this.

And this is mostly regarding to culture. The stuff we watch, the stuff our parents talk with us, it has too many factors. In the end, you are a geek. Or you are something else.

So I think that either tech has to look less geeky(how to?). Now that I've grown up, I'm less interested in being a geek, I've started to look up to fashion and a range of other things which I didn't when I was younger, but it was when I was younger that I've picked my profession and many other do.

I've started to discover that there was a lot of stuff I was missing out, I've never had money to buy clothes for myself, now that I do, I pay attention to what people wear, how to they act and so on. I talk to my wife and she teaches me many things. As time passes, I actually distance myself from the prototype of people who I work with.

To my very small knowledge of lawyers, they behave very very differently from IT people in general. Some people might be more attracted to becoming one, for example. It feels more mainstream. I think that when we make this kind of choice, it's more like we want to fit in. Nowadays, after years of working experience, I think that even me, I would pick something else, even though I love coding, studying new programming languages and so on, but I could as well be as productive somewhere else, maybe being a lawyer or a doctor, why not?

As a software dev you are also expected some kind of weird labour, you are always building, your leadership capabilities aren't so well tested. For many, they would even like if you would just code. I don't like the industry so much anymore. I feel that the industry enjoys the way that it breeds very smart people which would rather be given orders(or pseudo-orders, in a SCRUM cycle or whatever agile methodology) versus actually taking up responsibility from very early on your career.

Coming back to my argument, people when deciding on what to do on their life, they chose something which they want to belong, generally. Girls because of their experience and what they get bombarded by media end up choosing different stuff. There are rare cases though.

I think you're underestimating the importance of one of her main points, specifically the fact that lowering the bar for diversity hires only perpetuates negative stereotypes about those groups and breeds resentment in all the others. It's increasing the divide rather than doing the opposite.

Bingo, Google could train a bunch of SWEs no problemo, but they'd rather externalize that cost. I figure most positions wouldn't require much more than 6 months of on-the-job training.

Rhetoric like this is toxic and erodes the presumption of competence people should have in their colleagues. I know great developers of every gender, but it's always only the women that have to justify that their presence isn't the result of some "diversity charity".

I was not thinking about that. And when I started being exposed to it, my immediate reaction was like you described: seeing political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism as a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

It took a while, but I now realize how silly that reaction was. I felt somewhat attacked by these 'social justice warriors and quotas'. And my reaction was in self defense to this perceived attack. I spent so much time reading about it on the internet. There were so many smart people applying logic and engineering skills to these social problems. I identified with these people and I agreed with most of it. They made it sound like these are all easy problems to solve and if everyone had read the same scientific studies as them and applied the same logical thinking then we would have a solution.

My view wasn't changed until I had much more experience in the real world. All these women that are being talked about as statistics are real people. They're become my friends and coworkers. I've learned to sympathize with them. I've learned that it's not us vs them. We are working together is this. I've learned that political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism are definitely not a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

I think the human aspect of all this is sorely missing on HN. At least it was for me.

So, is the identified "gap" really that bad? No, not really, not much reason to think it's bad at all in many cases. Second, and most importantly, not only is the purported cause of big bad mean oppressive bullies lacking almost entirely in evidence, but there are actual explanations with mountains of evidence.

So what? What's the harm if I believe in one cause over another? People use to do raindances!

The harm is that sticking to an explanation of big bad mean oppressive bullies, means that whole classes of people are being not just accused but punished for "crimes" they did not commit. In fact there is no crime at all.

Part of the reason that word is such a hot button is that anybody even has to explain why. It simultaneously dismisses a lifetime of effort of people on both sides of the word based solely on racial and gender stereotypes that nobody can personally validate for any single individual.

To address your actual post, I seem to have missed the whole thing. I spent much of my career in Austin as a fairly short term contractor, with the first positions I took having a rough balance. (This was the early '90s.) There was never a question about the women's competence (or interest). I can't speak to any questions of harassment, though; I rarely got close to my coworkers. Only the last contract job was a sausage fest. :-)

Then I spent two longer stretches at UT Austin and as a NASA contractor. Both environments were fairly equal, sex wise.

On the other hand, my mother worked for a bank for 40 years and never got higher than head teller, in spite of training several men who went on to be her supervisors. And my SO has several stories of being told that women can't major in mathematics.

To answer your question, I didn't actively consider diversity in tech a problem before. So I think you have a point that it's good people have brought it up.

However, that doesn't mean I always agree with the means of social justice. It is possible to fight for a good cause in a bad way.

So there are multiple facets to this issue. I believe in the endgame of social progress while still siding with Dalmore. I think the correct way to refute Dalmores of the world is with research not firings, and people who would have him fired I think are doing the wrong thing, for the right reason.

That said, from what I've heard it sounded like google had a fine program in place. I think we're on the right track at a good pace for women in tech.

I'd like to see people start talking about minorities in investment banking next, because I'm not hearing it.

I still want to reply to your question because your opening sentence reflects my feelings on the topics well: Both sides have good points - the debate is not as black and white as it is portrayed and is valuable to have [1].

> I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful

Thanks for this, seriously. I'm happy to see openness to discussion rather than the (perceived) omnipresent downright dismissal of the opposing side :).

To still kinda answer your question: I think it's good discrimination has been brought to everyone's attention and that we are working on solutions as a society. I disagree with the diversity-push side on how we should go about it.

In a non-perfect world where we don't know the exact amount of discrimination/bias suffered [2], we can't use discrimination in the form of affirmative action or the like to correct for it without potentially discriminating the opposing group rather than just correcting for their privilege.

We should help individuals do what they want to do, so I'm all for breaking down any roles or whatever that prevent people from doing that. Forcing our idea of freedom of choice / equality is just not the way to do that. Especially when we forbid questioning it [3].

We should keep striving to become a better, fairer society. I don't know the solution, I just know that this way - no matter how well intentioned - is not it.

[1] only if we have an actual debate and try to understand the opposing side rather than dismissing valid points out of offense - both sides mostly do the latter right now as far as i can tell.

[2] Could be that e.g. the representation gap is 100% due to discrimination, could be that it's just 10% due to discrimination. The point is we don't know yet.

[3] the google manifesto was not scientifically debated and dismissed but attacked as sexist. If an hypothesis is not allowed we are not being scientific. And we really shouldn't turn our back to the scientific method.

I don't believe any specific action needs to be taken to promote diversity. As far as I can tell, people can work wherever they will, as long as they can pass the interview.

>arbitrarily exclusionary practices

Please name these.

But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?

My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing.

It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's noticeable.

It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs to be corrected most in today's tech workplace.

Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.

Alas, there is mostly lazy hiring. Her point that 98% of the candidates are male? I have a long list of colleges right here on my desk that she could reach out to that have a wider pool.

By all means, hire by quality. And I'm not aware of a single company actually doing quota hiring. It's a silly proposal. But look at a wider range. It's not as hard as the author makes it out to be.[1]

But all that bringing in of candidates doesn't help if your culture is crap. If you let people behave like it's a frat-house, guess what? The few minority people you'll find and hire will leave, because they'll be made to feel unwelcome.

I'm sick of tired of the hiring strawman. The reason there's a scarcity of women and other minorities is that many companies have a culture that's full of toxic sewage.

New hires aren't judged "by character". I wish more companies did, because we'd see less problems. But we're all desperately clinging to the ludicrous idea that reciting some algorithms from memory in front of the whiteboard is the one indicator for job fitness.

If you actually want diversity (and quality!), start right there. Test how people actually behave in a group setting. Have them solve real problems, together with other people.

[1] Of course, if you pay your recruiters by quantity, they'll be happy to let people self-select. And if your company's culture skews exclusive, guess what, minorities won't self select. It's not a problem of the candidate pool, though.

We've been going down the path where virtually everyone agrees people ought to be hired and promoted based on merit, yet we have an industry rife with harassment, various -isms, and discrimination.

I'm pretty sure quotas are not the answer, but offering up the tried and failed idea that we should all just stop being bad is rather pathetic, in my opinion. In any case, I think we can expect it to work as well as it ever has.

Edit: minor typo

Would be awesome if there existed a way to remove all human biases from hiring.

Unfortunately, there isn't one yet.

Of course, the implication is that Google is doing so. But if Google was doing so, they wouldn't have the poor diversity stats they've been accused of having.

You can't have it both ways! Either Google is lowering the bar to achieve satisfactory diversity stats... or they are failing to achieve satisfactory diversity stats.

And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?

Any pointers to specifics or resources on this?

> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.

Scott Alexander (penname for a psychiatrist) wrote about it here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psycholo...

> Implicit association tests probably don’t work (1, 2, 3, 4). That is, people who have “implicit racial biases” according to the tests are not more racist in everyday life than people who don’t. If this were true – and if it reflected a general failure of implicit racial biases to affect explicit actions – it’s hard to overestimate how much it would change psychology. We wouldn’t have to worry about how the wrong character on TV would accidentally bias people toward having certain stereotypes. We wouldn’t have to worry about subconscious racism affecting hiring decisions even among people who are trying hard to be fair and neutral.

(All PDF downloads) - 1 http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/reassessingpredictiv... - 2 http://www.academia.edu/download/41431928/Reassessing_the_pr... - 3 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public... - 4 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.12288/abstra...

Employing for any other reason will likely demoralise the team because they will likely under perform. They will likely under perform because instead of finding the best person, you find the best person based on a subset of arbitrary equality rules.

There is no reason why 50% of tech jobs cannot go to women. The main barrier we come across is there aren't enough skilled women applying. I think the author hit the nail on the head. It reflects my experiences.

You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they can lead the way on equality. To have equality for equalities sake. It's wrong. Where there are descrepancies between genders we should ask why they exist.

Take child care, the majority of people in childcare are women. Should we be passing over women with years of experience and excellent qualifications to bump the number of men in the industry?

I would love to see a few guys at my kids nursery. However they should be there because they were the best for job. I would pull my kid out of the nursery if they passed over better candidates to fix this gender ratio. I want the best outcome for my children.

The same is true with business. Merit is the measure that matters. More women in tech will lead to more meriting jobs in the industry, which in turn will lead to the male/female ratio improving.

If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.

Serious people are people willing to put their time and/or money into a cause. All power to these people but they are a fraction of the critical mass needed in any social campaign.

Genuine people are people who are sympathetic and have good intentions. They will do / not do what is helpful to the cause but it's not on of their top X priorities. Every movement needs lots and lots of these people. But these people will flee if a situation becomes toxic or they feel like they have more to lose than they can risk.

For example, few "genuine" men would ever write the article written by the OP, which essentially says, it's a pipeline problem. Why? Because even if they could prove with hard data that the biggest factor is the lack of female applicants they would still get torched by the ideologues. So the safe choice is not to engage, give a little extra consideration to the few female applicants received, and move on with your day.

While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their own decisions they'd be engineers.

Children are too young to make decisions for their future. Adults might not always be right but they're better at it than children. That's why school is compulsory, not "if the child feels like going"

There may be a sub-minority of women who want to be programmers but are discriminated out of it. That's not good but it's surely a tiny fraction of humans. Not worth changing everyone else's job for.

If you reduce your quality bar to fill a quota for a group, then that group can end up having a lower quality than the majority group, which then works to reinforce bad stereotypes in some of the majority against that minority.

That can then harm those in the minority group who were in fact above the bar and for whom the bar did not need to be lowered.

I'm not against quota systems but they need to be aggressively monitored so you don't get unintended effects.

Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?

On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.

Why do something sexist that didn't have a benefit.

How is it OK to respond to a candidate for hiring "sorry you're the wrong sex" if they're otherwise the best candidate. That's completely wrong IMO.

https://youtu.be/E577jhf25t4

Also watch the other episodes at:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd9_g7lAICxtlGbxh4_z8i...

https://youtu.be/Ve6uK00AvNo

It also covers why women in for example India and the Middle-East are more into computer science.

You can read more about the series at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

Because it's a poor country. As wealth increases and women start taking careers they want to instead of careers that pay well they amount of women going into IT drops.

Almost without question the interview process was also eliminating men who did not seem energetic or interested in the company.

But she wanted to hire women. So, the women were hired at market rate or higher. Without question they were willing to make an offer even if they had doubts about the woman's energy or passion or commitment to the company. After all it's hard enough to make an offer if you have standards, let alone make an offer to a woman, so the last thing you want is a technically capable woman being rejected because she seemed a bit tired in the interview. These women may have joined simply because the wages were good, without any particular belief or care about the future of the firm. They will work exactly as much as needed to earn their salary and no more.

There's nothing wrong with such workers, it's a fallacy to believe all employees must be passionate. However if your process is selecting for passion except when the candidate is a woman, then the women will seem low energy in comparison. And their "I don't care, why do you care" attitude will probably rub off on the rest of the team too.

But my take is basically she says when she was confronted with an overwhelmingly male pipeline she tried increasing diversity by increasing the acceptance rate of female candidates. She then tells a story of how this backfired and increased negative stereotypes about female engineers. I don't think she believes women in general lack or drain energy, just the few she hired for her start up.

Yeah, it's annoying that she's forcing readers to interpret that. I would guess that she means that they weren't able to perform their job responsibilities adequately, and others had to pick up the slack.

To understand one's mind, you should observe it.

Who said it is? It's a woman who wrote that, after all. And right after what you quoted comes this:

> That said, I’m proud to say that our freelance journalists on UrbanAMA are predominantly women and are kicking butt on the AMAs they are hosting.

Oh god how horribly disturbing.

All of this kiddo shit is the result of not listening to Camille Paglia. Close the intellectual honesty gap before you worry yourself further.

Because men and women have entirely different brains. They have entirely different strengths and weaknesses. Hate to break that to you.

The rise of "lets pretend everyone is equal even though they're obviously not" is one of the worst things going on right now.

Next, I'll make it really easy for you: women are women, and you can just count them as one group. That doesn't mean we should erase away the specific challenges and bigotry trans women face, but we also shouldn't be forcing them into a separate "quadrant" of women.

We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity?

She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.

It was about underrepresented minorities such as Blacks, Latinos, etc..

It didn't really pertain to white women

Or progesterone levels to compassion and nurturing desires?

I think you need to look a little harder.

Of course more complex skills/desires/abilities are going to have more complex biological causation; though if you can prove otherwise, go ahead.

The software engineer who is rewarded for putting out the fires, when in reality they are a serial arsonist...

Modern progressivism (https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberal...) ...

So on and so forth...

No one wants to put in the real, hard work and society continues to reward the facade.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010185 and marked it off-topic.

its better than the alternative of @dang and friends manually moving this item down/off the front page.