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Comment by Croso | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere. Also, it's kind of counterintuitive to equality, as you basically just guarantee women get a job in Tech. Regardless of skill set. Which in itself is kind of sexist. In my opinion anyways, based on my anecdotal experience holding the door for feminists.

I don't know why people think turning women into "butts in seats", as opposed to genuine respect and admiration of skills and abilities is going to make this problem better.

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I agree with aspects of what you said; in particular the observation that his would be impossible to implement everywhere due to the numbers imbalance of the talent pool. Although I think in general having more women in tech will encourage more women to enter the field (as I assume occurred in medicine and biology), so in the long run it could well be feasible.

I definitely think you could have left out the “holding the door for feminists” part though.

The holding the door thing is a marvelous trope. I honestly doubt anyone's ever given him a hard time about it considering it's a perfectly normal thing for people to do for anybody. Maybe somebody didn't do the traditional mumbled "thanks" and he interpreted it as them taking offense?

I'm not from the US, but I've had sarcastic (but not acerbic) comments from people who didn't know I hold it for everyone. Sometimes people will judge prematurely, it's not that surprising.

Actually, I once worked with someone who adamantly refused to go through a door being held for her.

And some people refuse to take elevators. Just because you came across someone once who behaved in a certain way doesn't mean "ohmagerd feminists hate men holding doors for them!"

I hold doors open for both men and women and no one has ever said anything to me about it except for "Thank you".

> you basically just guarantee women get a job in Tech. Regardless of skill set

But how do you know they weren't hired for their skill set? Like, if you have two equally good apples in flavor, but you want to balance the profile of varieties, choose the one you're most lacking?

To me, taking into account gender during the hiring process is the text book definition of sexual discrimination. Whether you mean it in a good way or not.

How will you tell you won't be developing some bias over time just to make the hiring process an easier job for you?

It’s literally just has to do with numbers. If men and women are equally good at the job and there are less total women, forcing a 50% split at all jobs means that eventually places need to take on lower skilled workers from the smaller group.

These numbers only makes sense if there are literally zero skilled women. Otherwise, you're not dealing with the whole of the industry, you are dealing only with your own team, the one or two positions you are currently trying to fill. The question isn't therefore, "What systemic biases in the pipeline can we have addressed in the past to ensure that I have a reasonably set from which to draw today?" It's simply, "Today, right now, is there one qualified woman that I'm likely to overlook if I don't make an effort to remind myself that being surrounded by nothing but men isn't ideal?"

There are an exhaustingly large set of companies that hire exclusively from the set of men, leaving competition for the smaller set of women much easier.

I feel like you've missed the point, namely: "if all companies ensured 50/50 hiring, so that exactly half their jobs were taken by female applicants, then simply because of the large number of jobs taken across the whole industry and the relatively small number of female applicants for those places, virtually all the females who apply will be employed, regardless of their actual skill". You're addressing the question of what happens if only one marginal company does that; the parent was addressing the question of what happens if that's a universal policy. (I pass no judgement about the validity of the above argument; the thought experiment elsewhere on this thread about "suppose 5% of working women are great at tech" is at least a counterargument.)

The entire discussion doesn't address the systemic changes which happen if nearly every female applicant is employed, of course; one obvious thing that would probably happen is that more females would consider applying to this sort of job, which most would agree is a good thing.

RE > There are an exhaustingly large set of companies that hire exclusively from the set of men, leaving competition for the smaller set of women much easier.

I don't know of any large companies that only hire from candidate pools of men. Does anyone know of an example?

You moved the goalposts with your question. I said that the set of companies which hires only men is large. You asked specifically about the hiring practices of large companies, which is a different question.

Recently, 88.6% of developers surveyed identified themselves as men[0]. That ratio alone suggests that the vast majority of teams and companies have zero female developers. In my experience, women developers often cluster at companies (usually large companies) so that they are not isolated, which might make the numbers even more extreme.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#demographics

The supply of apples is limited (and with a distribution of 20:80 in terms of varieties A and B). People can test individual apples for taste before buying and compete with you for the best ones.

It's going to be much harder to get 50:50 excellent apples than 20:80 excellent apples.

> Unfortunately, due to the lack of female engineers, this will be impossible to implement everywhere.

Correct. But the goal here I suspect is to get enough corporations onboard such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) are now motivated to select for and encourage balanced talent pool participation for fear of missing out on "hip" companies.

have you ever considered the idea that many women dont want to be engineers?

what about the fact that more men are dropping out of school and less are entering college? shouldnt we be encouraging those men to be engineers as well?

as far as encouraging undergaduate/graduate to have more 'balanced' classes, since there is a limited number of seats I can't see that going any other way than: you have a penis, thats a negative on your application.

> what about

I'm not here to entertain your Tu Quoque fallacies today. :)

Tu quoque "argument" follows the pattern: Person A makes claim X. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X. Therefore X is false

I made no claims about your past actions or past claims.

It'll be interesting to see in five or ten years if all of this effort bears results.

Being willing, and taking satisfaction from beating your head against a computer to get it to do what you want it to do is something I just don't observe as being wide-spread in any population group. But we need as many of those people as we can find, wherever they happen to be and whatever they look like.

> such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate)

I guess some universities care about which companies recruit there (for marketing purposes, being able to say companies A,B,C recruit there), but does this really apply to k-12?

Also, if most "hip" companies chose to only recruit at universities with gender ratios exceeding some threshold (and by causality this happens before universities are "properly motivated" to encourage balanced gender ratios in CS), won't they be hurting themselves by competing for an arbitrarily chosen much smaller pool of talent?

Yes, girls are currently switching away from math and computer classes in high school, before they even reach college.

I am not disputing the fact that high school matters as far as gender distribution of people applying to software eng. positions.

I was replying to a comment that says:

> the goal here I suspect is to get enough corporations onboard such that schools (k-12 and undergraduate/graduate) are now motivated to select for and encourage balanced talent pool participation for fear of missing out on "hip" companies

And asking how will "fear of missing out" motivate k-12 schools to get more girls into those classes. Companies don't recruit in k-12 schools. How would duolingo and "other hip companies" recruiting exclusively from universities whose CS classes exceed a gender ratio threshold influence k-12 schools?

Gender is a choice, there is elasticity in supply of female engineers.

Trying to cheat the system eh? :^)

Some people prefer to be part of the solution, not part of the problem...

Someone mentioned something like this yesterday (on /., IIRC, but I'm not sure). You could have 100% female engineers by simply having all your male engineers declare themselves as such, since "gender is independent of the underlying biology". There, problem solved! :D

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