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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Of course, correlation does not equal causation. If there is something about their "culture" that is off-putting to women, you can't "fix" it by changing the hiring practices. You fix the culture and the hiring practices follow suit organically.

I suspect that the title is wrong, and that the thesis of the article is that there is something strongly biased about Dropbox's culture and the experiences recounted about interviewing there are one symptom of many.

I'm speaking to what I read in the article, of course. I'm not a woman and I don't work at Dropbox.

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I was busy writing a comment while you cranked this out, so I'll just reply underneath yours since we more or less agree.

The premise of the article is a valid one but the arguments underneath are incredibly weak.

Perhaps a question on how Dropbox might be used to solve income inequality or the unaffordability of housing in San Francisco would reveal as much about someone’s creativity—and more about their character—than questions about superheroes

Certainly a refined hiring protocol that asks targeted and direct questions that allows the candidate to express and communicate their competence may perhaps improve the metrics of gender-diverse hiring. Suggesting such a radical change like asking for an opine on economic disparity at a Cloud Services Provider however I think is going a bit too far just to step back and claim progress; Post hoc ergo propter hoc .

The author here seem to stumble across, and then walk right by a much more interesting story in the use of demonstrably masculine conference room names in which to conduct interviews. All we got out of that was one paragraph.

I see why the name "The Bromance Room" is a demonstrably masculine name, but not why "The Break-up Room" is.

The article said:

    "‘The Break-up Room,’ by a male"

... what if this woman had been interviewed in that exact same room by a female? Would that have changed things? What if a male later on were interviewed in the same room by a female? I dunno about you, but "The break-up room" is pretty gender-neutral to me and that any gender-bias that person felt is entirely in their own head, due mainly to the fact that her interviewer was may (a statistical likelihood in this industry).

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