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

It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing.

The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?

Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)

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.

Likely it's interesting because she's a coder, a founder, a hiring manager, and a woman. That gives her a lot of credibility in one person that is fairly unique. I suppose, at the end of the day, it all boils down to an argument from authority. But people do make decisions that way.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's not a novel idea, but the reality is that someone who is convinced all men are out to discriminate against women is more likely to listen to her than to a man writing the same post.

So if for nothing at all, her voice matters in that it strengthens the argument that pipeline is a big part of the problem. It is obvious to a lot of people in this crowd but might not be to many, many others.

Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same

Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term) side of this debate, I'm left assuming she didn't see that occur. But she could also clear that up easily.

Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard not to taint them.

If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.

† 99% of what I write isn't well-written either, in case this sounds like a jab at the author, who I am not familiar with.

The word "shove" aside, I wish more companies would hire senior people for junior roles if they want them. One of the big problems with the American (and I presume Western) job market is the unwillingness to train people unless they're straight out of college. It seems that moms (and less often, dads) who take time off to raise the young ones would benefit from a new approach.

Of course, the employer and employee need to be on the same page about day-to-day duties, expected career growth, and so on. But that seems like a solvable problem.

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.

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?

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.

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.

A young woman could hear a lot about how tech is a rough place to work and decide to do something else. So the various parts of the pipeline do affect on another.

How much is an empirical question, I suppose.

That makes that part of the argument in her post a kind of straw man.

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.

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.

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.

No worries. I understood your meaning. I also meant that. I meant that hiring managers, in my experience, are more likely to give an outright "no" to an underqualified senior person than to offer them a junior role.

If the person took some time off, decided to switch industries, decided to switch specialties, or just figured out they were in a rut, giving them a junior role and letting them work their way back into an expert role should be a consideration.

My average student is a 14-year-old black female who wants to learn web dev. It should go without saying, I've not seen even a hint of ability difference based on gender or race. We cover JS as well as HTML/CSS -- this is not a design class, but a real development class where kids are writing native markup and code.

The program is free and held at the public library. All students are there because they want to learn. I thought some might come due to parental pressure, but I haven't seen that.

It's exhausting and rewarding.

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.

You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting employer demographics to immediately exactly reflect US population demographics is stupid. You're wildly incorrect that it's uncommon.

As just one example of the top of my head, Google released their diversity a couple of years ago and coverage was almost universally: "Google has a serious diversity problem", "Google needs to do a lot better".

The actual gender numbers? Non technical employees were split down the middle and technical employees almost exactly reflected percent of CS degrees by gender.

Something isn't a straw man if it's an argument that's constantly made and carries a lot of influence.

Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.

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.

Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal.

In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's good. But they are often weird, rude, or creepy (still 40 and shopping at Hot Topic?). They're usually taking orders rather than giving them. And they're often squirreled away in some lab instead of being part of the story itself. I'm concerned the message for women (and men for that matter) is "Tech is great... if you're into dressing up like a wizard and sitting in a cubical. You do you (over there)!"

One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others --- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated) SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.

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.)

"You'll hire me for a job I can't immediately do, and I'll treat growing into my job as the number one priority".

With the job market as it is, it's unrealistic to expect people to hire candidates who can't help lighten the load within a week or two of their start date.

I wish there was a less-risky way to 'try out' candidates. Someone I know works in boutique finance and whenever they bring on someone at a junior level, they're on a 60 day probation and the partners decide whether or not to retain them.

I think it's easier for them to do it because their applicant pool / candidates are predominantly young, white/asian, male, and high-achieving. They've never been sued by a candidate they've let go and they've found some real 'diamonds in the rough'.

I can't imagine that they could say the same if they let go of 40 mothers with children. But it does highlight a solution path - make it less risky for companies to evaluate candidates although I don't know how to do that without eroding worker protections.

If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally.

When your company says "the goal is to match the pipeline" yet still has an "aggressive diversity programme", what they mean is, "we know what we have to say to avoid legal trouble but we want to hire as many women as possible, and will find as many ways to bend the rules to do that as possible".

I see this trope trotted out again and again. Where exactly are we drawing the line between opportunity and outcome? When a 22 year old (woman or otherwise) gets hired at google that's no more an outcome than an opportunity. It's not like they're going to be sitting on their deathbed thinking of the way their life turned out realizing it was all set in stone at 22. More likely they're going to work for google for a few years, maybe leave to start a new business, get poached by a competitor or make a run at climbing the google ladder but what is that 22 year old going to be thinking later on in their career, say ten years down the line? Probably something like "I'm glad I got the opportunity to work at Google."

You mention wage gaps but if the pool of qualified engineers is mostly men and Google (and other tech companies) want to hire women, it seems that salaries for women should be far, far higher than it is for men. The fact that they are close to equal might be part of the problem.

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.

How is that fair for boys/men if they're excluded from mentoring opportunities (eg in a company that hires them) simply because they're male.

This is "fine" if your objective is "hire more women". As someone who supports equality of opportunity I don't see how compounding more sexism will ever lead to less sexism.

In the UK, overall, young men get poorer school results, are less represented at university, receive lower wages than women (up to the ages when people choose to start families) ... how does this sort of sexist mentoring policy fit in here? Is it really enough to say "well if we look only at this industry segment"?

What's wrong with equality?

I have been paid very good money (north of USD 85000 in Norther Europe) for stuff that was mostly so simple I could easily taught a bright and reliable 16 y.o. to do it. (I did at a similar job.)

I think this is already happening. It is 'cool' to do software (and be geeky in general - look at the popularity of The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones). The problem is that it take time for those changes to trickle up.

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.

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.

But unless that "aggressive programme" is illegally benefiting women with something concrete, like more pay, easier interviews or special privileges unavailable to men, it's like that the programme will be focused on trying to attract women into the profession who aren't already developers. So it'd make no difference to this hypothetical new college grad.

And if it did, then why would you want an employee whose primary reason for joining your startup over a competitor was the existence of a diversity programme? They'll just seem low energy compared to the men who joined because they love online discussions or whatever it is your firm does. Better pass and keep looking.

The answer could be "it works, but there's not enough of it" I guess.

I mostly brought it up because tptacek wrote, "It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline..." and I thought the recommendations for helping already-in-engineering women pointed to a more complex position. Though perhaps that position wasn't communicated, at least not clearly enough.

Think kids that don't have role models of their gender/ethnicity. Think kids that are placed in gendered roles without respect for their own interests ("oh you're a buy, let me get you the trucks and computer programing skills. I'll get your sister the art books instead").

It extends to school programs, funding, etc. and is certainly a complex issue. It is more about giving people similar access and motivation to enter careers/areas of study/careers.

I agree that many events (hiring, etc.) can be seen as outcome or opportunity, it's about where you draw the line. The phrase comes up because the common conversation about diversity is focused on 50-50 splits in hires and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.

You still have to make sure you're doing that in an unbiased way. For example, if you ask interviewers to determine if a candidate is a good "cultural fit," you might accidentally end up with 95/5 men instead of 90/10.

Some kind of diversity program to make sure you're not undershooting the diversity of your job applicants is an absolute minimum requirement, I'd say.

Should you aim to overshoot? Maybe! That's a discussion worth having.

Wow, that sounds terribly unfortunate! Did this happen while she worked at Google? Or while working at her startup? What are the mechanisms behind this? Do the diversity programs at Google have lower hiring standards than the normal hiring track?

(In case it's not clear, my point is that she appears to be describing a hypothetical scenario. The claim that diversity programs result in hiring unqualified women is a very strong claim (not even one that James Damore makes in his memo), and needs to be backed by actual evidence.)

Is this actually occurring at Google due to the existence of their diversity programs? If so, that is quite a strong claim and needs to be backed by evidence. But she doesn't appear to be actually making that claim.

> Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs.

Isn't this literally what Google's diversity programs do? The ones that James Damore advocates eliminating? I thought they were internship programs designed to encourage more minority groups to get into computer science?

For example:

BOLD - https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html

CSSI - https://edu.google.com/resources/programs/computer-science-s...

Engineering Practicum - https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/engineerin...

I don't watch that much TV, but Abby (sp?) from NCIS springs to mind, slightly quirky, but v. intelligent, commanding.

The equivalent character in Alias, f.e., was (in early series at least) a one-dimensional dork.

I don't think it's obvious at all. That an experienced engineer or manager can correctly evaluate a software engineer is one of the ground assumptions that runs through our industry and its thinkpieces. (Though it is borne out by the studies that, e.g., even Google has done).

> If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.

This is a significant point: Google's hiring process is legendarily bad. While I would work for them (I think their ethics are solid, their engineering is excellent, their benefits suitable for adults, and reports of internal culture are generally good - a rare combination), the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing. I just don't have enough of a taste for doing an independent study of my upper division algorithms class to have aggressively tried to get hired there.

It's also evidence, I think, that broken hiring processes do not inherently break a company - or at least a sufficiently profitable one.

I suppose individual women are free to negotiate a higher salary.

"But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team."

What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women unqualified or otherwise incapable of doing the work? If so, why not say so explicitly? Because otherwise, in the context of startups I would be inclined to interpret that sentence as meaning "they weren't willing to work 80 hour weeks like the rest of our team so we fired them".

> there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.

...it's funny how you point to two quite exceptional people as the standard for women to meet.

tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN, one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring.

Politely, sir, take a deep breath. You might disagree with him, but you might want to be careful with your assumptions there.

I've learned to be especially leery of arguments that sound reasonable and logical, but lack something concrete to prop them up. The post says her company paid premium salaries -- despite allegedly not being able to afford market salaries -- to women who then "lacked the energy to put us into overdrive" and "were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team".

Even if I were to disregard that the post seems to be basing its argument on a single company's set of anecdotes, I would still need an explanation of just what the heck is meant by "energy to put us into overdrive" and how you "drain" that energy from the rest of the team.

Unless you take all candidates, you are back to reducing the pool to a more manageable size, presumably using classic interview techniques.

And unless the mentors are biased, this still doesn't change the fact that your hires as a population will be similar to the applicants.

I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.

> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.

Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".

I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.

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".

Basically anyone in Big Bang Theory, Bones (herself). They're certainly STEM, but maybe not "tech" depending on what people mean by that.

I don't necessarily think the equivalent male characters are treated comparably well, for what it's worth. But if you want to encourage teenage girls to look at tech, showing them that it's also for normal people would help a lot.

I will say that Silicon Valley does a decent job subverting the trend with a handful of minor female characters.

I'm not sure that's true.

>and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.

Except it's not dangerous at all? What I specifically don't like about this article and your focus on outcome vs. opportunity is that it draws this bright line where none exists. The writer in this article basically lays out that everyone in the pipeline right up until her has a role in reducing gender bias. For example when she says: "I beg you to expend your energy motivating and mentoring young women at the crucial stages of making decisions about a tech education" she makes it clear that she doesn't think she's at a crucial stage. But she is. She admits to having failed to produce a diverse workforce at her startup but rather than really admit it as just that, a failure, she basically says that it's not her fault because all these other people aren't making it easy for her. It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.

Statistically, you're correct. But there's a lot more of a subjective element to hiring than matching skills to requirements. One of the replies to your comment mentions "culture fit", for example.

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.

* the rest of STEM,

* the law,

* medicine,

* pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c)

... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.

Add to that the fact that most software jobs are far more work/life flexible than other professions (roll in late, work from home, wear whatever, weekly+ deliverable cadence, &c).

It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.

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.

Would a US court disallow this? It doesn't seem to violate the spirit of affirmative action, or the letter of equality laws.

... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science.

Agree, this is reason for concern.

It is difficult to come up with an explanation for the 82/18 split in this industry that doesn't primarily include an implied preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women.

Here's were we disagree.

I think there are lots of things to be done but if this was true then there should be a massive opportunity for whatever company moved first and hired all those qualified candidates that others shun.

I don't think « preference on behalf of industry incumbents to avoid working with women » does that.

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.

This is vastly under-acknowledged. Implicit biases affect even the most well-intentioned of us, which then persistently and negatively impact the targets of our biases (see the movie Get Out for an exaggerated, but entertaining take on this).

For an "out-group" in any particular environ, their very status as a historical out-group itself fuels the perceptions that perpetuate their disenfranchisement.

So, the remedy to this has not been to psychoanalyze every hiring manager in an attempt to navigate these murky, subjective waters; but to set objective goals that seek to counter the equally objective under-representation manifestations that we can actually measure.

It's funny, because I am an ethnic minority. I mean that almost literally; outside of my family I have met exactly one person of my same ethnicity. If I had been waiting for a role model I would still be waiting. So my lived experience means I am pretty skeptical of the need for one's role model to match one's skin colour (or anything else).

Incase it matters my role models were Avon and Scotty.

"We [UrbanAMA] 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. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. I’m now back to being the only woman on the (tech) team."

I'm not sure what it says about the situation that 98% of the candidate pool is male or that she had to fire specifically the women for draining energy.

https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186026-decoding-femi...

In western culture, my experience has been: When you tell some acquaintance you're a software developer, engineer etc., they are almost instantly bored.

Contrast that with

* Science - The flair of knowledge, curiosity, discovery and a general sense of meaning

* the law - Status and money

* Medicine - Making a real difference in peoples lives, also extremely prestigous

Maybe men are just less capable of resisting the urge to tinker in order to achieve more respected/better payed jobs?

It bears to be repeated: This is western culture valuation, might be different in other cultures, which also might result in a different distribution.

I think telling someone that you're a software engineer isn't the best way to make it sound exciting and high status. Tell people what the software does, or what the company does. Saying "I'm a software engineer" is like saying "I'm a screwdriver operator" rather than "I'm an aviation maintenance technician". Nobody cares about the nitty-gritty details of how exactly you get your work done.

1. I went to LinkedIn

2. I searched for "Silverlabs"

3. I found the page for their company

4. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have LinkedIn profiles"

5. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.

I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this "research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.

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.

I feel very strongly that noone should proclaim opinion as a fact.

> But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there.

"Yes, we invest in mentoring and training all our team members and we did with the women we hired as well. We definitely found a few men and women who were either unwilling or unable to take on the role. We did end up losing the men who didn’t as well. On that part, it wasn’t a gender thing really — sorry that the post made it sound like that. Basically we had fewer women to begin with. And as luck would have it, these women did not end up having the desire to do what it takes."

https://medium.com/@hellovidya/yes-we-invest-in-mentoring-an...

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.

Also, it's possible that the hiring processes were broken in her chain, but not everywhere. Her experience doesn't seem to align with what either Google or Damore say (he felt all his female coworkers were equally capable and deserved to be there).

> Google's hiring process is legendarily bad ... the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing

How does having a high standard implicate any other hiring practices? "Bad" in one sense doesn't mean "bad" everywhere, and certainly "bad" for you doesn't mean "bad" for everyone. All that said -- I personally don't wish to go through an interview in which I'm grilled in detail on all the algorithms I reviewed in college. Hence why I don't work at Google.

I mean, if men are more often "candidates" for moving between jobs, then it would, right?

If that were true, then an employer wanting a more loyal or longer term employee might seek out more women.

[1] I have no evidence for any of this.

not the case

Law

At 35%, women practice law at about double the rate they do of more masculine occupations like engineering, while law practice involves abstract reasoning the degree of "social reasoning" is higher than engineering, thus more women I suppose.

medicine,

particularly the more caretaking functions of medicine

accounting

The work of an accountant and a mechanical engineer, or an information security analyst are hardly comparable, not in a hierarchical way necessarily, they just have totally different goals and methods.

Look at the actual data, it fits Damore's thesis to a T. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

There is a very obvious gradient from people and nurturing oriented fields to abstract, spatial, and mechanical fields.

Women like working with people and caretaking, and are good at these things.

Men like working with things, and abstract and spatial visualization, and are good at these things.

Do you think society would materially improve if we swapped the sex ratio kindergarten teachers with that of engineers?

Kindergarten 97.5% women.

Engineers 85% men.

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?

Will they? What if women stay in their roles longer than men? Then, you would less often be replacing women.

If men more often apply to new jobs, that could explain why the candidate ratio is more skewed than the ratio of actual workers.

As time has passed and I've encountered more people from all walks of life, I have started to see that for some people, it is _really_ important to see someone "like them" in a role they never thought they could fill.

Apologies then, I am not trying to focus on a line. It is constant effort to seek, identify and pursue opportunities. I agree that "Outcome vs opportunity" is a nuanced topic and one that will take forever if we try to draw lines.

> It's never easy, we're never at "outcome", we're always at "opportunity", hire some damn women.

Agreed. But "hire some damn women" is the very thing she set out to do and then realized that it is much easier said than done when you don't have many women applying.

I've only worked one job in science, I wouldn't describe the 400 or so people as "normal" as a population: geeky and nerdy, weird a wide variance, but not what I'd expect 999/1000 to be enamoured with.

Perhaps the lack of social skills, and friends, of a good portion of that population (myself included) was an aberration and didn't represent people who prosper in STEM roles in general.