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

Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. By doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance. Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of the hiring loop:

"After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to"

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because "we have to". That's a problem.

Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a higher rate than they currently are doing.

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.

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".

Well, make me a multi-billionaire, I now present to you:

BLIND SOURCING AND HIRING

I should only share the details in private, you say it's a multi-billion dollar idea and I'd hate to tip off the competitors.

In all seriousness, though, I know this is challenging. Especially at Google, there's still an opportunity for trouble after you've been hired but not yet assigned; though I doubt it would be enough of a problem to trash the whole system.

The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

What I had in mind is the mandate of hiring the best person for the job and any/all other policies are designed with that directive in mind. This is analogous to how the court system is supposed to be designed to be the discoverer of truth and the entire legal process as it relates to court proceedings is to further that search for truth.

What would my suggestion in reality look like? Similar to a company I once worked for. They had an interview process where all candidates were interviewed by at least 5 individuals. This was required to be done separately in one-on-one 30 minute sessions. Each interviewer scores the candidate in a combination of numerical and written feedback which is presented to HR. HR is also required to be one of the interview sessions. HR is also the pre-screener of all resumes unless an internal employee has a recommendation. After that, it boils down to a consensus system where HR reviews the feedback from everyone and determines who has the highest overall rating. This obviously required specific traits and requirements to be detailed in advance prior to the interview that were specific to the position. Some obviously overlapped like "communication skills" and others were very specific to the individual role and required work history and experience.

They also used a very similar process for their performance evaluations (you first two line managers had significant weight in the performance review, but you had to also get feedback from no less than 5 other colleagues. And your manager had to approve who could provide feedback on you so you couldn't just choose your best friend at work who would write a glowing review. That process was super-annoying and time consuming, but I think it did a pretty solid job. I never felt like I was ever treated unfairly or got shafted in any way. And the reason HR played a key role in the process was to make sure the rules were being followed and if there was any discrimination or unconscious biases, it would show over time and HR could take action if they saw fit like restricting a possibly biased individual from interviewing anyone who fit into a certain category (women, racial minority, disabled, etc.).

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.

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.

Hope that clarifies my thoughts a bit.

EDIT: grammatical mistake.

Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise, it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even make technical arguments.

Once you're listening to real voices, it's difficult to pretend that the hiring is blind.

The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra worked really well because you could hide the person behind a screen and judge an entire work product without knowing anything about the instrumentalist.

Now, if most software jobs include a heavy remote work component some day, it might be more reasonable to throw a somewhat detailed spec at a candidate, have them code up a solution, then show the code (and only the code) to people evaluating the work product. But most devs don't have a day-to-day that looks like implementing textual programming problems for strangers.

Also, fwiw, that process sounds like it would be pretty good at filtering candidates to be good at the job, but broad categories like "communication skills" cover an awful lot of territory. Imagine someone from quite a different culture with wildly different (but effective within their culture) communication styles that people in your company thought was weird. That person would probably be barred from working and integrating into the corporate culture.

I'm not saying you guys are bad people, or that I would have the guts to make that call myself, but I just want to point out that process as a fig leaf for distilling conformity is just that.

What I have read is that the "hiring a lab manager" experiments actually only found an effect for candidates that were (a) mediocre and (b) identically qualified. For exceptional candidates, they did not find bias. If there was a clearly better candidate they did not find bias.

Furthermore, the most commonly cited study on this was hiring for a position in a Psychology department. A discipline that is majority female. Other studies have shown that grading tends to be biased towards the gender that is less well represented in a particular field.

And of course there's the Ceci-Williams study that showed a 2:1 advantage for women in STEM tenure track hiring.

I would have dropped a reference except I thought this was so well known it could easily be found. If not, start here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

Meanwhile, thanks for the downvotes on spec - maybe save your downvotes for when you have a bibliography, peeps.

I think you should be aware your words imply that you believe Google is doing quota based hiring or different hiring bars based on 'diversity'. You said, exactly quoted:

"This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. "

The first sentence talks about Google. The second sentence you talk about how "companies" should hire the best person, no exceptions. Implying you believe Google does not do that. Because even though they are separate sentences they are part of the same chain of thought. So the second sentence seems to apply to Google despite your use of "companies" (which includes Google, since Google is a company).

So just be aware, if you raise A then B, then people are, naturally led into thinking that A and B are related in your mind some way.

This is why you can't write a memo like the original anti-diversity one, you are conflating too many issues. You can't dispassionately discuss how to change the diversity programs to be more inclusive in the same thought body that says "effectively lowered the bar for diversity candidates". That signals to people that you think these two things are related. Given that he has been embraced by the alt-right, and he has encouraged that, it should be giving people a pretty clear sign that the original 'anti-diversity memo' wasn't actually argued in good faith.

Most companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

This will possibly result in less women being hired. See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

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.

Mostly likely it is because it doesn't mirror how they work. (Text chat is SoP for remote-first work, but remote-first is far from the norm.)

If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.

Because it goes against the results they wanted to arrive at.

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.

Use a voice scrambler.

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.

In comment after comment, the possibility that there is no bias is considered literally impossible. The blatant and unrecognized bias in this conversation is absolutely fascinating. (I also notice HN has introduced a throttle, presumably to reduce the volume of incorrect messages.)

http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html

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....

Belonging interventions can have a startlingly large impact this kind of failure mode.

Instilling "college is hard for people - they work hard, get help, and succeed" reframes difficulty from "I guess I don't belong here", affecting outcomes at scale. http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...

Two Brief Interventions to Mitigate a “Chilly Climate” Transform Women’s Experience, Relationships, and Achievement in Engineering http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494... is interesting - two different ways of improving outcomes, with very different secondary effects.

The many questions of belonging. (2017, book chapter) http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/4/4/494...

More on http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/research.html and http://gregorywalton-stanford.weebly.com/papers.html .

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

Those types of diversity are much bigger than the difference between male and female computer geeks, they would have a much bigger impact on product design and yet no one is scrambling to implement it.

I've always had a big problem with this often said bit. It's basically revenge. You're saying "people X were disadvantaged by people Y a long time ago and you are decendants of Y so you should pay."

It's frankly crazy and I can't understand why there is still a small minority of people who actually believe this "revenge for your older generation's mistakes" madness.

> cultivating a culture that at least somewhat reflects your customer base

Bad point. Let's pretend that hiring people on a merit that they are like your customers is a good idea for a sec, then for a lot of tech companies whose customers are more likely white and male, we should hire tonnes of white males! It an invalid reason.

> 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.

We just established it's most often not true? And any sources for this customer-employee-demographic-matching hypothesis you're claiming is "true"?

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.

They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

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?

The second study only look at half the population, only during the first year of college, and the result they measure were GPA. Those are severe limitations if we are looking for a general solution to a problem that both genders suffer from. That said, social-belonging intervention in education seems useful in particular since bullying is still a major issue at all levels of education, and stress management also seems useful in a place where stress is creeping down the ages.

Thanks for the book. The summery was in particular a good read, highlighting both success and failures in prescribed solutions. If there is a one failure mode of physiological experiments that often seems ignored, it is the effect of false hope and empty charades. The recentness of the cited references implies there is a lot of more work to be done in the field in finding general solutions.

It seemed to me that the natural conclusion was that woman have lower confidence and thus performed worse at interviews.

And this is a deep realization for me, because it pushes me in the direction of current diversity policies. You see, if there is perceived bias against you, then you lose confidence. So we must, for a while, try our best to remove that perfection. That might mean hiring more woman even if they don't seem to perform as well as men, because, once we have done that for a while, woman will feel more confident and the good candidates will appear.

In any case - whether my last paragraph makes sense or not - the conclusion of the experiment interviewing.io did is that only removing gender perception during the interview process isn't enough, for woman may already have been affected by the bias and thus will perform worse than men during the interview.

So we come back to the conclusion that we must invest to bring woman to tech early - during college or even high school - and fight biases there.

It's a long road anyway, isn't it?

And even there they had to put carpet down / remove shoes to hide the difference in shoe sounds when they walked to the performance area.

https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

"the telltale sounds of a woman's shoes allegedly influenced some jury members such that aspiring musicians were instructed to remove their footwear"

That said, it's not super hard core militant censorship, there's plenty of other people saying politically incorrect things in today's discussion as well, so my censorship may have been due to "not adding to the discussion in a meaningful way", rather than my particular point of view. Hopefully there's an appeal mechanism for when I decide to straighten up my act, I'm working on it.

But as they say, freedom of speech does not require someone to provide you a stage to speak on, and private companies are free to censor whatever speech they see fit.

In general, your arguments here are so facile as to make any attempt to respond equally as absurd. If you're genuinely interested in the topic, I'd suggest you research further vs launching into fallacious reductio ad absurdum-style arguments on comment threads.

It might be depth within a certain timeframe then. I've noticed similar delays previously in non-controversial topics when trying to reply to non-controversial comments.

I don't think there's anything sinister going on here, there's just a mechanism in the comments to prevent people from speaking past each other in quick succession.

Edit: For reference, this comment took 9 minutes before a reply link appeared, and it is the 9th child of a top-level comment. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Try replying to this comment and timing how long it takes before a reply link appears - my guess is 10 minutes.

An alternative explanation is the universe was punishing me for being a dick, which wouldn't be that unrighteous.

So that wouldn't solve matters.

a) switch to outright discrimination in hiring

b) like it

I submit this would not be an improvement.

She wrote appeals to the committee. Quote:

> to make cases for cross-functional candidates who would be great assets to Google, even though a (typically) male dominated software engineering interview crew did not find these candidates up to snuff.

It worked, too:

> I had a 90+% success rate changing the hiring decision for these candidates.

Given that appeals exist and managers writing support for a particular candidate having such a success rate does mean that (what we all sort-of knew already) Google's hiring process is nowhere near as "clean" as advertised.

I read other places that the initial reaction to the diversity problem consisted of having the committees work without knowing names, ethnicities and/or genders and this actually made the problem worse, not better.