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.)

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?

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".