Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas.
Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.
But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?
My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing.
It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's noticeable.
It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs to be corrected most in today's tech workplace.
Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them, either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.
What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit?
If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hiring," instead of the current "diversity-conscious" hiring? You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.
It worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in tech?
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....
I don't know if there are studies, but I absolutely know toxic and unfriendly environments exist. I don't know how you'd quantify the effect; if you made up some metric where you looked at how many women COULD be in tech, there's huge lost productivity, but that's not necessarily meaningful.
Even clearing the hiring hurdle is not nearly enough. Hiring someone who your culture treats like crap is not going to help you or them. If the person is actually very competent, but consistently treated as a newbie, their work will be sub-par and they will burn out and leave.
It turns out you need managers who can actually see people, how they interact, and manage them on a personal level. Set up mentoring for those who need it, put people who like to work alone tasks that can be handled alone, people who like to be on big teams on big teams, etc.
There's no way to exhaustively list the things you could do, and that's the point - it's a big, hard job that is a job, that I think SV too often wishes didn't exist.