
10 steps to hire more women in tech - tomwinter
https://devskiller.com/steps-hire-more-women-tech/
======
turtleofdeath
Most of these are agreeable enough. "Unconscious bias training" seems like a
bit of a stretch, but I haven't taken it to know whether it's helpful. 2, 3,
4, 6 are fair, I'd say.

> 5\. Consider salary transparency

This is a double-edged sword. While good for some things, it is not without
cost. For instance, seeing a top performer's pay can be motivating for some
and demotivating to others. And others' performance isn't always immediately
clear so it may be that other workers don't see higher pay as 'just,' which
will cause them to devalue their own work because, "what's the point?"

To resolve this, you can flatten pay but then you remove the incentive to
perform well. You can separate people at different paygrades into different
physical locations, but now you're segregating performance groups while
harming overall open communication.

> 8\. Don’t force female coders behave like men to be successful

I'd say success is acting like a good coder -- regardless of gender -- just
like it says in the conclusion:

> “Overall, to become a female developer, you only have to do what any other
> smart dev would do. Spend weekends and late nights in front of your
> computer, laying down lines of code, debugging and developing your personal
> projects. Follow tutorials, read articles, and learn on the fly. Master the
> lingo. And, if you are curious enough to go deep down to the core of what
> you are trying to build, you will need to acquire a large and useful
> understanding of computer science. In a nutshell, spend time to learn all
> you can.”

I don't see a lot of places discussing the concept of trial hiring (i.e.
giving someone fair pay for actual work to skip the bias inherent in
interviewing and judging them based on some preset metrics). I feel like this
would get around the problems highlighted in this study:
[http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-
mas...](http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-
in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/). At my company, we use trial
hires and we have a lot more women involved as a result.

------
apricot13
> "involving women in the interview process"

THIS ^

Women can pick up the subtle 'creep factor' that some guys tend not to notice
both in women and in men. It will also help to see how they interact with the
team. 99% of the time it will be fine but it doesn't hurt to have them pop by
for five or ten minutes at the beginning! (I've had to work with several
people who would never have been hired had a woman been present in the
interview!)

------
HillaryBriss
how about just one step: make 80% of your company's job offers to women.
eventually you'll get close to parity.

simple.

~~~
slindz
If only it were that easy....

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009759)

~~~
HillaryBriss
i still think it _is_ that easy _if the top priority truly is a workforce that
resembles the general population_

if i tell you i have 10 billion dollars and a giant greenhouse and i'm going
to fill that greenhouse with orchids that represent the diversity of planet
earth's orchid population, and five years later, you look around the
greenhouse and notice it's 68 percent Vanilla planifolia, wouldn't it be fair
to question my commitment to fairly representing the diversity of the planet's
orchid population?

i must have other priorities. how else could i fail so miserably?

~~~
slindz
Is the greenhouse infinite in size? (ie. the economy)

Are flowers grown the primary metric of success? (ie. revenue generated)

Do the non-Vanilla plainfolia seeds on-average prefer different growing
conditions than the existing greenhouse conditions? (ie. working with people
instead of staring at a debugger for hours on end)

Are the Vanilla plainfolia seeds much easier to find (ie. students graduated
from college at an 80%+ clip)

Is the competition for non-Vanilla plainfolia seeds fierce (ie. many companies
have diversity programs)

\----

The productive suggestions surrounding diversity interests focus on increasing
the pipeline of seed varieties making it to the greenhouse and adjusting the
growing conditions as the way forward.

Arbitrarily throwing out as many seeds as you need to reach a 50/50 split
today ignores non-negotiable market realities. One of your competitors will
use what's leftover to grow more flowers than you with the aim of shutting
down your wing of the greenhouse.

Let's focus on discovering where we can find more seeds instead of discarding
the ones that we already have.

