
How Lever (YC S12) Got to 50–50 Women and Men - tzar
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/how-lever-got-to-50-50-between-women-men-b8db05b7d3ee#.awqqsfns7
======
Archio
I liked all of the steps taken except this one:

>They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not
rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict
averse.

I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and
advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace
and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural
pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down
the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't
good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep
things equal".

~~~
dongslol
On engineering teams you don't want constant negotiation. The psychological
chess that people play when they negotiate salary doesn't yield a better
product. What you want is people collaborating dispassionately to always
choose the best possible option --- the most physically effective, the most
beautiful, the most platonically ideal (whatever that means), etc. Truth isn't
negotiated. Likewise for the example below, programming languages. A language
should be chosen based on technical factors. Defending your opinion should
mean presenting a compelling (true) argument, not somehow coercing your
teammates to your view.

I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting
where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition
of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these
"conflict-averse" women would be too.

~~~
withdavidli
This is really framing negotiations as a conflict and emotional. It doesn't
have to be. There's plenty of data out there to make a data based case for a
certain salary. There can be a lot stress depending on an individuals
situation (currently no job, first job, new role, etc). For the most part I
believe this stress during negotiations come from information asymmetry.
Educating oneself is the best way to deal with this.

I have never seen a highly emotional negotiation tactic work. Screaming /
demanding will more likely get an offer rescinded. Best negotiations I see
usually go "market pays X for Y, here's the data to prove it from multiple
sources", "competitor is paying X+Y%", "This job requires X% more time than
stated, I have done this before. Here is the proportional increase I should
get for the extra time."

The example with the competitor might seem as a one off. But market rate has a
range, and it changes. Whatever competitors offers will eventually become
market rate, if all else being equal (location, company prospects, coworkers,
etc).

------
redthrowaway
This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from
an outsider's perspective. Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves,
or brag about it?

There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than
your applicant pool:

1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular
immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which
case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible
for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.

2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable
characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations,
you made your company worse.

3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find
ones who are both excellent _and_ have the immutable characteristics of birth
you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company
worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending
yours building better products and connecting with your customers.

All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? _Maybe_ attracting investment
from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide
range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products
better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either
hired a worse team or wasted your time.

If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant
pool, you have broken hiring practices.

~~~
warcher
Everybody's hiring practices are pretty broken. As a white male engineer, I've
never really had any success even getting an interview with ordinary tech
companies out of engineering school. Had to start my own. Going ok, has been
for many years now, which leads me to think all those guys throwing my resume
in the trash may have some false negatives in their system somewhere.

I think there are objective benefits to fixing some of the weird culture in
tech, including but not limited to (at least) doubling the available talent
pool. And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes
for much more effective teams.

I'm not so stupid as to think there aren't costs associated with bringing
populations that _aren 't_ well represented in. There's gonna be catchup.
You're going to have to develop talent. It is going to take a while.
Engineering and entrepreneurship is absolutely a hard job, and most folks
aren't cut out for it, not really. So widening the net is going to take work.
And bigger, more established companies are probably better equipped to
shoulder more of that investment, but smaller, hungrier companies can ALSO
afford to take risks on talent that has potential, but isn't a 100% safe bet.

~~~
redthrowaway
>And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for
much more effective teams.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to
me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a
diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse
in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief
systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male
aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If
diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of
race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief
systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and
socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in
engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its
proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological
homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of
anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-
earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful
companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate
identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd
ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and
cohesion is actually _more_ correlated with engineering success than diversity
of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in
Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast
majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the
perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

~~~
warcher
I hate to go Godwin on you, but the Nazis also expelled a great number of
jewish scientists that turned around and developed the atomic bomb for the US.
So you have the V2 rocket on one hand and the atomic bomb on the other. I
think your anecdote is decisively on the side of diversity.

------
hal9000xp
This whole diversity stuff is complete trendy nonsense!

If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it
actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled
candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because
they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has.

In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they
praise mediocrity, not talent.

You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower
skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep
gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams
were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't
exist in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software
engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like
about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth,
most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies
where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good
as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of
their gender but because of their coding skills.

Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination.
Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody
cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender.
Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your
personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are!
It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and
companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical
interview challenges.

~~~
atroyn
As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires
explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made
that may be introducing bugs into your thought process:

\- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the
evaluation is completely objective

\- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people
dissimilar to themselves

\- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever
experienced any

\- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically
wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and
workplace is heavily male dominated

Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their
hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate
for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.

Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your
arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as
we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought
to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what
lever appears to be doing.

~~~
hal9000xp
I didn't make these assumptions at all.

I born in a small provincial town in a poor third world country. There was
literally no social support of doing programming because vast majority of
people had absolutely no idea what it is (in 90s). I was doing programming
completely alone!

To start coding you need: open a book, download compiler/interpreter, write a
code snippet from the book, run the code.

To start competing in algorithm competitions: register by entering your email,
read a problem statement, write a program, submit your program.

To start contributing to open source: download software, hack it, send a patch
to a mailing list.

That's it, no social interactions involved. Yet I still don't see much of
women among programming hobbyists.

I have no idea why women are not interested in CS. They just don't.

To any female feminist I prepared an answer - open a text editor, write a
code, run it, repeat.

And please, don't talk about discrimination, I was rejected many times based
on my lack of degree, lack of experience (when I just started), on my
citizenship (when I started looking for a job abroad), on my bad Engish and
many other reasons I don't know. And still, I managed to find a job in 4
countries with completely different cultures (UZ, RU, SE, NL).

P.S. I have different background and born in mixed family. You can't just fit
me into your typical western political classes - left, right.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You seem to be an example of "This is not the diversity we're looking for."

The age issue being another important point. How many over-50s does Lever
employ - of either gender?

To me, this looks like neoliberal boardroom feminism.

It's important to have the appearance of equality -

1\. In certain selected job markets only. 2\. As long as class-of-origin
privileges are never challenged or questioned. 3\. As long as the culture
remains reassuringly homogenised, so there's no genuinely challenging
diversity of cultural thought or opinion.

In younger startups it also seems to be very important that everyone appears
to be having extrovert fun while all this is going on. (What about
neurodiversity? Are introverts or Aspies not welcome?)

So when Lever says "poor cultural fit" isn't used as a reason for not hiring
someone, the reasonable response is to raise an eyebrow and look rather
unconvinced. The reality is more likely to be a different flavour of corporate
conformity.

Which is fine if that's what you want. But it's also fine not to want it, just
as it's fine not to accept unquestioningly that it's absolutely the best
possible kind of culture for everyone.

------
serge2k
> At a different company, he noticed that a team of white engineers from
> affluent backgrounds chose to delay shipping an Android version of the
> product because they believed they would make less money on the platform.
> But it turned out that Android users were far more engaged than iOS ones,
> and the group later regretted prioritizing the wrong platform.

Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell,
nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad
reasons to do it.

I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were
rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x?

> I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an
> engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a
> technical founder.

Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things?
Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the
engineering degree really have any bearing?

The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most
effective.

> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing
> responsibilities around the entire workforce

I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes?

> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that
> they would use the word “women.”

Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women
sounds awkwardly formal.

I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone
for people to look up to.

~~~
gozur88
>> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that
they would use the word “women.”

>Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women
sounds awkwardly formal.

I found that kind of odd. I would never have said the complement (calling it
opposite is weird) of "guys" is "girls". It's "gals".

People will look at you funny if you say "guys and women".

------
plinkplonk
Next step : equal ratios of men, women, transgender.

Then gay, straight, bi

Then equal ratios of every age band in a working age range

Then equal ratios of race: white, AA, Hispanic, Arab, ....

Then native language family. Surely the language you think in affects what you
can think of - so the more the merrier

Good Luck, Lever!

(I am deliberately not adding a /s tag, or denying the need for one)

~~~
Y_Y
Could you explain for the benefit of non-americans how Hispanics aren't white?

~~~
aphextron
>Could you explain for the benefit of non-americans how Hispanics aren't
white?

Being "White" in the US is as much cultural as it has to do with skin color.
Hispanics, even those of light complexion, tend to be a part of Latin culture
and thus do not consider themselves to be "white".

~~~
jbmorgado
It's not "Latin" culture, it's "Latino" culture.

"Latin" culture is what people have in Italy, Spain, Portugal and, to a
degree, France.

------
zxcvvcxz
I'm skeptical of the value of this, and I really wonder what their
shareholders think. Your mandate as a founder should be to recruit the _best_
people for the jobs you need, not reach some arbitrary split in
gender/age/race/whatever.

Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple
question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal
split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's
inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a
natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better
suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0].

Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing
shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative.

As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment.
I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the
future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question.

[0] - [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-
cit...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-city-where-
men-have-three-girlfriends-because-there-are-so-many-women-10484270.html)

------
Apocryphon
I think that, regardless of whatever moral or ideological viewpoints one may
hold, this should still be lauded as an interesting experiment in a situation
that's most definitely a minority case in this industry. People should just
accept this as an interesting case study and keep an open mind, regardless if
they think it will have positive or negative outcomes.

~~~
NotQuantum
I completely agree. Having more data points on whether or not a fully diverse
work place is more effective is great.

------
ladelfa
Thought this was all great until I got to their company photo. Guess diversity
at Lever doesn't apply to age. :-/

~~~
WildUtah
The staff photo versus America:

    
    
        100% under forty. (USA is 50% over 40)
        95% white and Asian.
        <5% Latino and black. (USA and Bay Area are >33%)
        <5% overweight and obese (USA is 40% overweight and obese)
        21% duckface (0% of USA finds duckface appealing)

~~~
user5994461
Organization with noone over 3X years old => They pay too poorly and/or have
terrible life balance to get any interest from experienced people.

------
nateps
Hi! I'm Nate, another one of the Lever founders here. Have any questions about
our efforts here? I'd be happy to respond.

~~~
thisnotmyacc
I have a question.

> For two years, Sarah Nahm was the only woman at Lever, the company she co-
> founded and now runs as CEO... has roughly 100 employees... has a roughly
> 50–50

In any company, the first X hires are likely doers - e.g. for different
companies, all software developers, all plumbers, all landscapers, all
accountants, all lawyers. Then the roles you hire for start to change. Lets
say hire say 5 is a sales person, 6 is an accountant, 7 a marketer. Then a
company starts to hire lower-skilled support staff like personal assistants /
people to answer phones, a gopher maybe, then say cleaners. These lower
skilled jobs are easily filled with either gender, but pay a lot less.

So my question, in a company with a female founder, and a proud 50-50 gender
ratio, this seems the best chance to hit pay parity, and I wonder, has that
happened? Is the ratio of pay $1-$1, or does Lever have the classic $0.77 on
the dollar pay gap?

~~~
lykron
You forgot an /s when you said the pay gap. If you didn't, then they pay gap
you refer to is a statistical figure that is observed when you compare every
worker across every profession across their entire career. The pay gap (as you
assert it) doesn't exist (nor is legal to have) at a company level.

~~~
richthegeek
I think it can exist at a company level. Sum the wages of all male employees
and compare to the sum for female employees.

The parent comment is basically asking "do you have men in higher-paid
positions (Software devs) and women in lower-paid positions (receptionists,
secretaries, etc)?"

------
muninn_
Women are incredibly valuable, but there isn't anything inherently "good"
about having an exactly even split M-F ratio. Is a company with 70% women and
30% men better than a 50%-50% split? What about the other way around? What
about mostly men but a few women?

The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry
have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need
more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good
paying jobs, so why don't we have more women?

Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on
getting women good jobs in general?

The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they
work?

The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only
answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are
clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than
men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only
the best jobs?

I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're
over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't
say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example
of something I "can't say" in our society.

I support women, but I support men too.

~~~
rayiner
Having been a programmer and a lawyer, I can't think of anything about the
respective jobs that is a good explanation for why my programming jobs were
10% women while my legal jobs have been 50% women. Even if we indulge
stereotypes about men versus women, programming is if anything more social,
collaborative, and cooperative while law is confrontational and adversarial.

So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into
medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only
woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.

And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of
women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most
programmers to score is like 40/60\. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40%
of programmers were women.

~~~
Archio
>Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of
programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of
men

Medicine or law used to fill rooms with men, but like most other fields, that
changed in the past few decades. The question is, what is the differentiator
with CS that has led to the severity of the current imbalance?

~~~
amyjess
So, Vox has an article where they go in depth about what's behind the wage gap
[0], and they ended up reaching an interesting observation about pharmacists:

> The wage gap for pharmacists has shrunk significantly because the profession
> has changed.

> In the 1970s, pharmacies were primarily independent and self-owned
> businesses. A single pharmacist might be responsible for keeping his or her
> shop open. The pharmacy would need to be open typical business hours; the
> owner would need to be available to do that.

> Now large chains own most pharmacies. And while you might get nostalgic for
> the mom-and-pop shops, you should know this change has been undeniably good
> for female pharmacists’ earnings.

> The majority of pharmacists are now women. And their wages have grown faster
> than those in _other_ professional roles, like lawyers or doctors.

> Bigger pharmacies hired more pharmacists, and customers essentially saw the
> workers as interchangeable. Most patients don’t care about seeing a
> particular pharmacist — they just want to make sure they get the right
> medication.

> This meant it wasn’t important to be around 9 am to 5 pm — a shift from 6 am
> to 2 pm would do the pharmacy just as much good. And nobody accrued higher
> hourly wages for working exceptionally long hours.

And speaking of doctors, the article has this to say:

> You see this shift happening elsewhere too. Primary care doctors, for
> example, have shifted away from running one-person practices to joining
> larger, multi-doctor offices. In these situations, doctors become more
> interchangeable: When I go to my medical practice in downtown Washington,
> DC, I usually just want a doctor who can solve my problem — and I care less
> about which doctor is doing that.

The short version is that the Walmartization of professions has resulted in
them becoming more amenable to women. If you want to correct the imbalance, a
lot of programmers who think of themselves as _auteurs_ are going to have to
accept moving to a shift work model where individual professionals are
interchangeable and might as well be anonymous. Startups are going to have to
suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work
more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for
rearing children (another thing the article points out: most child-rearing in
the US is performed by women, even when both parents work).

[0] [http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-
explain...](http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explained-
real)

~~~
wott
Hum... In my country, pharmacies are still independent and self-owned
businesses (it may be by law, so possibly 100%), but the profession has also
shifted from a majority of men to almost only women.

So, I have doubts about the reasoning displayed in this article.

~~~
robryan
Not sure what country you refer to. In Australia though a similar requirement
has become somewhat meaningless as the market is controlled by a few massive
franchises.

------
noobermin
100 is such a small N that 50-50 could just be rounding noise, I'd think.
That's why I'm glad that they care about such things, but it doesn't suggest
to me that they are truly unbiased in their selection process. The only thing
that makes sense to draw conclusions about wrt diversity are the make up of a)
large corporations b) university output and c) the distribution of groups
throughout start-ups as a whole. They might have beat the average, but without
more data, it really could be anything else other than what they posit they
did.

~~~
SuperImprobable
The 95% confidence interval would be about 40-60%.

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+in...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+interval&rawformassumption=%22FSelect%22+-%3E+%7B%7B%22BinomialInterval%22%7D%7D&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22c%22%7D+-%3E%220.95%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22n%22%7D+-%3E%22100%22&rawformassumption=%7B%22F%22,+%22BinomialInterval%22,+%22phat%22%7D+-%3E%220.5%22)

------
oh_sigh
What I'm really interested in is do they have a population proportionate ratio
of redheads to non redheads?

------
EduardoBautista
It would be interesting to know what the wages are.

------
diversary
While they encourage diversity, they have a pretty clear hiring profile for
candidates [http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81](http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81)

~~~
theparanoid
Namely as cheap as possible. Dan Lyons's "Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-
Bubble" is insightful.

