
Duolingo achieved a 50% female ratio of new engineering college graduate hires - mgiannopoulos
https://twitter.com/LuisvonAhn/status/1050425977925459969?s=20
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throwawaygender
> We achieved a 50% ratio not by lowering our standards or by discriminating
> against men

To use a oversimplified model, assume everyone can be perfectly linearly
ranked.

The gender ratio is skewed towards men at the top purely due to pipeline
reasons (because college grads are nowhere close to 50/50).

Set a threshold to call your "standards" (say top 10 if you have budget for
hiring 10 people).

If the top 10 are 7 men and 3 women, then you must give up on 2 of the men to
fill it with 2 women from _below_ the top 10.

Do you call this "not lowering standards"?

(I have no problem with lowering the bar to achieve better gender ratios
because of long term social/game theoretical reasons. I just pedantically
don't like lying to ourselves about not lowering the bar)

~~~
jkells
You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to
interview 100 people, interview 150.

It's not about lowering the bar it's about making the extra investment to
achieve diversity. It's worth it.

~~~
seppel
> You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to
> interview 100 people, interview 150.

Then you are not in the "lowering the standards" part but in the
"discriminating against men" part.

You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50 gender ratio without looking
at the gender (Edit: When considering that all are all above the hiring bar).

~~~
talltimtom
“You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50”

Yes you can. As long as you are not hirering more than 60% of the Total
available workforce.

~~~
seppel
My sentence did not end at the point. You cannot change the ratio without
specifically looking at the gender, that is, specifically hire more of one
group (because of their gender) and less of the other group (because of their
gender).

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jimmies
Very smart people can believe in and say very not-so-smart things. To make the
output equal when the input isn't, you're skewing other factors.

I remember watching a video about communism the other day that talks about
equality. When trying to make everyone's pay "equal" while each person works a
different number of hours, what ends up happening is that you don't pay equal
hourly rates. If you pay everyone one equal hourly rate, then you can't make
the total pay equal. It's important to see what factor we want to make equal
for everyone.

Here he makes an elementary mistake when the input ratio probably isn't equal
and somehow magically the output ratio is equal. What could possibly go wrong?

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auganov
Probably just figured out it's a great way to pay slightly less for the same
quality people. It's smart.

Recently found out the real reason everybody has these unlimited vacation
policies - don't have to pay for unused vacation time.

It's better to come across as hypocritical but well-meaning than to have the
real intentions revealed.

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mgiannopoulos
A more thorough explanation on what exactly they did
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-duolingo-
achieved-5050-ge...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-duolingo-
achieved-5050-gender-ratio-new-software-engineer-sohn)

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O_H_E
Does that mean one more woman, and there will be a discrimination problem
against men?

~~~
mgiannopoulos
I don’t think this is how discrimination works.

