
Ask HN: Is it ok to make a list of female software devs available for hire? - Riphyak
Hey, could you please advice — we are making lists of developers available for hire by tech stack and other params, but is it good to make a special page for female developers?<p>From one side it looks like a good thing — all these movements for Women in Tech and other organisations, but from the other side... I don&#x27;t know  ️
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sevilo
Sorry to say, but even though as a woman I technically benefit from things
like this, this is yet another form of sexism. I want to be hired and reached
out by companies because they value my skills and experience, not because I
lack a certain genital so their company can show off at some diversity
reports.

If you want to bring your team to more balance in diversity, try letting more
people with diverse backgrounds to do the interviews when hiring. This is one
thing I don’t see nearly enough in companies, then they wonder why they don’t
get any successful minority hires.

~~~
p0d
I wonder how you feel about taxi firms who focus on female drivers or
construction firms with female only employees? Would you also see this as
sexist?

~~~
sevilo
Depends, for taxi drivers, it's a job that directly involves customer service,
and many female clients may feel more safe riding alone if the driver is
female. So if that's the problem they're hoping to solve by focusing on hiring
female drivers then I don't think it's sexist.

But for construction and software, I don't see what this practice is trying to
gain besides waving around the industry telling everyone they have diversity,
when they're treating female employees as victory tokens instead of valued
workers.

In general I feel the whole diversity practice recently is missing a huge
point of the movement in the first place -- to not discriminate, and let
everyone have a fair chance based on their abilities. How it has played out
has just been discrimination in a different way. When companies do shit like
this, minority groups feel their credits are being disregarded, and non-
minority groups feel the other side have it easy by pulling a gender or race
card, then they proceed to disregard minority group's ability when they're
hired. Nobody is winning.

I've had more than one male friends that told me "You're a girl, you'll get
hired even when you don't do so well at the interview", and who do you think
are to blame?

~~~
p0d
Thanks. I like your point how some diversity practice can be counter
productive. I often observe incidents were people become more polarised in the
name of diversity. Back to front really.

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program_whiz
I see the impulse here, an attempt to correct historic discrimination through
proactive action. There are a couple of problems here:

1\. If you inverted this equation, it would be pretty bad (can I create a list
of "white male" engineers to hire). Do we have a rational reason why we should
be discriminating against certain groups and not others?

2\. You are hiring based on gender, rather than purely on skills. This has the
chance to make teams function less well, if they believe someone was hired not
due to merit, but merely on gender. This could also make the person hired feel
unworthy if they think it was only due to gender. In the worst case this could
make team / company performance worse. Only a company who can spare efficiency
could use this policy. The best would be to take the best possible candidates,
some of whom are bound to be female (unless you presume there are no qualified
female engineers).

3\. Historically programming and computer field was dominated by women, we
don't fully understand the reason for the shift, so fixing things at the
endpoint (hiring) may or may not be "fixing" the root of the problem (possibly
education bias?). If you can't explain why the situation is as it is, then
you're just changing random lines of code and hoping that each "commit" will
fix the bug, even though you have no idea why its broken.

4\. Every situation humans find themselves in is the result of an unbroken
chain of historic conditions, but attempting to correct for it usually creates
more problems due to arbitrary decisions, which fail to account for all those
causes, and which result in unforseen future consequences. The best policy
given that you don't know anything about those circumstances is meritocracy
(just hire the best). This allows those who were disadvantaged to eventually
come to equal footing (we take our foot off the gas of arbitrary
discrimination), but also means that we aren't making things worse due to
ignorance (e.g. the daughter of a wealthy engineer with admission to ivy
league tech program vs being "while male" the son of poor russian immigrants
with no education, being "woman" here isn't the disadvantaged state).

~~~
mywittyname
> The best would be to take the best possible candidates,

I find this idea to be pervasive and completely inaccurate.

The hiring process we all go through is flawed and can at _best_ say, "this
person is likely capable of doing the job as required" and sometimes they even
get that wrong! There's no way to accurately rank candidates by determining
Person A earned 943 Qualification Points and Person B earned 894. So you might
as well take the list of people you like, and hire from that based on other
qualities you want from your team.

Trying to achieve a balance of genders is important on a lot of teams. A
hospital might want to hire more male nurses because certain situations might
call be better handled by a male, i.e., lifting heavy patients or for patient
comfort during certain procedures. Thus, if you have a list of nurses you feel
are qualified, you may favor hiring male candidate if your team has a huge
gender imbalance.

Our field is no different, may you'd prefer to hire a female tech lead because
of an influx of female interns from the local college or because your
clients/customers have a female bias and hiring that candidate may provide
intangible benefits.

~~~
program_whiz
Yes, this is a good point. Hiring "the best" is more like a multi-variable
optimization problem. Pareto showed mathematically its very unlikely that
there is a single "best", instead there is a population of non-dominated
solutions that form the "Pareto frontier" which is a population of "less bad
than other" choices. One variable in that might be gender. But again, forming
a list of female engineers seems like its premature optimization on a single
axis.

The best approach in these cases is as I said on another comment, take your
top candidates, some are likely to be female and you can weight that dimension
fittingly (e.g. we have no women, its slightly more important than having just
any another C++ dev).

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pdub1
One word: Prejudice.

Sure, it can be done. But do they really need to be set apart that way?

You'd be saying "These people we judge to be good because they have <quality
they were born with>. They are different and better, and we appreciate them
more than other developers because of this."

All the SJW political BS aside, this is simply prejudice.

Can you not imagine that it would feel uncomfortable to them-- they'll be
pedestalized. And they'll be wondering why only they are on the pedestal, not
others. Why they were singled out.

Only because of (recently trendy identity politics-motivated recognition of)
<skin color/gender/etc.> not because they're a good engineer?

Do you really think that's what they want:

to be valued because of how they were born?

to be valued because of something that is not in their control, versus the
skills the worked so hard to build and be recognized for?

And you think they want recognition as part of a certain grievance group,
which only recently became "fad" political norm?

I wouldn't operate a business based on ideological fads or movements such as
identity politics. (Nor would I work with one as an employee or customer of
such a business-- I would avoid them because of their politically-possessed
animus which could impact business).

That just sounds like bad business sense. And it sounds like you're OK with
representing your company as a company captured, possessed, and influenced by
ideological trends (which vary over time and space-- making political
movements & political ideology a terrible thing to base business policy on).

~~~
fzeroracer
Both of those already exist. There are coding groups and pages for black
software engineers as well as outreach programs for the handicapped. The point
is that historically various kinds of people are underrepresented in
companies. More exposure seeks to help reduce that gap and mind you, this is
not discrimination. People are conflating hiring practices with exposure.

As an aside, you're engaging in identity politics right now.

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KhalPanda
I don't see the importance in making a distinction. I can think of a very
limited number of reasons a company would _specifically_ want to hire female
devs? Why not hire the person best-suited regardless of gender?

...maybe I'm missing the point.

~~~
Riphyak
Well, the idea is pretty similar to that behind "Women in Tech". Women have
long been discriminated in the workplace - and they still are (take the wage
gap). A pro-active effort must be made to bring the balance.

Does this make sense?

~~~
KhalPanda
It does make sense.

How does a curated list of women in tech available for hire help solve that?
Won't both companies that pay and treat women fairly in line with men already
be hiring them... and women already be choosing to work for them?

I think a gender-specific list of people available for hire isn't conducive to
the actual goal. We need a way to change the culture of bigoted companies.

I agree a pro-active effort makes sense... just the question is: By doing
what?

(Not trying to be difficult).

~~~
Riphyak
Yes, but how about the remote developers?

~~~
KhalPanda
I see the sense in curated lists of remote developers, if that's what you're
asking?

\- Some companies are 100% remote

\- Companies in unfavourable locations may want to expand the talent pool they
can hire from

\- Timezone coverage (on-call, support, etc)

\- etc

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kolinko
Isn’t this illegal? You are not allowed to discriminate by gender.

On the other hand, you can promote your postings through women-targeted
meetups (women in tech, geek girls carrots).

~~~
JoeAltmaier
No affirmative action is not 'illegal'. Nobody is being hired by just making
the list. Its a recruiting effort, right?

Now, if a company said "We're only hiring from this list" then that's a
problem.

~~~
Riphyak
Ehh... Never thought about it from this perspective. Thanks for bringing
attention to the legal aspect.

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ttronicm
If the list is a source for recruiting, I don't see it as being all that
different from recruiting from a predominantly female college. No one says
that's a bad thing.

Here's a real-world situation from a previous job of mine: We hired heavily
from a local college. Hiring there became a habit as the candidates we got
were qualified and well suited for the jobs available. As it turns out, that
school is VERY white. We were always hiring "the best candidate", we just
weren't hiring from a big enough pool for that to be sufficient to create
diversity.

A lack of diversity is a business problem with negative business impact. I'm
not going to defend that; that there a people who can't imagine why diversity
is a business advantage boggles my mind.

It's a hard problem to solve. Please keep working at it.

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midnightmonster
I have no info on whether using such a list is legal, but it could be helpful
and (as a white male) I'm not offended.

A small software team I know of ran a job ad on stack overflow with over a
hundred applicants completing a preliminary ~8 question typeform-powered
questionnaire. Not a single woman among them.

You could say that there was something about the job posting or the
questionnaire that didn't speak to or even alienated women, and you might well
be right, but if you're that team and you'd like to have a decent chance of
hiring women, just hearing "hey, you're doing it wrong" isn't as helpful as
having someplace specific to look for candidates.

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sterkekoffie
As someone firmly on the "women in tech side", this is an awful method of
attack. Gender should be a consideration but it should truly be (one of) the
last one(s), way after skills, work history, personality, etc. Measures like
this are dehumanizing and useless, and more importantly they provide fodder
for actual sexists with which to undermine their female colleagues.

Affirmative action can work when it's considerate and sensitive and humane--
which sounds like the polar opposite of everything you're trying to do here.

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muzani
Statistically, hiring minorities who are being underpaid is the most cost
effective decision. If market pay for job X is $M, and a woman makes 11% less,
therefore, hiring women at $M will result in 11% higher quality.

Ideally, I'd fill a team with women and other underpaid minorities. Add in
some old people and you've got a hell of a team.

Plus with a team of minorities, it's easy to get underestimated by the
competition. "Oh look that team is full of old ladies who code in PHP!"

~~~
codyb
Jeez, I understand the business logic but that’s pretty brutal.

Ideally instead of perpetuating and banking on women and minorities being paid
less, you could, I dunno, pay them a fair wage for their labor.

~~~
muzani
I meant paying them the fair market rate and getting more than you would from
the market. You can choose to pay double market rate and you'd get 2.2x the
quality instead of 2x with a non minority.

I was being a little facetious, though.

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buboard
I dont see a problem with it. You are providing a pragmatic solution to a
problem: HR people wanting to build "artificial diversity" will find your
lists useful. Of course, as a side casualty, some others will use it to select
on standards like beauty. No good thing comes without drawbacks.

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maxehmookau
Dunno. Let me ask some men for their thoughts.

~~~
vova_sanin
Haha, this is gold

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vanadium
Aside from the others who’ve chimed in with great points to consider, I would
research blind hiring techniques instead.

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Bostonian
My understanding is that you can make a list of female developers and contact
them to ensure that there are women in your hiring pool, but you cannot rely
exclusively on that list to find candidates because that would amount to
excluding men from consideration.

~~~
malandrew
Relying on such a list also gives members of that list many more opportunities
allowing them to get more practice with interviews and more offers.

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rvz
For the sake of maintaining an equal hiring playing-field (Which is by law in
most countries in the western world), It also makes sense to put up pages
about devs that are males and other minoritity only hiring pages. But that's
if you decide to do such a thing. If it were up to me, I would list developers
only by the competence of their technical knowledge and stack choice or
whatever it is and nothing else. Which is already equal and fair enough.

So to answer your question:

> Is it good to make a special page for female developers?

If you support double-standards based on one's sex then yes.

If not, do not bother.

~~~
Riphyak
Thanks rvz!

The simple answer is that this matters to many people: e.g. a company wants to
get closer to a gender balance in their workforce. Also, only 14% of
engineering jobs in teh US are currently occupied by women:
[https://insights.dice.com/2018/01/12/relatively-few-women-
en...](https://insights.dice.com/2018/01/12/relatively-few-women-engineering-
computer-science/)

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vova_sanin
Hey, guys, let's check ourselves right in this thread.

Do we really have just one female participant in the discussion?

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ManlyBread
No, sex discrimination is a bad thing.

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perfunctory
Did you try to poll the female developers themselves? What do they think about
the idea?

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Raphmedia
Make a list and allow filtering. Don't make a separate list.

