
Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers - legostormtroopr
https://www.10degrees.uk/blog/why-we-dont-employ-female-developers/
======
DoreenMichele
_Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers_

I will suggest that at least part of why no woman has ever applied is because
your messaging sucks. This title is a terrible title that conveys that you
choose to exclude women. This may not have been your intention, but that is
what it signals. It sounds like you exclude them intentionally and you wrote
this piece to justify it.

If you meant "We currently don't have a single female developer and we would
like to see this change," well, you should have titled it that way.

People make decisions based as much on subtext, context, etc as on overt
messaging. This is a UK company, but it sounds to my ear like it was written
by someone who speaks English as a second language and doesn't grasp subtle
differences that native speakers should grasp. I have no idea why that is.

But this article is rife with problematic language that suggests you don't
want women developers and you feel entitled to exclude them. This is likely
(at least part of) the reason not a single female developer has ever applied.

~~~
Y_Y
The title is meant to be provocative clickbait. Most women I know will have
the ability to choose jobs without being put off by "messaging" just as well
as anyone else.

~~~
r00fus
Why would a woman subject themselves to a potentially hostile workplace when
tons of other options abound?

This piece is a complete own-goal.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
If they have no women employees now, that might be enough to scare away a
female candidates in itself. I didn't read anything hostile in the post
itself, it seems to be more like "this is bad, how can we do better at this?"
not "we are proud we have no women employees".

~~~
JeanMarcS
The post have been written by a women, which happens to be employed there.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Yes:

> We don’t employ any female website developers at 10 Degrees. There’s one
> very simple reason for that: we’ve never had any women apply for our
> developer vacancies. Not one.

Not everyone who works for a company is necessarily a developer. The author is
the company's business manager according to
[https://www.10degrees.uk/about/](https://www.10degrees.uk/about/).

I guess I should have qualified as developer instead of employee, sorry about
that.

------
gowld
> But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman. We
> want the best people on our team, regardless of their gender.

Does not follow.

They shouldn't _hire_ someone because of their gender. But they might be
missing women from their pipeline because they aren't recruiting where women
are looking for jobs.

Particularly, since this is apparently a small company, they might succeed in
building a well-balanced team because they only need to find a few qualified
women, compared to a larger organization that might need to hire hundreds of
women to create an environment where there are enough women to prevent a
"locker-room" atmosphere.

More likely, since they only have 3-4 developers on staff, they just don't
have enough hiring to get women anyway, so there's not much point to the
clickbaity title to an article that isn't actually about their hiring.

~~~
whoisjuan
I think what the author of the article meant to say was "hire" not "recruit".
In that case, that line is absolutely valid.

~~~
pmyteh
Yes. This use of the word 'recruit' is a Britishism. We rarely say 'hire' for
jobs, especially permanent ones.

------
boyter
It’s doubly hard when you are outside the “tech” hotspots. Any competent
female is usually snapped up by the larger players often with relocation costs
and a salary that is impossible to match. So long as ther is a minority of
females in the industry this is going to be an issue.

I must confess in some ways to being jealous of the attention that females get
in the industry. It worries me because I would like there to be as many camps
and the like aimed at all children including my son and not just girls.
Hopefully in time the gender imbalance will be corrected. People will probable
hate me for saying that but I have a feeling I’m not alone in feeling like
this.

~~~
everdev
You're right, it's not as easy as it seems. If the most qualified person is
not the most diverse from your current culture, there can certainly be a tough
decision of feeling like you are choosing between a good diverse candidate or
a great homogeneous candidate.

Most companies want diversity and performance, but unfortunately that perfect
candidate might not always apply for your job.

I can understand both perspectives of wanting to give extra incentive to
hiring a diverse candidate to create a diverse culture, but also feeling like
being born similar to those already at the company might put you at a
disadvantage or make you feel like "one of many" rather than a "unique
perspective".

------
titzer
(elsewhere in the thread)

Why do people jump to the conclusion that "specifically recruiting women" =
"lowering standards". It is actually a logical fallacy.

Suppose you wanted turkeys at least 10kg in weight. Suppose that there are
only wild turkeys, either white or gray, with a 90/10 population white/gray.

Well, since you need to find and catch turkeys, it turns out that catching
white turkeys is easier just because they are easier to see! So you end up
with 10 big fat white turkeys and no gray turkeys at all. Are gray turkeys
slimmer on average? Worse? Different distribution? No. They are just harder to
find.

After a while, all the big fat white turkeys are gone, because everyone is
grabbing them up.

But hey there's whole population of big fat gray turkeys that you _can't even
see_.

This is why it is rational to specifically recruit women.

Even from a purely self-interested point of view, it's an untapped market.
It'd be stupid not to recruit women. In fact, not hiring women would mean that
you eventually have to lower your standards _for men_.

~~~
sparkie
You're introducing a logical fallacy here too, by arguing that "all white
turkeys are gone," which is absolutely not the case for hiring male
developers.

If your hiring pipeline is working, and you're successfully hiring qualified,
capable candidates who all happen to be male, there would be absolutely no
reason for you to change your practices which may result in you _not_ finding
the competent developers you need.

It is lowering standards if you have to transition from a working recruitment
process to one which may not work, but ticks a diversity box.

On the other hand, there's the possibility that by trying to recruit women
specifically, that their hiring process could improve. But who is going to
take such a risk when they've already got a working process, and no solid
argument that changing it will bring in better workers.

~~~
titzer
> You're introducing a logical fallacy here too, by arguing that "all white
> turkeys are gone," which is absolutely not the case for hiring male
> developers.

I'm not arguing that either, but even if I was, it wouldn't be a logical
fallacy as much as it would be an empirically testable fact, and if I was
wrong it would be a factual error, not a logical fallacy.

> It is lowering standards if you have to transition from a working
> recruitment process to one which may not work, but ticks a diversity box.

I don't see how that lowers standards, it might just be ineffective. The
salient point being that lowering standards is about standards (i.e. "fatness
of turkeys"), not how many people you hire (number of turkeys).

Now if you want to argue about whether specifically recruiting women would be
_effective_, that's a different conversation, but my OP stands on logical
grounds.

------
lnsru
I remember math lectures from my studies. There were ~400 students and <10
females among them. Good luck hiring female engineers, if you find one.

~~~
watwut
That is odd ratio for math where did you study? It sounds even worst then CS
gender ratio, which is super odd.

Then again, math is not development and they have little in common. (Speaking
as female developer who always liked math.)

~~~
lnsru
Electrical engineering in Germany 15 years ago.

------
everdev
I imagine there might be some circular hiring here too where if the founders
are if similar cultural backgrounds, they might know people or groups that
share a similar identity and reach out there when looking to hire. A
homogeneous company is easy to achieve when it's small and growing fast if the
initial hires aren't in connection with a diverse group that is signed with
their business needs.

Similarly, if I'm evaluating a company and meet a group of ten people that
seem like they have a lot in common with each other but less with me, I might
see that as an opportunity to be unique or I might see that as isolating which
could perpetuate the current homogeneous hiring.

------
southphillyman
Source with visas if need be. The majority of female engineers I've worked
with have been from China, India, and Eastern Europe. For whatever reason
women from those areas seem to be represented much more in engineering.

~~~
whack
It seems to be a causal effect, and not just a random coincidence.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-
more...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-
equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/)

 _" In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and
science professions.

it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender
inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom.
And often, that path leads through stem professions.

The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for stem professions. In
looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found
that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most
countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of
college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all
except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was
reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at
science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all
countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent
of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the
percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more
gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global
Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science
as their best subject."_

~~~
watwut
In Easter Europe, there is much less expectation that women is naturally lazy
useless housewife. There is much less tradition of the "women are supposed to
be naturally at home and do nothing whole day otherwise there is something
wrong with them" I see repeated surprisingly often by Americans. There were no
culture wars around women working in 1960. In Easter Europe majority of women
(except very small aristocracy) always did useful things and worked whole day
(same as men) - the place could not afford half population do nothing.

Importantly, pay gap between genders is bigger then in America. So much for
women being attracted to money more due to desperation.

However, jobs are gender segregated a lot, probably much more. Tech is boy
thing, clearly and openly. It is mostly that different things get qualified as
"boyish tech" \- for instance economics is mostly girly and seen as office
administration job. Math is also much less likely to be perceived as "male
thing". The attitude that girls don't have what it takes to learn math exists,
but is less pronounced. I have heard it first time as adult, although I knew
it would be weird for me to do something with physical technology. And I heard
it most often from christian circles influenced by Evangelicals, for other
people the stereotype was news.

There is a lot of push for boys to go to stem, including to tech occupations
that don't earn much.

Edit: it is very odd to put reading and science into opposite. As if you would
be interested in one and not in the other. There is not subject "science" in
school either.

------
dogas
This is a clickbait-y headline for the wrong reasons. I applaud their effort
for recognizing the problem, but if they are truly interested in hiring female
developers then they need to work harder. Either 1) do outbound recruiting and
sourcing or 2) open a junior role.

We have a Junior engineer opening at ConvertKit, and have had well over 100
extremely high quality candidates, over half of which are female.

It's not enough to just lay out your "we're hiring" sign and expect your
team's diversity to magically increase. Get proactive with outbound or hire a
hungry, ambitious Jr engineer.

------
austincheney
> Girls have the ability to be really good coders, they’re choosing not to.

This has got to be a tech hub problem of places like London and silicon
valley. Maybe it is a start up problem.

In my years as a corporate developer in Texas women have been about 30-40% of
the population at all skill levels. Women certainly haven't been the majority,
but that doesn't mean women developers have been mysterious unicorns either.

What I have noticed is that the more experienced (old) the developer
population gets in the corporate world, by average team member age, the less
sex stratified it becomes.

------
doggydogs94
A few years ago I took a Configuring Network Firewall class. The instructor
mentioned that he has never once had a female student for the class.

------
oliwarner
Clickbait aside, they say they don't go out of their way to hire female
developers. Ie, they don't positively discriminate; make diversity hires.

A couple of comments here have mentioned that perhaps women don't apply to be
in a small, all-male team _because_ it's all male. And that by extension,
diversity (in gender and race) might have its own value for attracting the
very best developers, even if those that you hire to get there aren't the best
candidates amongst their interview peers.

(I get that there are _other_ values in diverse teams, that's not what I'm
focussing on here though. I'm talking about attracting future hires.)

Part of that makes sense to me. Does anybody know if there's any data backing
it up? Do pure diversity hires make for more attractive work environments for
future candidates?

------
eljimmy
I read the article and obviously it describes in detail why they have no
females developers employed, but... considering how many people don't RTFA
these days, they really should have chosen a different headline. At least from
a PR perspective.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I get the sense they wanted a shocking headline to draw attention. I take it
as a shrewd move to hook people with their outrage-instinct and then get them
to read 4 pages of non-controversial stuff.

~~~
chamilto
That is exactly what it is. I'm really surprised other folks aren't able to
sense this.

------
shruubi
The title of this article is terrible, and gives off the wrong impression
right off the bat. However, this could also come down to a regional dialect
issue, as people from my region could just as easily read that title and see
"why we don't have female developers on staff" rather than "why we don't hire
female developers".

~~~
sparkie
The title was worded this way deliberately to bring attention to the issue.
It's unfortunate that it gets a barrage of downvotes before people even click
and read it.

~~~
Bertio
It's not unfortunate; click bait has reached a point where it achieves the
opposite of its desired effect. It's getting the treatment it deserves.

------
folz
What a flamebait title. Sure, don't hire someone just because they're a woman.
Consider each candidate based on their merits. Etc, etc. But if you look at
your hiring funnel and it's entirely men, something needs to change. Hard to
consider the merit of women engineers if you don't have any women whose merit
you can consider.

------
gavanwoolery
> But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman

At least here in the US, it is actually illegal to either prefer females or
discriminate against males in the hiring process (or vice versa), unless the
sex is part of the role in question (i.e. hiring a person to play a female in
a movie).

------
legostormtroopr
Why is this submission flagged? I would have thought an article from a small
software shop of their hiring practices would be on-topic?

~~~
sparkie
Because facts can upset some people.

------
gregknicholson
> We don’t employ any female website developers at 10 Degrees. There’s one
> very simple reason for that: we’ve never had any women apply for our
> developer vacancies. Not one.

> We know from industry networking that there are many female web developers
> out there

Maybe their job adverts are inadvertently radiating “nope” signals?

Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at all.
There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”, but that's only
gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes. (Men are disproportionately
conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy
and cheeky.)

So I suppose if this is how they do hiring, that would explain why they're
only getting men applying for their development jobs.

~~~
enord
>Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at
all. There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”, but that's
only gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes. (Men are disproportionately
conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy
and cheeky.)

I think I'm going to have to politely WTF? that, if you don't mind.

~~~
gregknicholson
I'm not sure which part you're WTFing, so I'll try to unpack my comment:

> Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at
> all.

I couldn't see a clear Careers page on their site, which I found slightly
surprising.

> There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”,

On the About page there is a message like this. Literally it says “Looking for
a new challenge? We are always on the lookout for likeminded individuals to
join our growing team. If you've got the talent to help our mission and you
share our values, please get in touch.”

That's a very general prompt for people who want a job to contact them. You
need quite a high bar of self-confidence to apply in response such a general
prompt.

> that's only gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes.

This is my cute nickname for people who believe they're great when in fact
they're merely OK, in reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect. These people do
have enough self-confidence to reply to the vague prompt. “Dudes” because I
believe these people are disproportionately male:

> (Men are disproportionately conditioned to be over-confident, because boys
> are rewarded for being noisy and cheeky.)

This is my opinion. In my 2nd-hand experience, young boys are generally
encouraged to be boisterous and even naughty, whereas young girls are expected
to be quieter and more shy.

Boys are more likely to be confident in their own abilities than girls, even
when the two have similar skill levels. This assertion comes from a small-
scale experiment in [a TV
show]([https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09202jz](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09202jz)),
which is not proper science, and it's reasonable to reject this assertion as
anecdote.

In any case, this is generalising and there are always counterexamples. But if
any of this holds somewhat true, it may explain how the asymmetry arose.

Hopefully that answered your WTF!

------
draw_down
You can't just sit around and wait for candidates to apply, you have to
actively source them.

~~~
rvo
Exactly. This is very troubling : "But we are not going to recruit someone
just because they are a woman."

How else do you expect to get gender parity? It should be important to
specifically source and hire women.

~~~
ben509
"How else do you expect to get gender parity?"

If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women
are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one
is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon
Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;)

I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed
as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to
do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-
hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made
the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor
work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could
make in a half a dozen related fields.

Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5
PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose
lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't
want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level
than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff.

Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job
doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.

