
Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why - hudon
http://blog.alinelerner.com/diversity-quotas-suck-heres-why/
======
fipple
"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing
company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if
you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well.
Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that
any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of
Jobs' time he required. "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything" we have all
heard. Well, if you don't need a lot of ideas, but you need a streamlined
execution organization, diversity is a huge weakness!

For every fun example of "Oh, only a tattoo wearer would recognize that this
product wouldn't work for people with tattoos! Diversity would have halped!"
there are the Silicon Valley giants, achieving ridiculous financial results
with highly non-diverse teams.

~~~
batiudrami
It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are
corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good
because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal
opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked
in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it
is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more
easily than others.

Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A
truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before
this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a
friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.

~~~
belorn
If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or
law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity
implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple _" if a
government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the
population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it"_.

One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used
in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race
segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being
applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession
here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no
policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even
suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and
higher gender segregation.

To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a
profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a
random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere
where the ratio is worse than 60/40\. If affirmative action was only used to
address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.

------
manigandham
Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and
will instead create misery for all involved.

The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has
an opportunity if they _want_ it, then let people do what they desire. It may
not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is
that doesn't matter anyway.

~~~
themarkn
I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind
tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As
is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife
is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity
she brings to her team is invisible to most people.)

What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while,
of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance
institutional discrimination and measure our success. Of course arbitrary
targets sometimes lead to suboptimal outcomes in specific cases. But, in
aggregate, they are better than no measurement at all and I believe they do
improve things.

There are many forms of institutional discrimination that alter the candidate
pool before people even apply. Your blind process can be perfect but that's
the last link in the chain. Quotas are a blunt tool to force us to compensate
for unfairness that occurred _before our process_ for which _we are not
responsible_ in order to build stronger teams.

As such I believe quotas are a good thing, because institutional bias and
discrimination are bullshit and need to be eradicated. When they are, we can
drop the quotas. If we come up with anything better than quotas, we can drop
the quotas.

~~~
dnautics
I was going to write this as a throwaway but you know f it. I stand by my
stories.

> As such I believe quotas are a good thing

You don't address the article's claim that quotas make stereotype threat
worse.

This is a real, lived experience. In high school, I (an overrepresented
minority) failed to get in to MIT, and my best friend (an underrepresented
minority) got in, despite me looking better 'on paper'[0]. He chose not to go
even though I pled with him that it would be a better life choice. Not going
to MIT was disastrous because his college experience was bad, including an
unjustified arrest, and dropping out. Don't worry, it all worked out - he's
the CEO of a startup that's doing well now. I can't claim to know what was in
his mind in high school but a part of me thinks there was real stereotype
threat in play.

Second issue with quotas: In the case of Harvard with their overrepresented
minority, they usually reject based on soft qualities like "no leadership
potential". This really irks me, as my father in his government job was denied
promotion several times because of that exact phrase, "no leadership
potential". This is considerably ironic since for a brief stint he took a
sabbatical and went full-time with his job in the navy, as an O-6 (captain, as
in Picard, not America). During this year, the team he commanded completed the
US Navy's first ever fully databased inventory system, on time and under
budget, saving the navy billions of dollars. "no leadership potential" and
phrases of its ilk are basically cover for discrimination, as they can be so
easily issued even in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary.

[0] for example I had great scores in the AP sciences and a high-performing
science fair project that placed at the international level - which are
relevant skills for MIT.

~~~
themarkn
Thank you for this perspective. I’m not going to argue. It sounds like this
experience sucks mightily and I need to give it some thought.

~~~
dnautics
also consider Aline's anecdata that interviewing.io has a high rate of placing
underrepresented individuals into employment, without a quota system.

------
toomanybeersies
What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we
have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming
workforce is female.

That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a
way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies.

Diversity needs to happen from the ground up. Affirmative action is more
effective and more appropriate the earlier in life that it is. Special coding
classes and programs for underserved groups (e.g. Rails Girls) are the best,
because a lot of girls don't get the same opportunities. In New Zealand, a lot
of single-sex girls' schools don't teach programming at all. It's the same
with schools in lower income areas, they often have very underdeveloped STEM
programs.

Having lower entry requirements to university for less privileged populations
also makes sense, although using ethnicity is a very blunt stick, as there are
often external factors that mean that equally talented students have worse
educational outcomes in school, such as poor nutrition, working a job after
school to help pay the bills, and low quality teachers (most good teachers
want to teach at good schools). There external factors tend to be ironed out
at university.

Obviously not every type of affirmative action is appropriate for every
situation. Requiring lower grades for women to get into engineering programs
at university probably isn't appropriate, since it's not like women grow up in
less privileged households than men.

Affirmative action in hiring makes a lot less sense than at earlier stages.
There's only a certain percentage of women in the workforce, hiring over that
percentage isn't going to help with diversity or inclusion. If only 20% of
programmers are women, then your company's programming team should be
somewhere around that number. If it's a lot higher or a lot lower than this,
there's something wrong.

~~~
batiudrami
If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as
desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates
away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a
bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.

~~~
michaelmrose
Mathematically its hard to select a higher percentage of anything than the
population of applicants without picking inferior players.

I know its challenging to rank people in real world jobs compared to say
scores on a test but humor me here. Say you score people on an objective
metric from 100 to 0 and you have 5 times more applicants than jobs. One
logical way to hire than is to hire the top 20% of the population.

If the overall population is 20% female than all things being equal 20% of the
top 20% will also be female.

How then do you arrive at 50% female while still trying to maintain quality.
You have to remove the lowest ranking male and replace him with a female from
the applicant pool. All the woman above this man are logically all in the to
hire pool already. The only applicants available are those ranked below him so
you must be logic replace a more qualified man with a less qualified woman.

As you travel from 20% to 50% you must pick increasingly less qualified
individuals to hire in order to reach your goals. Presumably your last hire
would be from the 35% percentile instead of the 20th?

The real world is multidimensional, complicated, and much harder to rank but
bias logically has to reduce overall fitness on the larger scale.

~~~
shalmanese
Companies don't pluck candidates out from an unbiased set at random. Companies
that are attractive to women get top tier women to apply which means they're
able to select their 50% from the top 5% of women. And guess what, a major
factor in a company being attractive to women is a culture where women have a
voice roughly equal to men.

Increasing your percentage of women increases your candidate quality, not
decreases it, because it forces you to address all the issues that make it
challenging for you to attract/retain women in the first place.

~~~
michaelmrose
Seems like this does not scale in any meaningful way. Got any companies with
50% women in jobs where the applicant pool is 20% with a large population of
employees?

Hint hiring women in marketing to balance the male software developers
wouldn't prove much.

~~~
shalmanese
When I talk to my female engineering friends, Stripe, Slack, Patreon,
Pinterest & AirBNB consistently come up as great work cultures for women. They
preferentially apply for those companies first over other places because of
the work culture.

------
BadassFractal
Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in
California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there
being _more_ diversity in colleges, a smaller grades gap between ethnicities
and many other benefits that affirmative action was meant to accomplish.

The argument being that quotas actually don't help with diversity because, in
the example of high end colleges like MIT, a huge chunk of quota kids end up
dropping out, or changing to non-technical majors, or stay in the bottom 10th
percentile of their class. They end up feeling terrible, their classmates (who
on average will be 300 SAT points above them) end up not taking them
seriously, so instead of this being a positive experience for everybody, it
just creates more resentment on both sides.

I suppose many people believe that throwing unqualified kids into the
meatgrinder is worth it just for the diversity exposure alone, and their
sacrifice is for a greater cause.

This is not to say that exposing different clusters of society to each other
isn't beneficial to overall social cohesion and acceptance. Doing it through
quotas, however, doesn't seem to have been proven to be an effective way of
accomplishing that goal.

Race is an awfully blunt way of looking at these societal clusters. Mashing
all the white people together makes no sense. The Italians, the Polish, the
Irish were discriminated against heavily early in the century. Russian-
Americans make 30% more on average than French-Americans. West Indian blacks
make 50% more on average than American blacks. Africans who move to the states
for work are about as successful as Asians or Whites, despite supposed heavy
racial discrimination. Race includes none of that nuance in it.

------
zaarn
Here is my take on it.

I agree quotas suck. A lot. When people explain why we need them, they fall
back to "it's morally good" because the other choice is "monoculture" or
"racism" which is "bad" or "evil" depending on who you ask. My problem with
that is that I don't accept purely moral arguments, these are usually
subjective and depend on someone's culture. Additionally they easily lead to
tribalization where people form two camps over a problem and neither side is
willing to compromise because their tribe is good and the other is evil/bad.

A diversity of thought seems intuitively to be more effective at solving
"programmer didn't think of X because they're not in group Y" problems.
Diversity by skin color or gender... not so much. Atleast, it doesn't seem to
be a good solution for the above problem and when it is, only for a very very
narrow range of problems. It obviously doesn't mean you shouldn't hire women
or people with other skin colors or ethnicity. But also that you shouldn't
hire them primarly.

Hiring 50/50 male/female workers doesn't solve your ignorance of deaf or blind
users of your software. Or people who lost limbs or are otherwise inhibited in
movement (just look at Microsoft, their new controller is an amazing statement
for diversity).

A purely blind hiring process would solve some of this. Additionally the
hiring process would also have to find people that challenge the status quo at
the work place, atleast in the relevant matters.

Writing an app in React? Hire someone who is good at Angular and React but
advocates Angular. You'll be hearing about problems in your App you haven't
thought about. Make this person satisfied with your App.

Creating "Uber but for X"? Hire people who do X and who use X and don't want X
disrupted by "Uber but for X". They'll tell you all about what's wrong with
the implementation. Make them satisfied.

A diverse group of people is a group that when asked about a problem will find
at least as many solutions as people in the group.

Ask your team "what would the ideal calculator look like" and see what they
come up with. They can make it phyiscal or software, any arrangement or
features they like. But each should have their own unique calculator.

I would say this is a good start point for further thought and discussion on
this, though obviously I'm reducing the complexity of such a wide, subjective
and deep rooted problem.

------
rdtsc
Agree with the author. I think a lot of clarity can be gained by answering the
question they posed:

> I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with
> diversity quotas in the first place.

Like the article says, maybe the company has found that hiring diverse
candidates leads to more profits and they are seeking them out and letting the
rest fall into place, i.e. they get higher salaries, better compensation
packages... It would be no different than figuring out graduates from
Stanford's such and such department end up doing particularly well in the
company.

Or maybe the company does want to right a wrong and want to not just improve
its bottom line but also help marginalized groups who have been neglected,
abused and pushed out in the past. Companies the size of Google, Amazon,
Facebook and others can certainly, and maybe should take that position. They
can influence the technology field and their policies can affect a huge number
of people. But I think they shouldn't be shy about declaring their mission,
and should be more bold, as opposed to trying to hide behind the former
reason. It is this hiding that leads to controversy and conflict.

Also in case of this article, the title could have been a bit less
controversial too. It should have been something like "Diversity Quota Needs
To be Explained".

------
eadmund
> I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with
> diversity quotas in the first place. Are we trying to level the playing
> field for marginalized groups? To bring in the requisite diversity of
> thought that correlates so strongly with a better bottom line? Or to improve
> our optics so that when the press writes about our company’s diversity
> numbers, we look good?

Honestly, I believe it's the last reason. Levelling the playing field would be
relatively easy: blind auditions (easy in some fields, like music, more
difficult in ours — but doable). I'm really not convinced that diversity of
thought has all the benefits we attribute to it. At the end of the day, I
think it's fashion: we want to be seen as fashionable, and diversity is in
fashion.

Regarding diversity of thought, her example is a great one: 'And look, if you
put a gun to my head and asked me, given absolutely identical abilities to do
the job, whether I should hire a woman who came from an affluent background,
aced her SATs because of access to a stellar prep program and supportive
parents, went to a top school and interned at a top tech company over a man
who dropped out of high school and worked a bunch of odd-jobs and taught
himself to code and had the grit to end up with the requisite skills… I’ll
take the man.' I'd take the woman, not because she's a woman, but because she
almost certainly has more of the requisite skills than the man in the
situation. If they actually have _identical_ relevant skills, then maybe he'd
be more interesting, just because he's so unusual, but judging by appearances
the woman is more likely to have the skills I'd need.

~~~
effie
Agreed on the fashion. Hiring both 1) fairly to all candidates and 2) most
effectively for the company is a difficult and potentially impossible task.
Introducing quotas is an easy "solution" of this problem for the hiring
department.

However, I do not understand your rationale for hiring the woman. By
assumption, both the woman and the man have the same skills. It is the
histories of how they got those skills that differ.

~~~
eadmund
In the hypothetical example, yes the assumption is that they have equivalent
skills. My issue is that in real life you can never assume that two candidates
have equal skills (in fact, the odds that they do are negligible); instead you
have to make assumptions about the probability of increased skill given
various priors. Given standard priors based on my own experience, I'd be more
likely to hire the woman in that example.

If I actually did know that they were exactly identical skill-wise, it'd be a
different story.

------
Leary
American Companies and universities will rarely admit they are using quotas.
Rather, diversity initiatives boost the probability of hire for certain
demographics. This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but
it is also unfair to the other demographics. Hopefully companies will consider
other avenues to increase their diversity rather than having differing hiring
standards.

~~~
collyw
> This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but it is also
> unfair to the other demographics.

Correcting prejudice by introducing more prejudice doesn't see like the best
way to go about it.

------
freedomben
Not a new opinion, but well articulated and reasoned. Sadly, I don't think it
will resonate because of the knee-jerk responses people seem to have these
days regarding this topic.

> _So, what about diversity of thought? If you’re really going after
> candidates who can bring fresh perspectives to the table, their lived
> experience should trump their gender and ethnicity (though of course, those
> can correlate heavily)_

Diversity of thought is a dangerous term in this current culture of witch
hunts and personal destruction: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-
diversity-head-denis...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-
head-denise-young-smith-apologizes-for-controversial-choice-of-words-at-
summit/)

~~~
eesmith
I understand what it means to at least estimate representation based on
gender, race, religion, nationality, veteran status, etc., and from that infer
possible discrimination.

I can also understand the reasons for having civil rights laws to protect
members of those groups, and I fully acknowledge the long history of
discrimination in the US (I'm from the US) against Native Americans, blacks,
women, non-heterosexuals, non-Protestants, and more.

But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any
meaningful way.

Look at all the places with 'No-Assholes' hiring policy. Aren't "assholes"
part of the diversity of thought?

I think it's pretty obvious that there may be good reasons to not hire people
based on which thoughts they decide to express and how they express them. (I
assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading
devices aren't that good.)

The author doesn't address this topic, and instead proposes an evaluation
based "entirely on performance in anonymous technical interviews."

How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"? If
people from school X are 80% likely to pass the interview and people from
elsewhere are 20% likely to pass the interview, then woudn't that process
result in a monoculture of thought?

freedomben? Can you tell me how one might meaningfully characterize "diversity
of thought"? For lack of a better definition, by "meaningful" I mean
"incorporate it into hiring decisions such that the result is to the overall
benefit of the company and the society which allows the company to exist".

~~~
woodman
> But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any
> meaningful way.

For that to be true, you'd have to be unaware of the fact that people can
process data and reason through complex problems differently.

> I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind
> reading devices aren't that good.

That is a poor assumption that requires the redefinition of the word
"thought". Our mind reading devices are pretty good: "Here is a complex
problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work."

> How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"?

By clearly demonstrating an applicant's competing priorities by way of
solution selection? It sounds like you've never worked on a team that had that
one guy who would regularly shoot down seemingly sensible textbook solutions,
and instead offer a solution that either sounded like more work or just plain
insanity. Have you never heard the story of Mel [0]? I can tell you from my
own experience, as a former full stack developer who had to do a lot of
interdepartmental work at a non-software company, diversity of thought is very
useful.

[0]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSpY)

~~~
eesmith
> "people can process data and reason through complex problems differently"

This was in the context of hiring, and I gave my operational definition - how
does one apply 'diversity of thought' to the hiring process?

> "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show
> your work."

Presenting a solution, or an attempt at a solution, is an expression of one's
thoughts.

> "diversity of thought is very useful"

How do you apply it to the hiring process? How does the proposed method
(skills testing) result in improved diversity of thought?

I'll be more concrete with two examples. Example 1: Suppose there are only
three schools which teach COBOL programming, and you are a bank which is
looking to hire junior COBOL programmers. Do you design your test for COBOL
competency, which will result in preferential selection from those small
number of schools and hence reduce the diversity of thought? Or do you hire
for more general diversity of thought and expect more overhead to train people
in COBOL?

Example 2. Suppose you put the applicant on an Ubuntu box and ask them to
write a sort program in C++ which takes two command-line arguments. The first
is an input file name containing set of lines (ending with a '\n'), the second
is the output file name containing the input lines but sorted by byte value.

Of those that pass the test, 50 do the 'standard' vector<string> with a sort
from the standard library, but only 10 do I/O failure checking, and 1 of the
50 decides to make the parent directories if the filename's directory doesn't
already exist.

But wait, another 40 treat C++ as C, and use stdio along with a resizing array
of char * . Of those, 30 use qsort, 8 implement quicksort, and 2 use bubble
sort.

(Oh, and one person who didn't finish was 90% of the way through implementing
a Timsort.)

That's a diversity of thought. Do you give preference to them for thinking
about the problem in a different way?

But wait, another 7 think about it a bit, realize that 'sort' is on the Ubuntu
box, and construct system("sort filename1 -o filename2").

That's surely thinking outside the box, so should be encouraged in the name of
diversity of thought, yes?

Except another 2 think about it further, realize that the filenames may
contain spaces or shell metacharacters, so construct the exec call directly.
Security thinking is hard to train, so they should have preference, yes?

And finally, the last one writes a C++ program which uses the Python C API to
pass in a Python program as a string.

Surely that's even more diverse thinking - and completely within the test
protocol as given.

Now to reverse the direction. I know all of these solutions. If I were given
the task and I know that the employee wants to hire for "diversity of
thought". Which implementation should I do to improve my chances of being
hired?

That is, should I do something which I know is less maintainable simply
because I know it's more obscure and thus shows my diversity of thought?

~~~
zaarn
Here is an example that I've mentioned in a top-level comment here; ask the
candidate to design a calculator. Budget doesn't matter and they can do it
software or phyiscal.

All that matters is that at the end the calculator is the most ideal one for
you as the candidate. All the features you wish for and none of the downsides.

So you get a bit of paper to draw on and maybe write some short text.

Compare the results to what your team has drawn when they were hired (or you
asked them separately).

Of course the comparison is still subjectively but ideally you pick the
candidate with the most different calculator from the others.

That's better than coding tests since you can look at the result and it's
independent of coding skill.

Similar tests are possible where you don't test coding skill but instead test
if and how much a person thinks outside the box and what it looks like. This
would better help to assemble diverse teams than a simple coding tests.

Another one would be to look for people that are contra to the current team.
If you develop COBOL look for a developer that can do COBOL but hates it and
would love to switch elsewhere. These kinds of people will make your team
diverse since they can find problems more efficiently.

I think the problem there is that your diversity tests still only test for
coding skills, which aren't as important when you consider that someone with a
fresh and contra perspective to your current team could be much more helpful.

~~~
eesmith
The stated goal is to design the model which is most ideal for me.

The real goal - meaning, the one which decides if I will be hired - is to
design the model which is most different from others.

Since I want the job, shouldn't I disregard the instructions and instead
create crazy looking calculators which aren't ideal for me but which are
different enough to stand out, and thus get me hired?

As a test designer, aren't you making a bias toward hiring people who are good
at gaming the system? Is that really good for the company?

Going back to my examples, which you did not address, would your team hire the
"C++ programmer" who implemented the sorting challenge by using the Python/C
API to write a Python program? Because that's certainly thinking outside the
box. But it doesn't tell you if the programmer would be a good C++ hire.

> If you develop COBOL look for a developer that can do COBOL but hates it and
> would love to switch elsewhere.

What? If you want to hire a COBOL developer with the expectation of working
for 20+ years at a bank, why would you want that developer to hate that job?
Do you have any evidence that they will be "more efficient" at it? Why
wouldn't they do the bare minimum need to do a satisfactory job, while looking
for a new job on the side. And when that happens you'll need to retrain your
new employee.

It seems like money down the drain.

------
skookumchuck
> optics

That word meaning "appearances" suddenly appeared and became all the rage a
year ago. Writers and commentators think they're hip and cool using it, rather
than what it actually is - camp-following and boring.

Blech. Just use "appearances".

~~~
teddyh
The word “appearances” has bad optics now. It’s called the euphemism
treadmill.

------
d--b
Quotas are tough for people right now, but they serve a longer term role.
Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact.

Some dumb-ass dudes may tell you: "oh you're here because of diversity quotas,
not for your inherent quality", and it will be annoying for you. But the
purpose of the quotas is that the next generation of students can look at the
distribution and tell themselves: "oh, actually this field is not only
populated by bros, there is a lot of women in it, maybe I'll give that a
shot".

Ok, it's not meritocracy, but come on, meritocracy is only unbiased if the
culture is unbiased...

~~~
manigandham
Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of
doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of
all this.

~~~
batiudrami
Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field
they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it.

It's not about this generation; it's the next.

~~~
collyw
Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never
seen anything that actually proves this is the case.

~~~
batiudrami
You might find this[1] interesting.

[1]] [https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-
coding-1...](https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-
coding-1019aac9727c)

~~~
flukus
Do any image search of the homebrew computer club that established much of the
scene from the mid 70's and tell me what gender ratio you see:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?t=chakra&q=homebrew+computer+club+ph...](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=chakra&q=homebrew+computer+club+photos&ia=images&iax=images)

It looks like advertisers in the 80's had a demographic they were marketing
too, they didn't create one. That article start with the assumption that
everyone studying a field is interested in it as opposed to wanting a career
and goes downhill from there.

