
How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers - mankins
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3005681/
======
luu
I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this.

At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-
Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at
the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other
firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring
women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been arbitraged away, but it
took decades to get to this point.

At the time, people gave many reasons sexism couldn't possibly exist in
finance; naturally, more men went into finance because women just _didn't
like_ finance, and more men had senior positions because simply _didn't want_
senior positions, and so on and so forth (oddly enough, those same reasons are
given today, in discussions of sexism in CS and engineering).

In 1987, Townsend-Greenspan shut down, after thirty successful years, because
Greenspan became chairman of the Fed. Now, twenty-six years later, the gender
gap among MBAs is much smaller than it used to be, but it hasn't disappeared.
I hope it doesn't take fifty-six years from the founding of Etsy for someone
to be able to make a comment like this about programmers.

I'm afraid it might be a while, though. In discussions about the topic here on
HN, the top comment is often something along the lines of how there obviously
isn't any sexism in the field, or if there is any, it's rare, and certainly
not a systematic problem, and how it's simply impossible that the highly
skewed male:female ratio in the field is due to sexism. That's usually
followed by a paragraph on how any attempts to address the issue are an
insidious cause of reverse sexism.

The top comment in the previous thread on this topic was a comment about how
everything Etsy is doing applies equally to all people, not just women,
despite a large body of research indicating that, on average, women are
treated differently in the workplace [1], and how some simple changes can
neutralize many serious problems [2].

[1] Perhaps someone else can supply a reference to a well-known study that I
can't seem to look up. When men react with anger, or act authoritatively,
that's seen neutrally or positively, but when women do the same, it's seen
negatively.

[2] <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511>

~~~
usaar333
Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And
I'm sure it discourages some women from entering.

But it is important to note there are plenty of industries today with high
female representation, such as law and medicine, that in the recent past were
bastions of male dominance. A female relative of mine went through law school
in the 1950s and can tell tales of male chauvinism more extreme than you'd
find anywhere today in tech or finance. But somehow, women went to law school
more and more, and today represent ~50% of law classes. Something must be
different about these fields, but I'm not sure what.

~~~
duggan
Theory: the fields you mention, law and medicine, (historically and still)
convey a higher social status on the member. There's also a relatively well
trodden path through apprenticeship, successful practitioner, and eventual
transition into other stable/respectable paths (politics, judiciary, hospital
administration) as your career winds down.

Software engineering doesn't have that (yet?)

~~~
philwelch
People haven't aspired to become software engineers for generations. Only the
past few years. In 1990, no one told their daughters that they could be
software engineers. They told their daughters they could be lawyers and
doctors, or maybe Senators, or business executives. Software engineering? Who
wanted to do that?

~~~
duggan
Out of 150 students that graduated my year of high school (2003), an all boys
school, I was the only one who chose to follow a computing career.

All my friends, even those with a similar (or more advanced) aptitude and
interest in computers, chose different paths. Chemistry. Theoretical Physics.
History. Politics. Economics.

Nobody wanted to be doing computing professionally. Men were/are afforded to
be outcasts or underdogs, socially; there's some romanticism to it. I'm not
sure the same has applied for women, but maybe that's changing.

------
cantastoria
_Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female
technologists._

I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering
problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of
this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles.

 _Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to
be known in startup circles as engineer-centric and something of a dude-fest_

So the fact that eighty percent of Etsy users were women despite having an
all-male engineering team apparently means that you have to hire more women
engineers to attract female users? Again I'd love to see evidence that once a
core of female engineers were hired significant changes where made to the site
that could only have come from a "woman's intuition" (natch). It seems to me
that having a female dominated user base in spite of an all male engineering
team disproves the assertion that you need hire women to achieve "cognitive
diversity".

~~~
readme
Unfortunately, when approaching an issue like this you cannot do so without
adopting a sexist viewpoint yourself. To begin to analyze workers in terms of
sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative
action is racist.

It's fine and good that companies want to hire more female engineers. But this
article is lame, which you should have picked up on when the author used the
word "rockstar"

~~~
steveklabnik
> To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself
> is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist.

Which is, again, not sexist or racist at all. *-ism implies institutional bias
of a society, not an individual instance of discrimination.

It is _discriminatory_ against men, for sure. But not 'sexist.'

~~~
cantastoria
_-ism implies institutional bias of a society_

Sexism/racism et al. can exist outside of institutions no? "Hate crimes" for
instance clearly do not involve any recognizable institutions yet clearly
involve an _-ism of some kind. Nor do_ -isms only exist at the society level.
For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men
(female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal biases.

~~~
steveklabnik
> "Hate crimes" for instance clearly do not involve any recognizable
> institutions yet clearly involve an -ism of some kind.

Only in the sense that they 'reproduce' the broader -ism. The individual act
is one of discrimination, the sum of all acts collectively is an *-ism.

> For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men
> (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal
> biases.

Studies and discussion on this topic are scoped specifically at the societal
level for a reason.

------
elptacek
Recently I watched a documentary in which a researcher told of how he was
ridiculed for studying happiness, even though nobody saw anything wrong with
studying depression. Then I saw a documentary where a handful of really skinny
people were put on a ridiculous diet and their physiological changes were
tracked.

Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math
and engineering disciplines, perhaps we should be talking to the ones who are
already there? It seems to me that if we've really had to jump over extra
hurdles and deal with lower wages, there has to be something very compelling
that keeps us here.

We think these answers are obvious. Maybe they aren't?

ETA: I interviewed with Etsy in 2010 or 2011. It seemed as if I did very well,
but it wasn't a career move that warranted relocating the home to Brooklyn. At
the time, I thought they were just excited by me, as a professional. I'm
feeling a bit sad that it might have just been a "hire more women" drive
instead. Bleh.

~~~
Tichy
Whast extra hurdles did you have to jump over? Are you sure your wages are
lower? Those differences are not very obvious for office jobs, in fact the
other day I linked to astudy showing women in tech earn more than men ( till
age 30 anyway, have no data on otherrs).

~~~
elptacek
My degree is in audio tech, not computer tech. I have always found the latter
to be far less challenging in the gender bias department, and had a much
easier time, in general making a career "in computers." I do have experiences
where I was passed over for positions where men with less experience were
hired (I trained them). Also where male peers received training I was denied.
Also where I was harassed until I resigned while I was pregnant. I've been
asked if I was okay with working 40 hours a week because I have kids or what
my kids would do during the day while I was working. Even writing one sentence
per experience would make this response tedious.

I have no personal examples of being paid less, because I've more or less felt
I was being paid enough to make it not worth asking anyone else what they were
being paid. From what I understand, that is a big no-no. The examples I have
of women being paid less are from other women in tech, a couple of these for
which there is direct proof.

~~~
Tichy
Curious about the "willing to work 40h" question, seems fair to ask?

~~~
elptacek
Weird. Something ate that post.

The question was, "I can hear your kids in the background. Are you sure you're
okay with working 40 hours a week?" From a female recruiter for a previous
employer when I specifically inquired about FTE. Her boss (also female)
certainly didn't think it was fair to ask.

~~~
Tichy
I'm male and not really OK with working 40 hours a week (with a 2 year old at
home). I find it annoying that people automatically assume I'm OK with it. Not
sure what to think, I mean why the question is offensive. Maybe it is illegal
to ask (like pregnancy status)?Edit: I don't know what FTE means.

~~~
wglb
FTE -> Full Time Employee

------
omonra
I'd like to see some numbers on how having 500% more female engineers made
Etsy ship a better product - which is what I imagine customers ultimately care
about. The idea that diversity is good for its own sake in every possible
situation is taken as an axiom - which I'd like to see proven.

It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given
job is based on competence is substituted with one of diversity. Ie that in
any group of size n, the personal qualities (gender,race,sexual orientation)
of N+1 person joining the group is just as (or more important) that his/her
core qualifications.

For example - why does company have to have engineers that mimic its customer
base? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to have people whose job it is to
figure out what customers want and then tell engineers to code it up?

Now - I am not saying that diversity is bad, rather that it's presented as a
given, with no numerical justification.

~~~
Bakkot
On any other problem whatsoever, people would readily grant that having the
developers understand the problem domain confers an advantage. I don't see why
this should be any different.

~~~
omonra
I am not convinced that males are incapable of understanding whatever it is
that Etsy's clients want. After all - we don't look for programmers who are
doctors for medical programs, etc.

I'd actually posit that in majority of cases (ie all enterprise software),
programmers actually have much less of clue as to what they are working on
than in the case of consumer site like this.

~~~
mlent
Actually, you do end up needing a degree of domain-specific knowledge. Do you
not think that programmers of medical software don't pick up a ton of medical
knowledge while they're working? And that people who are programmers who were,
say, pre-med or bio students or whatever wouldn't have an edge? As someone who
happens to work in a science/bioinformatics environment with no education on
the topic, I can definitely say that I make decisions based on the domain
(what I've learned since joining) and the behaviors of our end-users,
scientists.

When programmers lack domain knowledge, they're likely to make bad assumptions
that will hurt them later. Of course you have to know intended use when you're
writing software, it can help you design it properly. A very simple
hypothetical: Designing a database to efficiently receive some data set. What
if Etsy's users aren't interested in that data? And they care more about
something else, which would merit designing it differently? Maybe having a
female voice to bring that up would be helpful. Obviously, it's purely
conjecture, but I think it's a reasonable scenario.

------
kansface
I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as
highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed
to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference
between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out
equality to promote it?

Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99%
men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a
company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The
Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not
to mention civil suites).

~~~
randomdata
I tend to agree. I thought the whole point of gender equality was to be blind,
so to speak, of gender?

If you have to specifically hire female people, it says their quality is lower
(otherwise you would just always hire the best person female or male), which
is not something I am sure I can support. Women are just as capable of being
the best. It seems like an insult to give anyone special treatment just
because of gender. Isn't that what we are trying to stop?

~~~
mlent
I mean, being qualified is never the only piece of the "getting hired" puzzle,
right? You want someone who fits well in your team, is generally interesting,
is eager to learn, and possibly fills some other niche that you feel your team
is missing. I think it's a fair question to ask, "Will this person provide a
unique perspective within our team?"

It seems simply that Etsy is trying to fill a female niche and add female
perspective. It's not like they're hiring random ladies off the street, their
hires have gone to hacker school and are clearly capable given the
opportunity. Software isn't written is silos where you don't talk to other
people about what/how/why you are going what you're doing.

~~~
randomdata
You definitely right that being the overall best is more complicated than
being the best at one specific thing. However, doesn't the idea of "female
perspective" reintroduce the exact same gender bias issues?

If you can justify hiring for "female perspective", what about the companies
who only want "male perspective"?

~~~
mlent
I don't think Etsy is acting as though they want only the female perspective,
just more of it than what they have. I'm sure there are other areas where they
are trying to get more male perspective (e.g. at small liberal arts colleges,
to a degree).

Etsy is obviously not starting to hire only women or even mostly women.

~~~
randomdata
Teaching is an industry that openly seeks male perspective, but I'm not sure
that is right either. Why can't men just reach the level of being the obvious
choice for the job, without even needing to consider gender?

~~~
mlent
I think, as the article alludes to, men and women are less likely to consider
certain careers/colleges/whatever. So if you ignored gender at a liberal arts
school and blindly selected candidates, and the ratio was as skewed towards
women as the tech industry is towards men, do you think men would be as
comfortable there? Having a gender balance (as well as a balance on other axes
that include more minorities) is good for everyone. Maybe that overall
environment is better than an environment full of mega left-wing lady commies,
or, in the case of tech, "hotshot" male engineers with poor social graces.
These are all generalizations, obviously, but I think it's true to the
overarching trend.

------
auctiontheory
The article doesn't really say _why_ they wanted more female engineers, other
than "it was vital to the product."

I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it
seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women
developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the
near term.

I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female product boo-
boos, like the time Microsoft offered "bitch" as the equivalent to "male" in a
Windows XP Spanish localization.

~~~
asveikau
I didn't know which company was accused of this, but the version I heard was
that "female" was translated as "hembra". It does mean that, but you usually
hear it applied to animals.[1] Probably an easy mistake for someone to make if
they're told to translate a string without being made aware of the context.

[1] The DRAE, considered the "dictionary of record" in Spain, says that female
animal is definition 1, and female human is definition 2.
<http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra>

~~~
jaimebuelta
"Hembra" used to be acceptable some time ago, but right now is controversial
and not used in that context. It is still used for female animals, though.

The same goes with the male equivalent: "macho", which now is only used for
animals and not people. (Macho can be also used in a similar way as in
english, but that's a different acception and context usage)

------
Ellipsis753
Doesn't this seem a little sexist? I only hope they give men the equal
opportunity to women and don't start "paving the way" to make it easier for
women to get a job there than an equally good man. Avoiding sexism isn't about
hiring an equal number of men as women. It's about hiring the best for the job
regardless of their gender.

~~~
jt2190

      > Doesn't this seem a little sexist?
    

Had the article been: "How Etsy Replaced 50% of our Male Engineers with
Females" you might have cause for concern.

If we were using startup lingo, we'd be saying that Etsy is disrupting the
traditional labor market by finding a supply of software engineers where one
didn't (or didn't seem to) exist before. We wouldn't assume that the labor
supply remained exactly the same size, and that every software engineer
position staffed by a woman meant one less software engineer position staffed
by a man.

~~~
Ellipsis753
It's not whether they're getting rid of male engineers. I just hope they're
not giving an unfair advantage to females over males here as I would consider
that to be sexist. Equality isn't making sure 50% of workers in each role are
of each gender. Equality is making sure that when recruiting/training you
always pick the best candidate _regardless_ of there gender.

------
niggler
It's great to see Etsy hire more female engineers! But really, they had so few
female engineers to begin with (3) that the 500% figure is a bit
sensationalist

------
RyanZAG
This is a really great plan for hiring top talent in a way that's not
immediately obvious. There is a lot of talk of 'sexism' in the tech world, but
from my experience, many top male engineers are going to prefer working in a
team with a few more females. If the article is correct then this proves this
further - they were able to hire some big names simply by having those extra
female engineers.

Training up female engineers is also positive as the main complaint about
'diversity in tech' is putting less competent female engineers before more
competent male engineers to meet ratio targets. (I'm not saying that females
are less competent, but female engineers are harder to find.) By training up
female engineers first before giving them the jobs, they are hopefully making
sure that their female engineers are just as competent as their male
engineers.

Basically it's a win all around, and is much better than just hiring any
female engineer regardless of skill to make quota.

"Less headhunters, more hacker school" - Good call, good call.

~~~
jaimebuelta
Well, more education/vocation HAS to be the key. There are less female
engineers. The objective has to be to have more around, not to concentrate
them in a few companies.

------
mhartl
At that rate, in just over 20 years every woman in the world will be a
software engineer at Etsy.

------
Cthulhu_
You know, gender aside, this is what more companies should do; there's an
enormous demand for skilled engineers out there, yet very few companies that
acknowledge there just may not be any more in the market and they need to
create said skilled employees themselves.

The problem for employers is that trainees and interns are a risk; you need to
screen them beforehand, and then you take a gamble about whether they'll get
up to the required skill level in six months or a year to be up to par to the
rest of the company's team.

I heard about a major consultancy company's success in attracting interns as
potential future engineers (Ordina iirc), they said the success rate was about
1 in 20. Which, for smaller companies (<100 people) is simply not enough.

The article itself states they hired eight people from Hacker School, which is
daring and commendable. I'm curious as to how those people will develop
themselves in the coming year.

~~~
GoranM
Companies should also be very clear about what they're actually looking for.
If you're looking for "world class" talent, don't complain about a "programmer
shortage".

The fact that there were 600 valid applications (the women applying had code
examples to show), basically busts the "programmer shortage" myth.

There are a whole lot of people who can program computers, and who could, with
some investment, become valuable assets.

------
erickhill
Large previous thread on HN from 45 days ago here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994>

~~~
SeanDav
True but probably worth discussing again in light of "adriagate"

~~~
MartinCron
Especially because this is a fundamentally positive story. It's not all
crusaders and combat out there.

------
sprash
Work, after all, is mostly about getting shit done. If there is a shortage of
female engineers they are probably overvalued which also means I could hire
equally good or better men for less money.

Does the little gain of prestige make up for the huge potential loss of
opportunity?

------
kushti
What a sexist goal Etsy had, to hire 500% more female(???) engineers. Why
engineers are separated by gender? It's 100% sexism.

------
OGC
So, they had 4, and now they have 20 female engineers. That sounds like quite
a small sample size and quiet a lot talk about that.

------
Kudzu_Bob
500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. If
that's not progress, I don't know what is.

~~~
justinhj
Progress will be when this kind of thinking doesn't occur

~~~
yummyfajitas
Is this kind of thinking incorrect?

~~~
raganwald
Probably incorrect.

And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine
men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment
suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't,
why would adding a second women change his behaviour?

On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men,
I'd say you may have doubled the chances of having a harasser on your staff.

I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause
sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think
it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists
out there who believe that women are making this stuff up.

~~~
cousin_it
I don't completely understand your argument here, on a purely intellectual
level...

In a very simple model, going from 0 women to 1 woman should increase the
number of harassment suits, right? Then going from 1 woman to 2 women should
have a similar effect, because all naturally occurring functions are
differentiable :-) Intuitively it seems to me that the amount of reported
harassment should be proportional to how many opportunities for harassment
exist, or (under a different theory) how many opportunities for false claims
exist, which is the same number by another name.

So it's a little strange to hear you say that anyone who disagrees with you
must believe in nasty things like "harassment is made up by women". Do you
know how hard it is to figure out causality from observational data? For any
possible trend you could find in the data, like "reported harassment scales as
the number of women times the square root of the number of men", one could
probably make up a just-so story that blames men, and a different just-so
story that blames women.

~~~
raganwald
I think the onus is on you and those who agree with you to discard all this
"intuitively" and other hand-wavy stuff and come up with some hard evidence
and/or citations, or back down and say, "we're making this shit up because it
suits our biases."

I wasn't born yesterday. If someone makes a claim without a shred of evidence,
it's perfectly legitimate to say, "Well, here's another alternate explanation
that's just as unproven, so clearly yours has nothing special going for it." I
gave you a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you're telling me that intuitively,
God has a long white beard, not a saucer.

I'm perfectly ok with your saying that you choose to believe something without
a shred of evidence, to take it as faith.

But that won't change the fact that simply making shit up, asking if it's
"wrong," and then saying that you'll stick to it unless someone else proves
your unsubstantiated prejudices are mistaken is bunkum.

That thinking isn't thinking.

~~~
yummyfajitas
His intuitions are simply basic mathematical intuitions ("natural functions
are differentiable") and have nothing whatsoever to do with any prejudices. He
isn't "making shit up", he just isn't justifying it with as much mathematical
rigor as I did.

It really does not help discussions like this to simply assume and accuse
those you disagree with are prejudiced and unthinking.

~~~
raganwald
Sorry, what he and you are doing is starting with assumptions you are making
up and then saying GIVEN this shit I'm making up THEN given these mathematical
intuitions I cherry-pick as simple demonstrations of the conclusions I've
drawn THEN the conclusion I drew before I back-filled my reasoning holds.

Again, without even the barest attempt to go out and gather some empirical
data. That kind of talk belongs amongst consultants pedalling methodology
snake-oil. And yes I am being dismissive of your so-called arguments.

Around here we regularly make fun of the "social sciences" for their lack of
rigor. Except, it appears, when we want to throw our prejudices around. Shame
on you all for treating Hacker News like it's Reddit.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Which prejudices?

I made three assumptions. One was social distance (a harasser will harass only
one of the K < N people he has met). The other was _your assumption_ that a
harasser always harasses. The third was _your assumption_ that all harassment
allegations are true.

I assume that the social distance assumption is the one you believe to be
prejudiced?

I'm also curious why you believe your post is any different. You also posited
a mathematical model (exactly like mine, except without the social distance),
and hinted that those you disagree with must be sexist. Is it merely the
existence of an ad-hominem attack that makes your post more valid?

