
Be a Man and Stand Up for Gender Equality - Tzunamitom
http://thomasbell.co.uk/2013/12/09/be-a-man-and-stand-up-for-gender-equality/
======
sliverstorm
_How any company can expect to build a sustainable long-term business when not
one of their 14 Partners /Advisors is female is beyond me._

This piece seems... I don't know the right word for it. It's not reverse
sexism. But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders
were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see _some_
boards with 14 members of only one gender? So while it is conspicuous this
particular board is all-male, how can we say a business cannot possibly be
viable with only one gender on the board?

~~~
dangerlibrary
14/14 company partners were male. They claimed to support diversity within
their organization.

The probability that the "supportive of diversity" claim is true and that the
make up of the board is all male by random chance is quite small (naively,
1/(2^14) ).

~~~
sliverstorm
I clearly made my point extremely poorly. I am not, in any way whatsoever,
making ANY POINT about the board of the company the author applied to. I am
SPECIFICALLY addressing his assertion that a board must have women for the
company to be successful.

------
philwelch
> This is especially surprising considering that many of their partners are
> ex-Accenture, a company that in my experience placed a strong emphasis on
> recruiting and promoting female talent at the highest levels.

The minute someone throws out Accenture as a positive example of how to run a
business is the minute they lose their own credibility. It turns out it's easy
to hire whoever you want if competence is not a requirement. Otherwise, if you
hire in a field where most qualified candidiates are men, your employees will
be predominantly men.

~~~
Tzunamitom
Ignoring your unfair generalisations about Accenture employees, I made no
assertion that Accenture as a whole was a good way to run a business.

In the 3 years I worked there, there was a lot that I disagreed with, but one
thing they did well was their effort to drive towards greater gender equality.

[edit typo]

~~~
philwelch
That's not too surprising, as that's the kind of thing that impresses
politicians and MBA's. In the real world, where delivering results is more
important than checking off political boxes, tech companies have to work
extremely hard just to hire the best people, so that's not a luxury they have.

------
Jemaclus
While I agree that it would be awesome to see more women represented in
companies, particularly at higher levels of management, I'm not sure this post
makes sense to me.

If one of those top management executives were female, what makes them
different from the "TOKEN FEMALE" on the other associate-level pages? Is it
different if there are two women in C-level positions? Where do you draw the
line between women being powerful in their own right vs simply TOKEN FEMALES
on a team?

(Note: I'm all for hiring women, and I encourage my friends (male and female)
to take up programming, and I do my best to help them get jobs in the
industry. But this guy's argument just strikes me as a fundamental
misunderstanding of feminism and what that means.)

------
gadders
Based on my corporate experience, there is normaly at least one department
that is the opposite of IT in terms of gender balance - Human Resources.

I wonder if people women in Human Resources are running campaigns to recruit
more men into their departments?

~~~
philwelch
Of course not. Feminists will tell you this with a straight face: it's only
sexism if it disadvantages women.

That's why feminists only started caring about STEM when it became high-
status. Feminists are glad to let men do all the low-status shit jobs, like
garbage collection or construction or working in oil fields, as long as such
work remains low-status. 20 years ago, programming was low status and women
were obsessed with becoming doctors and lawyers because medicine and law were
very high status. 20 years from now there will be lots of women programmers
just like there are lots of women doctors and lawyers today.

------
devonbarrett
By the title I expected a piece of satire.

Titling an article about sexism with 'Be a Man' probably is not the best way
to go about advocating equality.

~~~
Tzunamitom
One might even suggest that the title is at once playful, satirical,
arresting, and a little ironic.

------
lukasm
This is extremely dangerous and often gives the opposite effect. An example is
situation with universities in Sweden. There was a parity for all degrees. As
a result, lots of women didn't get to uni because 50% was reserved for male,
even though they had higher grades. They filled a law suit and won (European
Court of Human Rights).

------
knodi
Don't tell me what to do. Tell me why I should.

~~~
dangerlibrary
There are plenty of reasons why you should care about gender diversity - many
of them linked in the article/letter, if you had bothered to read it. The most
obvious being: because you said you care about diversity. CompanyX claimed to
support diversity and integration, but didn't make it a priority. If one can't
trust the management to hold itself accountable on something so visible, why
trust them about anything else?

------
samolang
There are laws against outright discrimination. The economic benefits will
cause the market to sort it out eventually.

------
voidr
This is a sexist article, because it tells a company that they should hire
people just because they are women, it's also racist because it remarked that
the team was white as a problem.

------
altero
Have sex-change operation and paint your skin! Be a man!

------
rfnslyr
What if I started a company, and all good candidates were male, and the women
weren't on par? What if no women applied at all? I don't get this whole gender
thing. If statistically less women apply to a STEM degree, or tech related
job, how is it the fault of "white males"? White male guilt at it's finest if
you ask me.

If you actively see discrimination, do something about it. I actually work
with a team that is 90% women, it just happened that way. The male applicants
sucked, the women were great. My friends teams however, are only male, because
they had no female applicants.

Why try to force equality? Am I missing something?

What if the person doing the hiring silently disregards all female applicants?
How would you tackle that problem?

OP if you had a company would you hire a less qualified woman than a more
qualified man in the name of equality?

This movement seems counter-intuitive. If the applicant is good, hire them,
male or female, young or old. Our team consists of elder women, young fresh
grads, interns, and working class middle aged women as well, all across the
spectrum. We all mingle just fine and still shoot the shit.

Hiring GOOD people is the only thing that should matter. Throw out all this
ideology and affirmative action nonsense.

~~~
rayiner
Your viewpoint is predicated on an assumption: that equality is the
equilibrium state of human society. In such a world where this equilibrium
exists, there is no need for "ideology and affirmative action" because any
_affirmative_ actions to create inequality will be erased through the passage
of time as the world returns to the equilibrium of equality.

The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted,
unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for
generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to
pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with
housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see
this "affirmative action" ([http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-
ads](http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads)). Even if you believe that there
is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past
discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time?

The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women
and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as
male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the
field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career
liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize.

One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are
professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and
consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to
almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are
scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get _any_ women in the
door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year
are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a
source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying
to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law
firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit
steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof
that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become
self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in
the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole
different century than the tech sector.

[1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that
older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and
that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names
differently.

[2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there
is a decent chance your boss will be this guy:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311)
("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more
naturally drawn to STEM fields...")

[3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women?
Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley
across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women
across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level.

~~~
philwelch
Law is a high status profession so of course feminists were interested in
training more women lawyers. Now there are a lot of qualified women graduating
from law school, and an overall oversupply of people with law degrees anyway,
so it's easy to make gender equality a priority.

Look at the gender ratios getting CS degrees, consider how extremely
competitive the hiring situation for programmers is, and then tell me it makes
sense to put an emphasis on hiring women in particular when you can hardly
hire anyone qualified at all.

~~~
rayiner
The gender equalization in law happened through the 1980's and 1990's, at a
time when salaries at large law firms were dramatically increasing due to the
limited supply of graduates from which large law firms source their entry-
level hires. The key difference is that law schools, being generally very
progressive places, took aggressive steps to fill their classes with
approximately equal numbers of men and women. And the field, being very
progressive itself, embraced that trend.

It's also interesting to note that when it comes to LSAT scores, men outnumber
women 2:1 in the top percentile. This is very similar to the gender gap in the
top percentile of the Math SAT. Law schools tend to simply ignore that slight
distinction, relying on the fact that women tend to have higher GPAs, so an
index combining GPA and LSAT tends to result in roughly equal numbers of men
and women. And in practice, it's a theoretical difference that has basically
zero impact in the real world. Yet, people repeatedly hold up differentials in
the Math SAT to justify gender gaps in STEM more extreme than the
differentials in the Math SAT itself, as evidence that men are somehow more
suited for STEM jobs.

~~~
philwelch
And if CS programs set aside 50% of their slots for women as well, you might
see similar results. There remains very little that employers can do about it
though.

~~~
rayiner
Law schools would not make a change like that without buy-in from the
employers that allow them to justify their tuition. If tech companies bought
in the same way, I think you'd quickly see a change in how schools fill their
classes.

