
I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity - 317070
https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999
======
turc1656
" _In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up
for the genuinely amazing women in tech._ "

Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought
up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired.
Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate
for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. By
doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance.
Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not
explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of
the hiring loop:

" _After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire
women just because we have to "_

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least
a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because
"we have to". That's a problem.

Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at
the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just
hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and
getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a
higher rate than they currently are doing.

~~~
kurthr
I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be
to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude.

If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless
you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best
person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and
worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away
good candidates and get a few duds.

Once you're into real hiring statistics you have to be very careful of
confirmation bias and "I just like this guy"ism even after the fact... they
look and act like your successful hires. It's hard to even say, unless you're
personally looking at their work on a regular basis and know what direction
they're being given.

~~~
microcolonel
> _I hear you when you say, "the only mandate for the interview process would
> be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR
> platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B
> idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as
> the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough
> interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring
> managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds._

Well, make me a multi-billionaire, I now present to you:

 _BLIND SOURCING AND HIRING_

I should only share the details in private, you say it's a multi-billion
dollar idea and I'd hate to tip off the competitors.

In all seriousness, though, I know this is challenging. Especially at Google,
there's still an opportunity for trouble after you've been hired but not yet
assigned; though I doubt it would be enough of a problem to trash the whole
system.

The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are
indistinguishable from standard hiring.

~~~
humanrebar
> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are
> indistinguishable from standard hiring.

Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software
engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures
contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise,
it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even
make technical arguments.

Once you're listening to real voices, it's difficult to pretend that the
hiring is blind.

The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra worked
really well because you could hide the person behind a screen and judge an
entire work product without knowing anything about the instrumentalist.

Now, if most software jobs include a heavy remote work component some day, it
might be more reasonable to throw a somewhat detailed spec at a candidate,
have them code up a solution, then show the code (and only the code) to people
evaluating the work product. But most devs don't have a day-to-day that looks
like implementing textual programming problems for strangers.

~~~
rbanffy
> Once you're listening to real voices,

Use a voice scrambler.

~~~
imron
People have tried that... specifically to show that women were being
discriminated against, but guess what happened when it was implemented?

They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices
modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as
the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women
modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men
modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:

[http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-
mas...](http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-
in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/)

~~~
HeavyStorm
One very interesting finding of the study is that woman and men are faring
equally once the attrition is removed.

It seemed to me that the natural conclusion was that woman have lower
confidence and thus performed worse at interviews.

And this is a deep realization for me, because it pushes me in the direction
of current diversity policies. You see, if there is perceived bias against
you, then you lose confidence. So we must, for a while, try our best to remove
that perfection. That might mean hiring more woman even if they don't seem to
perform as well as men, because, once we have done that for a while, woman
will feel more confident and the good candidates will appear.

In any case - whether my last paragraph makes sense or not - the conclusion of
the experiment interviewing.io did is that only removing gender perception
during the interview process isn't enough, for woman may already have been
affected by the bias and thus will perform worse than men during the
interview.

So we come back to the conclusion that we must invest to bring woman to tech
early - during college or even high school - and fight biases there.

It's a long road anyway, isn't it?

------
tptacek
Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak.

It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is
interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also
more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games).
Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both
are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds ---
let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going
to end up doing.

The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts
on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-
out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a
Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without
fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the
software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the
work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the
discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to
the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made,
forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?

 _Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I
believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that
can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment
(through clearly there are some that can.)_

~~~
jasode
_> , and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in
programming and her daughter in photoshop. _

Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me,
her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in
pressures to hire some women _who couldn 't do the work_. This creates a
perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates _who could
do the work_ \-- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo,
the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.

To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer
scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if
companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because
diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire
future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting
lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_\(scientist\))

~~~
tptacek
Because the piece isn't very well written†, it's unclear whether the "infinite
loop" of mediocrity she's referring to is something she actually observed, or
something she surmises is possible. She is clear and specific, presenting
numbers, when talking about things she was personally involved in.

Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade
of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term)
side of this debate, I'm left assuming she _didn 't_ see that occur. But she
could also clear that up easily.

Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual
software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software
engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root
subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by
prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard _not_ to taint them.

If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of
the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant
rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues
to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software
developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the
people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled
broken processes.

† _99% of what I write isn 't well-written either, in case this sounds like a
jab at the author, who I am not familiar with._

~~~
cargo8
I think that her "infinite loop" theory was her perception of the anecdote
around hiring at her own startup. It does seem conceivable, but yeah obviously
data is light here.

Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't
really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for
subliminal bias since it is how it is.

~~~
tptacek
Another weird attribute of her theory about setting the bar and paying
premiums for talent is that her engineering team, according to LinkedIn, is in
India --- which is a radically different market for software talent than SFBA.
In particular, the gender distribution of CS grads and programmers in India is
very different from what it is here.

One possible interpretation --- and there are probably equally credible others
--- is that this founder found it difficult to compete in the (overheated)
SFBA market for talent, irrespective of gender.

~~~
goldbeck
Oh interesting. Where did you find this? (My cursory check didn't show turn up
any info on that)

~~~
tptacek
I used the following advanced sleuthing techniques (don't share outside HN):

1\. I went to LinkedIn

2\. I searched for "Silverlabs"

3\. I found the page for their company

4\. I clicked on the link labeled "14 employees and former employees have
LinkedIn profiles"

5\. I observed that all the engineering profiles were in Hyderabad.

I'm being a little snarky but also it's good to know how superficial this
"research" was so it's not at all unlikely that I'm totally wrong about this.

------
okreallywtf
I see some good points on both sides of the discussion here but one thing
occurs to me about the current diversity-pushback that I'm seeing(I'm not
going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-
meaning or at least not explicitly hateful).

We've surprisingly quickly moved from periods where it was common to simply
refuse to even consider minorities or women in many fields to a time when many
people see political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism as a greater
problem than sexism and racism themselves.

I'm glad to see people being very thoughtful about fairness and equality, but
I have an honest question: Before quotas and social justice warriors, were you
thinking about fairness and equality when the status quo potentially benefited
you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender? I'm asking
honestly, not trying to point fingers but I would like to know because this
community, while left-leaning on many issues (I think) tends more towards
libertarian on issues of race and gender and seems especially defensive when
it comes to the tech industry (especially when the term "privilege" is used,
it turns downright hostile).

If you were active in supporting equality and diversity (by resisting
arbitrarily exclusionary practices) when it wasn't popular to do so and now
you are seeing the negative aspects of a push for artificial diversity I would
like to know that.

If you have never even considered diversity issues until recently when seeing
hiring practices that could negatively affect you I would like to know that
too. Do you believe _any_ specific action needs to be taken to promote
diversity or will the problem solve itself, or does the problem even exist at
all?

~~~
Lon7
> Before quotas and social justice warriors, were you thinking about fairness
> and equality when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded
> others not on their merit but race and gender?

I was not thinking about that. And when I started being exposed to it, my
immediate reaction was like you described: seeing political correctness and
reverse-racism/sexism as a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

It took a while, but I now realize how silly that reaction was. I felt
somewhat attacked by these 'social justice warriors and quotas'. And my
reaction was in self defense to this perceived attack. I spent so much time
reading about it on the internet. There were so many smart people applying
logic and engineering skills to these social problems. I identified with these
people and I agreed with most of it. They made it sound like these are all
easy problems to solve and if everyone had read the same scientific studies as
them and applied the same logical thinking then we would have a solution.

My view wasn't changed until I had much more experience in the real world. All
these women that are being talked about as statistics are real people. They're
become my friends and coworkers. I've learned to sympathize with them. I've
learned that it's not us vs them. We are working together is this. I've
learned that political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism are definitely
not a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

I think the human aspect of all this is sorely missing on HN. At least it was
for me.

~~~
m1el
Nothing you said here is a counter argument to either the comment you replied
to or the linked post.

> All these women that are being talked about as statistics are real people.

Nobody denies that. However, once you say that there's not enough "equality"
of engineers, you invoke statistics.

> I think the human aspect of all this is sorely missing on HN.

Think of those poor talented engineers denied a place of work because of
"gender quotas"! These engineers have dreams and passions. They aren't just
statistics!

See how this works?

> I've learned that it's not us vs them.

Except that's exactly the tactics used by SJWs.

> I've learned that political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism are
> definitely not a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

Reverse sexism is exactly the same problem as sexism.

~~~
jeffrom
Well it's not. Not objectively. Not in any sense. Only in abstract terms.

~~~
TheLilHipster
> Not in any sense.

Eh?

> Only in abstract terms.

You want something literal? Lets throw some reverse-VIOLENCE into the mix!

I'm going to bash my neighbors head in, because he's "definitely" a violent
psychopath (It said so on the internet remember).

The heart of the issue is DISCRIMINATION. Doesn't matter if its positive or
negative, you're EXCLUDING groups/individuals which is divisive and breeds
discontent.

Someone posted below

> judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the
> variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.

THAT is equality.

------
Icedcool
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up
for the genuinely amazing women in tech."

Awesome. A plea towards hiring based on quality, rather than quotas.

Towards a group that is judged by the content and quality of their character
rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination
through discrimination.

~~~
JimboOmega
So quotas are terrible, yes.

But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and
assumes this or that about her based on gender alone?

My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my
gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not
in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior,
needing more hand holding, giving me simpler tasks, that kind of thing.

It's subtle enough to make me constantly second guess myself, but it's
noticeable.

It happens in interviews, too. It's very easy to rationalize biases within
certain bounds. Those kind of things - and toxic environments - are what needs
to be corrected most in today's tech workplace.

Of course correcting toxic environments early in the pipeline would be the
best, because then the men that share those environments don't normalize them,
either! But it's not fair to ignore the adult realities of the current working
world and just dump all the blame on the early part of the pipeline.

~~~
Danihan
I believe that treating everyone as individuals, rather than as stereotypical
groups, is the only way forward. It's the only truly fair approach.

What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy
enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit?

If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is
true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hiring," instead of the current
"diversity-conscious" hiring? You don't have to get to know someone's
personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their
skill level and aptitude.

It worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to
use in tech?

[http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-
impact...](http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact..).

~~~
iainmerrick
_You don 't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make
a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude._

I agree, but how do you estimate their aptitude in an unbiased way? That
mostly rules out face-to-face conversations, which is what most companies use.

Aptitude tests? I feel like those have a bad reputation, at least in Bay Area
tech companies. Are there good tests we should be using? How do you customize
the test to fit your own company? To the extent that "cultural fit" is
important for effective teams (and isn't simply a way of excluding women,
black people, etc) how do you test for that?

~~~
Zyst
How about an artificially anonymized process. HR does know, or assumes, your
gender from receiving your CV. But from that point onward your identity is
anonymous.

For instance, HR creates a throw away email which will be used during the
hiring process to coordinate the rest of the tasks. The coding interviews
could use one of the many platforms we have for shared/same space coding with
an added chat box for talking your way through the problem so to say.

And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender or
how the candidate looks.

I think this would allow for a good level of blind testing, but would provide
some downsides in the side of cultural fit screening. It's a lot easier to
pretend you're not an asshole in asynchronous text-only communications.

I guess everything carries a trade off.

~~~
imron
> And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender
> or how the candidate looks.

It might make the situation worse:
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-
tria...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-
improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's very sad that "free from sexist, racist, ageist biases" is considered
"worse", surely?

Do you agree?

~~~
mLuby
The method (free from sexist…) is better but the outcome (employee similarity
to general population) is worse.

~~~
Caveman_Coder
I guess it really comes down to the ethical framework you accept as valid,
deontological or utilitarian...

------
msteffen
I worked at Google, and Alan Eustace, Google's most emphatic champion of
gender diversity when I worked there, repeatedly emphasized that Google
couldn't lower its hiring bar for women candidates, because that would hurt
the reputation of women already there

The main forms of gender-diversity outreach that I remember Google engaging in
were 1) programs for young girls, to introduce them to programming, 2)
programs for women in college, to advocate for their studying computer
science, and 3) the grace hopper conference for women who are engineers now.
All those seem in line with the author's suggestions.

This article (and the letter last week, and similar rhetoric) really feel like
they're attacking a strawman to me. I left a while ago, but have things
changed that much?

~~~
aoeuasdf1
Wouldn't it violate US equal-opportunity laws to lower the hiring bar for
women?

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Nope. Affirmative action towards historically marginalized groups is
explicitly permitted by the law, and in some instances there's even a duty to
do so (for .gov stuff mostly). There are some complexities and details to all
this, but generally speaking, affirmative action is legal in the US.

------
falcolas
The most unfortunate thing about this article is how often the author has to
say "I'm not a traitor" in different ways.

Regardless of the diversity issue, do we really value a culture where we
branding people with opinions in tech as traitors? Sure, she's preempting name
calling that may never occur - but that means we're in a culture of discussion
where being called a "trator" for expressing an opinion is even a possibility
in the first place!

------
CobrastanJorji
The author's post is odd. She's sick of "our" approach to diversity, by which
I assume from the headline she means "Google's", although that's not clearly
laid out in the text.

Her specific advice is:

> Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue
> a career in tech.

> Start a mentoring program.

> Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases.

These are all things Google tries to do. For instance, Google has a mandatory
class for interviewers about correcting subliminal biases. You may recall its
existence from the recent document suggesting that Google remove it.

------
stared
On a lighter tone, here are some lessons I've learnt at !!con (a conference by
Recurse Center aka Hacker School alumni):
[http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html)

tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming,
accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few
axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed
transgressors

Sure, not all of these things may scale, or be copy-pastable to workplace
environment.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Thanks for posting this. It was a really interesting read, and I think it's an
under valued point in these discussions that there are lots of small things we
could do better that add up in a big way.

------
KirinDave
One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected
technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues.

The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you
don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a
company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract
out.

I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem" people want to point to as
a source of the gender gap in hiring will become our primary issue when we
first iron out the issues with the atrittion and harassment we see for women
in the workplace.

As for gender essentialism, I think this woman has every right to her opinion
and I support her efforts, but I think she's approaching the problem wrong.
She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of
being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter (who has almost
certainly had positive modeling for a lot of other roles) isn't interested.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of
being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter... isn't interested.

And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in
hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part
of the process?

~~~
KirinDave
So you spend your days working arbitrary logic puzzles in a gross language
like Python? I know I'd have never gotten into this field.

It's so easy to say, "Gosh this confirms our stereotypes!" But even if there
are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that
doesn't really translate to "women are worse at programming and math."

~~~
hackinthebochs
Honestly, I would prefer if my days were spent doing logic puzzles. Most of it
is doing tedious uninteresting coding tasks, i.e. code that takes no insight
nor provides any intellectual stimulation. But the logic puzzles are what
initially drew me in. The "sexy" stuff in software engineering is built on a
boat load of unsexy behind the scenes. It's easy to be mislead.

>But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant
differences that doesn't really translate to...

True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're
not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles it could be torture.
Interest is related to aptitude in that those that are interested have the
inherent motivation to get good at it. I strongly believe that interest is
highly correlated with aptitude. That doesn't mean that those uninterested in
logic puzzles can't hack it, its just that they have to be very highly
motivated to learn. I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer
interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.

> in a gross language like Python

Brave words to utter on this site!

~~~
KirinDave
> True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're
> not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles

Here I am, not that type until my late 30s. I've been programming or trying to
since I was 5ish. And most folks who talk to, work with, or have worked for me
regard my technical skills quite highly.

If all you want is an endless stream of puzzles with no responsibility or
connection to reality, be a professional video gamer. The Minecraft folks, for
example.

I tried it for awhile, but I find the life of video gaming without any real
responsibility pretty empty.

> I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a
> young age if it doesn't come naturally.

Logic puzzles in a language founded on principle of anti-intellectualism is
not software engineering.

Maybe if they made things of issuing tests that's a better idea.

------
d--b
She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal
biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women
tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's
easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?

This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to
say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She could have gone with the stats: in a pool of candidates, you have 3% of
very good people. And in that same pool of candidates, you have 90% of men.
Given that there is not really any compelling reason that would explain why
women would be better or worse than men at engineering, only 0.3% of your
candidate pool are very good women. Plus given that pretty much every company
out there will try to retain their exceptional women worker (in the name of
diversity), exceptional women engineers are a rare sighting in the job market.
Hence the diversity issue cannot be solved by forcing people to hire women.

No need to involve personal stories about how teenage girls are more
interested in clothes than in assembly programming...

~~~
khazhoux
> She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like
> subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire
> our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something
> that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates
> against?

> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to
> say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.

~~~
d--b
Well 'lacking energy' and 'draining energy from others' is not exactly
factual...

~~~
turc1656
I think you mean that it is not easily quantifiable or provable with evidence.
That does not mean the statement is not true and accurate.

~~~
d--b
No I mean it's a subjective view from the boss that doesn't mean anything.

She could have said that they were procrastinating, or could have said that
they were consistently tired and whiny about it. Or maybe these particular
women did not want to work all their weekends away and complained about it. Or
it could mean they weren't cheering at the beer pong event. Who knows?

I'm just saying that 'women I hired lacked energy' is the kind of blanket
statement that overgeneralizes and that fans the vicious circle she described
as damaging below.

------
nthcolumn
Women are sick of being 'women in tech'. Being 'women speakers' at cons. They
just want to be judged on their merits. Quotas are a check balance FOR quality
not instead of. That you are finding and eliminating barriers to the best
candidates in the hiring process because if you were doing it properly then
there would be a balanced hire reflective of society at large. There should be
no need for the quotas because as we all know there is no scientific evidence
of any gender-based aptitude advantage. However it is evident from the numbers
and in the wrongheaded attitudes of some people that there is some
considerable adhesion to outdated, backward stereotypes. Yonatan Zunger also
ex-Googler explains the diversity policy when he replied to the memo:
[https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-
man...](https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-
manifesto-1e3773ed1788)

I concur with him 100% and find it extremely frustrating that these old
prejudices persist among otherwise intelligent people.

------
danans
> Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware
> stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was
> going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I
> did.

This seems like false reasoning. She is using an intentionally biased sample
(the candidate pipeline in a narrow subspecialty of software engineering) to
draw conclusions about the larger software engineering candidate pipeline,
which actually has a higher representation of women - not high overall - but
higher than both her subspecialty and more importantly, higher than the
current representation of women at tech companies.

> If we increase the inflow of women into tech education, we will
> automatically increase diversity in hiring.

This is not enough. She would have us believe that companies are automata that
will just adapt to the changing composition of the pipeline with no other
action needed. It's an absolution of corporate responsibility for diversity
(that perhaps reflects her self interest as a founder/executive). But
companies are not automata, they are entities with their own inertial biases,
and in the case of large companies, these biases often are often rooted in the
communities from which the companies sprang.

Companies, especially major tech companies, are major cultural influencers -
their businesses are based in part on the power of their cultural influence,
and with that comes disproportionate responsibility to act, especially when
society at large has not been successful enough at solving the pipeline
problem.

~~~
SilkRoadie
It is not false reasoning. She is relating to her specific experiences. Where
I work 80-90% of applications are from men. We now have 2 women on our team
but it is still male dominated. The women are there because they were best we
could find when we was hiring just like everyone else we have employed. They
have earned it with their knowledge and skill.

Employing for any other reason will likely demoralise the team because they
will likely under perform. They will likely under perform because instead of
finding the best person, you find the best person based on a subset of
arbitrary equality rules.

There is no reason why 50% of tech jobs cannot go to women. The main barrier
we come across is there aren't enough skilled women applying. I think the
author hit the nail on the head. It reflects my experiences.

You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so they
can lead the way on equality. To have equality for equalities sake. It's
wrong. Where there are descrepancies between genders we should ask why they
exist.

Take child care, the majority of people in childcare are women. Should we be
passing over women with years of experience and excellent qualifications to
bump the number of men in the industry?

I would love to see a few guys at my kids nursery. However they should be
there because they were the best for job. I would pull my kid out of the
nursery if they passed over better candidates to fix this gender ratio. I want
the best outcome for my children.

The same is true with business. Merit is the measure that matters. More women
in tech will lead to more meriting jobs in the industry, which in turn will
lead to the male/female ratio improving.

~~~
danans
> You appear be asking tech companies to pass over excellent candidates so
> they can lead the way on equality.

That is absolutely not what I said. I'm saying tech companies should take
active measures to counter the historical bias against _qualified_ under-
represented candidates, while simultaneously engaging in corporate efforts to
influence the pipeline to produce more qualified candidates from those under-
represented groups. If you don't think that such a historical bias against
qualified female candidates exists at all stages of the candidate pipeline,
from primary school through to job interviews, then we disagree on the basic
assumptions.

The author is insisting that the sorts of efforts I described should not be
the responsibility of corporations, but rather should be the result of
virtuous charitable actions of individuals volunteering their time. This is
like arguing that corporations should do no charitable giving to fight hunger,
or fund environmental initiatives, and it should be left solely to charitable
individuals to feed the hungry or advocate for a cleaner environment (I
realize there are significant number of people who also hold that belief).

Fighting these sorts of large complex problems takes a lot of resources
coordinated and guided by a set of values. Today, for better or for worse,
those things lie in the hands of corporations. We could argue about whether
that should be the case (i.e. perhaps government should be the responsible
party), but it is manifestly the case today.

------
jpfed
>Feminist outbursts are driving even the most genuine of men away from us.

I think this depends on what "genuine" refers to in this sentence. Many issues
have loud and/or shrill advocates on any or all sides, but that has _nothing
to do_ with the actual merits of any side. Anyone who is seriously interested
in arriving at the best estimates of truth or utility available should
disregard whether or not advocates are shrill and simply focus on facts.

~~~
humanrebar
When part of your pitch relies on trust and goodwill (open dialogues, open
corporate culture, leaders worth voting for, etc.), there is a component you
cannot neglect: trust.

If the pitch is "the future will be welcoming of all kinds of people from all
perspectives unless you offend the mob, then good luck", your pitch is weaker.

------
TarpitCarnivore
My one complaint with this is the authors tone as it relates to her daughters
interest in design. I understand the main focus of diversity in tech is in
engineering, but it kind of felt it was implying she wouldn't have a place in
tech by going into design.

If the point of this is to fix the problems from the bottom, or the
'pipeline', wouldn't some of that also have to do with breaking down the
stigma that programming is all that matters in tech?

~~~
ballenf
Or to flip around your statement: it's a special kind of out-of-touch
arrogance to assume that programming is the mecca of career paths. Great way
to judge anyone who chooses a different field.

While we're at it, let's make sure everyone in other fields know they're
victims of discrimination and if only they were strong enough to make their
own decisions they'd be engineers.

------
jorgemf
> I have told my daughter it isn’t optional to learn coding and that she must
> stick with it until she’s good at it and then she can choose not to do it

This is what I don't understand of society. If someone is bad at something and
I think it is important, then I force them to learn it. They will hate it more
in the future. All those hours wasted instead of letting her doing what she is
good at, and improving that skill.

Just for the records, few years ago it was important for the woman to know how
to do the house work and things like cooking and sew. I see no difference with
the coding thing. She has tried, she doesn't like it and she is bad at it. Let
her move on and do something she will enjoy.

~~~
averagewall
Absolutely not. I never liked math at school. I was bad at it too. But now
it's a major part of my career and I love it. I would never have this
opportunity if adults had let me just do what I felt like when I was a child.

Children are too young to make decisions for their future. Adults might not
always be right but they're better at it than children. That's why school is
compulsory, not "if the child feels like going"

~~~
jorgemf
There is a difference between having a bad teacher and not liking something.
You always loved math, you didn't like how teachers were teaching you math. I
have been a teacher, I know what a difference a teacher can do.

------
hnnsj
Yes, yes, yes. You have to go to the root of the problem. It's impossible to
solve the problem by (only) changing the recruitment processes. It starts way
earlier than that. You can't expect to have the current gender distribution in
education and job applications that we have today and then expect the numbers
to magically even out in recruitment no matter what policies the companies
have. It basically doesn't matter what way you measure differences in
programming interest, at every level there are vastly more men than women that
are interested in programming, let alone has anything more than cursory
experience with it.

I believe that can be changed. I don't think it's biological. But the changes
needed are wide and deep. If you want it to change, you have to actually
change something about culture. That also means letting go of things you are
familiar and comfortable with, maybe even some thing you really like. Gender
norms need to change. I'm not so sure a lot of people even actually want that.
Many seem to want to fix some negative symptoms, but not fix the root cause.

~~~
averagewall
Why does it need to change? Maybe both men and women are happy in their common
jobs? Whatever the reason, nurses seem to choose nursing and programmers
choose programming so they all get what they want.

There may be a sub-minority of women who want to be programmers but are
discriminated out of it. That's not good but it's surely a tiny fraction of
humans. Not worth changing everyone else's job for.

~~~
hnnsj
Do everyone seem to be fine with it? Why do we have these massive discussions
about economic and work equality, then? Obviously a lot of people think it's a
major problem. I think there's clear evidence for that. It's just that, in my
opinion, most people are not really prepared to do what needs to be done to
change, they'd rather just try in vain to treat the negative symptoms.

------
iainmerrick
This seems to be another version of: "the pipeline of potential talent from
colleges has very few women, so if we go out of our way to hire extra women,
we'll reduce our overall hiring quality. The college pipeline needs to be
fixed first."

Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often:
_hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix
the college pipeline in future._ If tech companies are seen to be diverse,
welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested
in tech in the first place.

~~~
Danihan
That a big maybe, it's completely unproven. Maybe hiring slightly less
qualified people just because of their demographic group will cause all sorts
of strange resentments across the board. That seems to be what our current
hiring protocols are doing now.

------
qub1t
I'm going to illustrate why I think the points brought up by this post have at
minimum some level of validity with a toy example, that takes sex out of the
equation completely.

Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of
individual programming skills, and assigned them _randomly_ into two
categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) =
E(skill of a candidate in B)

Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst,
and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking
that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates
from B)

There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one
individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from
B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number
from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get
the result that A is on average better than B.

In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, _given the current ratio
of men to women in tech_ we would expect to see a skill disparity in the
average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women.

Edited to add some further points:

1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills
are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all
have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal
experience, but I have seen people make this argument.

2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing
process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B
successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long
as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill]
then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero
correlation.

3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I
think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate
pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like
Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill
difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level
because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like
google.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Re 3) it mightn't make an appreciable difference to the skill set as a whole,
but it's sexist.

Why do something sexist that didn't have a benefit.

How is it OK to respond to a candidate for hiring "sorry you're the wrong sex"
if they're otherwise the best candidate. That's completely wrong IMO.

------
guiomie
"Men who reported to me liked and respected me. Men who managed me liked and
respected me."

Starting straight off with this makes me wonder if it's a perception she had
or if it was the reality. The majority of people to not tell someone if they
dont like them or dont respect them.

~~~
apk-d
Most people are entirely capable of reading the general attitude others have
towards them. We occasionally make mistakes but a large sample goes a long way
("Jerry respects me" vs "most people at work respect me"). Is there any
rational reason to think she's wrong?

------
cylinder
Is anyone aware of how many female engineers come out of Iran? This has
everything to do with education quality. Our math education is an absolute
joke in the US, even mine and I went to a supposedly amazing public school.
Add in cultural biases such as parents and teachers pushing bright girls to
"girly" fields instead of math and you end up like this. Then in typical
American fashion we try to impose quotas or other bandages at the endpoint
rather than fixing the system itself.

~~~
arkitaip
I dislike the blog post for being poorly written but one of the author's
points is that it's too late to attack diversity during recruiting because
your pool of women applicants will already be tiny due to attrition. She is
advocating approaching women in college but at you point out, even that's way
too late. You can't have a society that instills shitty values into people
from their first breath and then expect to undo all those years of mindfuckery
because you work at a progressive place and are really passionate about
diversity.

------
interlocutor
Good article, but I was disappointed by her implying that "women lack energy".
That's too broad a statement. The women she hired may have lacked energy but
you can't generalize based on that small sample.

I agree that we need to fix the problem at the source, i.e., encourage more
girls (actually, kids in general, why limit it to girls?) to be interested in
tech while they are still in middle and high schools.

There is ample evidence that there is a cultural problem in the United States
in this regard. The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement:
"Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in
the United States." See
[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015)
Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in
the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern
Europe. So there is something in the US culture that makes American women not
want to take up tech.

The diversity memo doesn't address the fact that more women take tech jobs
when impediments are removed, as evidenced by the larger percentage of women
in tech jobs in other countries.

------
narrator
The central idea at the core of all the diversity ideology is that everybody
can do anything, they just have to try and people who fail to become Google
engineers or sports stars only have themselves to blame, or even better, since
people are loath to blame themselves, some other dominant group.

Naturally, the only way to solve this dillema is for the less successful group
to seize power after which they will be able to achieve everything they ever
dreamed of.

------
RealityNow
Great article. Sad that if this article had been written by a man, it would
not be getting any attention and the comments would be calling the author
"sexist".

Here are my 2 cents as a male (thus my opinion on the issue automatically
doesn't carry any weight to most of you). Women chose to pursue tech less than
men (just look at any open source project), and this starts way before
college. I took CS in high school - not because anybody encouraged me, but
because I taught myself how to code as a kid in order to make videogames and
cheat at them - and there were very few women in that class.

That's why it boggles my mind when people act as if discrimination is the
reason why women are underrepresented in tech. Girls are underrepresented in
introductory CS courses in high school, meaning they're clearly not even
choosing to pursue the field as much as men. You can't claim discrimination if
they're not even signing up for the introductory classes. And anyone who's
taken a CS course in college knows that at least half the students there have
been coding since they were kids (I graduated a while ago so I'd imagine
that's even more the case now) - again, not because anybody told them to, but
because they sought that knowledge out themselves - which can be intimidating
to newcomers who've never seen "Hello, World".

Videogames are probably the main reason why men pursue CS more than women. The
naive feminist will say "videogames are targeted towards boys". Yes they are -
but that's because videogame developers are predominantly male, and game
developers are more likely to create games that they themselves would enjoy.
Videogames being male-dominated is simply a reflection of gendered biological
differences, not some conspiracy to exclude women.

Any sort of discrimination on the basis of gender/race is a problem, that's a
given and nobody will dispute that. But it should not be considered a problem
that women choose to pursue tech less than men, just like it's not considered
a problem that men are less likely to pursue nursing, primary/secondary
education, psychiatry, fashion, and yoga teaching. Men who like yoga don't
give a fuck about the underrepresentation of men in yoga classes.

At the end of the day, this "diversity" debate gets way too much attention.
There used to be a time when the focus was on the tech and doing cool things,
not what people looked like.

~~~
urahara
You're completely missing one of the main points of the whole gender
discrimination discourse: that there are strong social influences that prevent
women from going to tech long before your 'before college', as well as during
college and after college. There are many turning points at which girls are
influenced the way that discourages them from tech instead of helping them to
develop interest in it. So yes, discrimination is definitely the reason why
women are underrepresented in tech, even if there would not be 50/50 women/men
ratio without discrimination. You can claim discrimination if the environment
subtly discourages you with constantly signalling that you shouldn't pursue a
certain path. And yes, men who'd like to pursue 'non-male' careers also often
choose not to because of the social pressure. And no, the diversity debate
doesn't 'get too much attention'. It gets significantly less attention than it
should, given the scale of this problem and devastating effects the lack of
diversity has on societies, working environments, women, men, children -
basically, any social group.

~~~
RealityNow
Of course there are strong social influences - little boys are given toy
trucks while little girls are given dolls. But that's not the same thing as
discrimination in hiring and the workforce, which is what these affirmative
action policies tackle.

> "And no, the diversity debate doesn't 'get too much attention'. It gets
> significantly less attention than it should"

First of all, it's not even a "debate" as the memo has shown. It's a one-sided
emotional crusade against the opposition, and you're not allowed to disagree
with the hivemind.

Why is it only considered a "problem" and attention-worthy when women are
underrepresented? Nobody gives a shit about men being underrepresented in
certain professions, or women being underrepresented in the trades. There's a
clear double standard here.

~~~
urahara
These early social influences are a very significant part of the whole
diversity/discrimination story and of what the diversity policies are trying
to solve. The best ways to improve diversity and fix gender biases are still
‘debatable’. But speaking about the ‘memo’, this particular document is
incorrect to the level it doesn’t deserve the debate. Despite the author
claimed he created it “all in the name of open discussion”, he mainly created
a hostile environment for his coworkers, which is unacceptable (and the fact
he didn’t even understand that doesn’t excuse him). I agree with this comment
on the ‘memo’ story, which is by far the most sane one:
[https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-
man...](https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-
manifesto-1e3773ed1788) Men are underrepresented in certain professions for
sure (and it is a part of the diversity problem), but the current discussion
is about underrepresentation in tech, and white men are definitely not the
main subject to it (so I don't see any double standards here).

------
perfectstorm
Finally someone is talking like a matured person about this whole issue. If
you really wanted to fix this issue, you've to fix it at the source. i.e
encourage girls to take up engineering courses in college.

I went to college in 2005 and there was only 1 girl who graduated with me from
my engineering class. There were tons of girls/women in my optional classes
(Geography, History) but very few (2 or 3) in some of the core engineering
classes.

You can't fix this by sending women to coding bootcamps. It's like - what we
call - a bandaid fix i.e applying patches without fixing it at the root level.

I've tried my best to convince my cousin to take up a career in STEM but she
refuse to even consider that possibility. She claims Math is too hard for her
and is choosing nursing as her major. I'm sure she will be a good nurse and
there's nothing wrong with nursing as a career. In the end it's her choice and
all I can do is talk and try to convince her.

------
bachaco
Everyone seems to agree that only the best should be hired. But may I ask
isn't that a form of discrimination as well?. Being the best in an intelectual
activity such as programming is highly corelated with the level of
intelligence of an individual. No matter how hard you try if your IQ is below
80 you will never enter in Google. I even dare to say that even if you are in
the normal range of intelligene your chances of entering in Google are still
very low. Isn't intelligence a biological attribute in the same way of the
color of the skin or a gender?. Who decided its own IQ level before they were
born?.

~~~
cjcenizal
I understand what you're saying but I think this perspective may be mis-
framing the issue. One immutable requirement to a solution to the company
diversity problem is to form an effective company. Another requirement is to
ensure applicants don't suffer discrimination either during the hiring process
or the employment period. Ensuring the entire pool of humanity has an equal
opportunity to work anywhere / do anything is incontrovertibly not a
requirement.

------
nodesocket
If this were written by a male, do we really think the reception would be so
positive?

> To solve diversity, we must start at the source of the problem — encouraging
> women to pursue engineering in college!

That is absolutely right. The solution is not to give people who aren't
qualified or deserving jobs just so companies can fill a quota or prevent
media backlash. Hire the best candidates for positions.

------
sjg007
An interesting point in the post is about the Google interview itself, and how
she had to appeal in order to hire candidates who then turned out to each have
a big impact. Google calls this the false negative problem but it seems to be
a big problem. Google itself has already have shown that GPA and academic
credentials do not correlate with job performance.

------
scierama
TL; DR Woman startup CEO fires women, hires men who work for peanuts because
men love coding and thus are higher "energy"; takes advantage of recent
controversy to get free advertising on HN. Side note, said woman lacks
professionalism and uses profanity in an appeal to the peanuts working,
20twenties'ish men reading the article.

------
magic_beans
> Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in
> our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse,
> they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team.
> Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go.

This is one of the most disturbing thing's I've ever read in an article
proclaiming to promote change in the tech gender gap.

What exactly is this supposed to mean? What exactly does it mean to "lack
energy" and to "drain energy" from other people? How on EARTH did she come to
this conclusion? And WHY would this be a problem inherent to women? This tells
me more about her management style than it does about any woman at her
company.

This woman is NOT someone we should be listening to when it comes to closing
the gender gap in software engineering.

~~~
xenihn
>What exactly does it mean to "lack energy" and to "drain energy" from other
people?

Yeah, it's annoying that she's forcing readers to interpret that. I would
guess that she means that they weren't able to perform their job
responsibilities adequately, and others had to pick up the slack.

~~~
morgtheborg
I assume it means they didn't want to work the hours and/or play games at work
with their co-workers.

~~~
xenihn
>they didn't want to work the hours

Sadly, that could still fall under what I said.

------
euske
I'm going to ask a practical advice here. As a male teacher, what can I do in
a classroom to encourage more female students for math/logic/programming? I
sometimes talk about how there are great female software developers out there
and how gender shouldn't be hindering their talent, but that's about it. And
when a female student isn't performing well and being bummed, I can't do much
other than general vague-sounding encouragement. At the same time, I don't
want to sound too pushy. I live in a very sexist country compared to the US
(Japan) and there's not much advice on this kind of things from other
educators. Is there anything else that I can do to help the cause?

------
ksec
My Biggest grasp with the whole thing, ( If you think this is a well done post
), is that Intelligent and Wise have little correlation.

It takes a person with GRE 800 to figure all this blatantly obvious answer.

Now before you downvote me, it is also obvious this diversity topic is
especially a problem in Silicon Valley ( Because most people in Silicon Valley
are Liberal ? ) and mostly in US.

We dont see this being blow up in huge news anywhere else, the US neighbour
Canada, or anywhere else in Europe.

Why is there such a difference? And it seems you aren't even allow to talk
about it in US. Where in most places inside EU they will likely have an open
discussion without Calling an All Hands meeting off.

Note: Never been to US. So there may be some cultural difference i am not
getting.

~~~
urahara
Not sure about Canada and Europe, but many countries just didn't reach the
level of development where this discussion can start. They are not grown up
and are stuck on the lower level, having problems like absence of basic human
rights and protections.

------
lazy_throwaway1
I overheard a discussion between my HRG and department head, the discussion
was about hiring temporary replacements for female employees who were on
maternity leave, the HRG told that approval had to come from the country head
and it will take almost 3 months because of a hiring freeze, and each case has
to be dealt individually, the HOD was worried at this and said this sort of
rules will hurt female hiring, the HRG was schocked to hear those words and
remainded him that, all his reportees including him has an appraisal goal for
diversity and he doesn't have an option

------
brightball
I can't remember who said it, but there is a great quote that applies to
management in general that seems to apply here.

"As soon as a good measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

~~~
gaius
Goodhart's Law
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law)

------
alistproducer2
At this point, I find these discussions tiresome. Enough with the politics on
HN. Everyone has picked a side and the last place a mind will be changed is
the context free world of Internet arguments. The fact that these post get so
many votes doesn't mean they're valuable discussion. It just means that even
among the supposedly enlightened, we are attracted to drama just like everyone
else. I wish the mods would do more to kill these garbage posts.

------
unityByFreedom
Interesting. She's saying something different from Damore,

> "These women show up at work and perform not as great as we want them to"

Damore said his female coworkers were equally capable.

> "After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire
> women just because we have to"

It sounds like somebody in her chain misunderstood or misapplied Google's
hiring practices. From what Google and Damore said, all the women and men
there are equally capable.

------
goodbye-
So masking the interview... doesn't mean women will do better. You might be
surprised why if your disposition leans towards social conspiracy theories.

[http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-
mas...](http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-
in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/)

------
unclebucknasty
> _" In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it
> up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."_

And, why aren't these genuinely amazing women in tech otherwise being found?

How is it that things are so easily "f'd up" for them?

~~~
unlmtd1
Dilution of merit.

~~~
unclebucknasty
> _Dilution of merit._

Well, my question was rhetorical, but your answer underscores my point: when a
man performs poorly, the "merit" of other men is not "diluted".

And, it certainly doesn't lead to the risk of other "genuinely amazing" men
going undiscovered, which doesn't seem to be a problem in the first-place. In
fact, it would be silly to make any of these assertions about men.

Such statements only apply to women and other "out-groups". By uttering them,
the author is making the argument against her own case.

------
unit91
Can anyone provide insight as to how transgendered people count in the "women
in tech" discussion? As I see it, there's now a quadrant of biological
(fe)males and psychological (fe)males. Would a woman in tech mean only
biologically and psychologically female, or also biologically female, also
psychologically female, depends on who's counting?

I ask only because I see this already hyper-sensitive topic very soon becoming
nearly impossible to discuss without somebody taking offense due to the
combined effects of the biological _and_ psychological gender sensitivities.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
So to start with, don't conflate sex with gender.

Next, I'll make it really easy for you: women are women, and you can just
count them as one group. That doesn't mean we should erase away the specific
challenges and bigotry trans women face, but we also shouldn't be forcing them
into a separate "quadrant" of women.

~~~
unit91
Wait...this didn't make it easy at all. When you said "women are women" were
you speaking in terms of gender or sex? After that you said "trans women", so
I take it you mean gender only? If so, does that mean a biological female who
identifies as a male does not count as a woman in tech?

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
Gender.

A trans man is a man.

------
li4ick
>Sooner or later, some such opinions get out there

Very carefully chosen words, regarding the Memo.

------
likelynew
To everyone agreeing with this post, I will ask you a question: Will YOU join
a company with 40% females or 10% females with everything same. If the answer
is former, there is a real value in hiring more females.

------
j45
Is diversity only defined as gender diversity?

~~~
alexandercrohde
I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What
minorities need protection and rebalancing?

We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or
gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And
what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men
back up to parity?

She didn't have answers, which to me just made me wonder if she was fighting
for a vision of equality, or promoting her in-group.

~~~
arkitaip
Diversity is intersectional and people who actually fight for diversity
absolutely talk about and work so that Mexicans, Asians, latinos, the
disabled, gay people, trans people, etc, etc are given equal opportunities and
treatment in the workplace. There are literally thousands of organizations in
just the US advocating for workplace diversity for pretty much any and every
minority you can imagine. I suspect the problem is your "we" has little to no
contact with minorities and a even poorer understanding of their everyday
struggles.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I disapprove of this response on a number of levels. One of the biggest
reasons I avoid these discussions is ironically, the "safe-space" crowd has
managed to offend, insult, and ignore me more effectively than almost any
other group, and ironically, they do so because of my race and gender [white,
male].

Working in tech I work with probably 80% minorities (Indians, Asians, women,
gays, Iranians, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Russians, one Venezualen, one
Egyptian). There was at least one time I was the only white guy on a team of
9.

Most of those I asked did not feel discriminated against.

So you tell your sob stories all you want, but the reality is most americans
couldn't afford $500 in an emergency, and however bad you think skin color X
or gender Y has it, that gulf pales in comparison to the problem of class-ism
in America (and I don't here any SJWs speaking to that, and so I really have
to question the motives at play).

And you're just dishonest to us and yourself if you are insinuating you, or
Google, or SJW-crowd cares 1/10th as much about hiring an proportionate number
of hispanics/jews/ugly-people/tatooed-people as it does a proportionate number
of women.

------
exabrial
Bravo! Every point here is spot on!

------
graycat
Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt, scars, bruises, etc. Believing that
stuff was by far the worst mistake of my life. Strong advice: Don't do that.
For all the attempts at _gender diversity_ in STEM fields, f'get about it or,
except in very rare cases as in the OP, suffer from pain to the agonies of the
damned to serious harm to your life (I did) and worse, maybe death, literally,
for the associated female.

I'll give details below, but, bluntly, bottom line, as essentially parents
with any insight and objectivity at all with children of both genders learn
quickly, in short, right from the crib, with rare exceptions, the girls are
interested in people and the boys, in things. Sorry, that's just the way it
is. They are BORN that way, and the difference does NOT go away with time.
There is a small fraction of exceptions in both genders, but otherwise that's
the fact, Jack. Sorry 'bout that. A really simple argument shows that the
difference has held strongly for at least 40,000 years. Gads, from some recent
research, the difference even holds for Rhesus monkeys which shows that it has
held for some millions of years.

I tried that: As a college sophomore she told me "Women don't just have to be
cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career." Well, since she had
been Valedictorian of her high school class, a year earlier in the freshman
trigonometry course I was teaching, had been the best student in the class,
with twice as many test points as the next best student, and was well on her
way to _Summa Cum Laude_ , PBK, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and NSF Fellow, all of
which she got, I believed her. Wrong. Dumb.

Later I was on the team that did IBM's artificial intelligence language
KnowledgeTool. Well I understood the language, and on our team we had some
very bright and aggressive guys, young men, who had written some early sample
programs. KnowledgeTool was a pre-processor to IBM's PL/I, a huge language.

From one of the world's best research universities, she got her Ph.D. in
mathematical sociology, with lots of multi-variate statistics, with matrix
theory, analysis of variance and experimental design, hypothesis testing, SPSS
usage, etc. All of that was easy for her.

So, I showed her how to use our home PC to logon to my office VM/CMS account,
use the editor XEDIT, use the scripting language Rexx, and right away she
wrote a nice, useful Rexx program to report on disk space usage. Then I gave
her a one hour tutorial in KnowledgeTool. A week later she had a nice, first
sample program running. It did what she wanted. I gave her a 30 minute lecture
explaining the intended role of rules as _knowledge representation_ , and two
weeks later she had fully in line with the idea of rules and knowledge
representation by far the best early KnowledgeTool program I ever saw.

She was genuinely brilliant. She beat me like a rented mule in Scrabble. I
kept asking her to play so that I could get better, and I did, but she got
better faster than I did until the difference was absurd. The OP mentions GRE
scores of 800 -- that's exactly the score I got on the Math GRE. So, I was
bright enough, but she was brilliant, plenty good in math, and much better
than me in verbal and essentially every other non-STEM subject.

She was brilliant and was a super fast, brilliant student at KnowledgeTool
with essentially no instruction at all, no text, no notes, just did it.

A STEM field diversity success? Heck no. She hated the STEM fields, including
computing. Her view of the STEM fields was "I'm not that kind of person.".
What she wanted was "A career that helps people.", and that mostly meant
volunteer work. The idea of working for money was an anathema to her -- so she
had no future in business.

To get a job, she kept trying the STEM fields, e.g., with IBM. She was
miserable, desperately miserable. In a training class, she made the highest
score in the class, but she was miserable. She went into a depression and
clinical depression, was trying to recover with her mother at her family farm,
and soon her body was found floating in a lake.

Diversity? A grand failure.

To believe her "women can do things, too" for anything like the world of work,
business, technology, computing, or the STEM fields, she could do it, best in
class, for a while but HATED it and too soon found it fatal. Instead she
desperately wanted a career that "helped people".

Bluntly, she was interested in people and not in things, technology, applied
math, etc.

Are we learning yet?

Can some small fraction of women, as in the OP, do well in the STEM fields?
Yup. Did I mention a "small fraction"?

Generally for "diversity", do everyone, men, women, universities, companies,
society, a huge favor -- f'get about it. Certainly don't push it, encourage
it, urge women to get into fields with _things_ instead of _people_. Don't do
that. To do that is dumb de dumb dumb, dumb, harmful, and sometimes fatal.

Instead? Let women pick their own directions. Stop pushing women to be like a
dog that walks on only two legs -- usually they can do it, but they nearly
never do it well.

For this diversity stuff, to borrow from an Indiana Jones movie character
Marcus Brody “You are meddling with forces you cannot possibly comprehend.”.

I tried, HARD. Biggest mistake of my life. Diversity good? Don't believe that
stuff, not for your sisters, girlfriends, wife, or daughters. DON'T do that.
The author of the OP? She's one of the rare exceptions. Leave it at that.

------
luckytobby
Hiring quotas are bad. Let's have quotas in engineering schools instead... O_o

------
curun1r
One thing that's becoming increasingly clear to me is that lumping everything
under a single "diversity" label is becoming counterproductive. There are many
types of diversity that we should be striving for and most have their own
causes, concerns and there's limited overlap between the two. And, more
importantly, the actions we need to take to address them are different.

Racial diversity is mostly inter-tribal. All jokes about the "I have black
friends" protestations aside, the percentage of people who socialize primarily
within their own race is high. It's very easy for people to go through life
without making a deep connection with someone from a different race.

Gender diversity is very much intra-tribal. Most men still have very close
relationships with women and vice versa. Whether it's mothers/fathers,
brothers/sisters, girlfriends/boyfriends, wives/husbands or just close
acquaintances, it's very difficult to go through life without caring deeply
for someone of the opposite gender.

At my last company, we didn't have any explicit diversity quotas, but we tried
harder to hire women and minorities because we felt it would add a diversity
of perspectives that would make our products appeal to more people. Trying
harder meant things like giving phone screens to candidates we might have
otherwise rejected based solely on the resume or trying to arrange an
interview panel that we felt would appeal to the candidate and, should they
pass the interview, make them choose us over other companies. We never
"lowered our bar" and accepted minority/female candidates that were
unqualified.

But we started to notice an interesting phenomenon with how we composed our
interview panels. When we had minority employees interview minority
candidates, the results were good. Candidates tended to choose us more often,
tended to be more comfortable in interviews and it was meaningful to our
interviewers that we were making an effort and, in a way, validating their
value to the company. The same cannot be said for when we had our female
employees interview female candidates. They almost always found fault with and
opposed hiring the candidate. It got so ridiculous that the male interviewers
would often get on IM before the post-interview decision meeting so we could
have our decision made before letting the women on the panel weigh in.
Otherwise (and somewhat ironically), without providing that unified front and
appearance of certainty, the women on our interview panels felt less heard and
didn't feel like their input was appreciated. When we equivocated in that
meeting, they'd notice and their opposition would be all the more sure.

And that's just one example of a concern that's different when considering the
two most-scrutinized forms of diversity. There are many other forms of
diversity that we should be striving for too...age diversity, socio-economic
diversity, language diversity (related to, but not the same as racial
diversity...a Russian speaker is still considered to be white)...even
something as rarely-considered as diversity of physical attractiveness will
lead to a team that's more resilient and has diversity of insight on the
various subjects the business needs to consider to succeed. And each of these
forms of diversity requires specific considerations be made during the hiring
and review processes. Too many of the discussions on diversity lack the nuance
necessary to improve the situation. We need to drop the generic "diversity"
label and start discussing specifics of each kind of diversity.

------
peterwwillis
People are still trying to make weak links between biology and interest in a
subject, as if there are some mysterious laws of nature that link work to body
chemistry. There's no overwhelming scientific evidence proving this.

Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest
in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to
stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all
the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the
barriers they'll face when they get there.

A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work)
could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now
that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by
the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at
parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different
kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and
address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach
parity in tech employment, they would actually have to _want_ to reach parity,
and fight for it.

Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to
change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the
exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually
allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the
system to account for a perceived natural imbalance.

In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist
states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have
greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified
the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy,
and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to
achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a
living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed.

What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today?
Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their
access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc.
Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their
gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and
other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all
this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working
in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!

Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle
anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-
crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where
creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For
a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform
logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats.

To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a
field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same
challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At
the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western
society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in
between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a
paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers.

Can someone please tell me why a woman would _want_ to work in tech in the
first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in
tech?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There's no evidence linking, for example, testosterone levels to bone and
muscle mass?

Or progesterone levels to compassion and nurturing desires?

I think you need to look a little harder.

Of course more complex skills/desires/abilities are going to have more complex
biological causation; though if you can prove otherwise, go ahead.

------
whipoodle
It has been kind of strange to watch the diversity programs and the
conversations around it, because it all seems partially designed to sorta try
to fix the problems, but also not be confrontational or force any hard
questions to be asked/answered.

It seems more important to do something, and to be seen doing something, than
to get real about what will work, and what won't, and why.

~~~
stlHusker
People have been using this tactic for ages, whether it be for political,
professional or personal gains.

The software engineer who is rewarded for putting out the fires, when in
reality they are a serial arsonist...

Modern progressivism ([https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-
liberal...](https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism))
...

So on and so forth...

No one wants to put in the real, hard work and society continues to reward the
facade.

------
rbanffy
Funny... Many others were flagged. This one, for some odd reason, wasn't.

Go figure.

Ref:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992859)

------
mberning
A truly revolutionary idea in this era of authoritarian social justice causes.

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
In what way are social justice causes authoritarian?

~~~
reitanqild
Not in itself. I'll even sometimes step up myself and at some point managed to
get my boss to hire the girl who cleaned our offices since she was qualified
only hadn't been considered since she was Polish.

The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences
(wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.

~~~
Frondo
I'm going to push back on the critique of shaming. It's literally the only
consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have. It bears no
force of law. It creates no consequence directly except for a little
discomfort on the part of the recipient.

Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or
centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people
they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with?

The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo
that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.

~~~
msla
Shaming by some groups is a badge of honor: If I'm hated by a certain
unpopular political group, that's a real point in my favor in some regions.
It's credibility you can't buy. And it doesn't matter if the group which hates
me is powerful, as long as they're hated in turn by the people I want
credibility with.

The only way shaming hurts me is if the group doing the shaming is powerful
among people I care about. Thus shaming is an expression of power, and a use
of social force which must come from groups which have power.

~~~
Powerofmene
This goes back to that old adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

------
JelteF
What I find really weird is that this post is at the bottom of the frontpage,
even though it has the most upvotes of the entire frontpage (443 at time of
writing) and achieved this in only 2 hours. This was the same case for the
article containing the 10 page manifesto from last week:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895)

Could @dang or some other moderator shed some light on why these specific
posts are disapearing from the front page so fast? Because this seems like a
failure of the ranking algorithm.

~~~
frinxor
was wondering the same. the explanation i can think of is that people are
flagging this and the algo lowers flagged posts?

its better than the alternative of @dang and friends manually moving this item
down/off the front page.

------
unlmtd1
Google is obsolete.

~~~
arkitaip
I wish I could be as obsolete as Google. God, I might even start believing
that you exist for Google level of obsolesce. Amen.

------
rootedbox
Poorly written. Also does not contain facts to back up what she see's in the
market.

I think this article just shows more that CEO's and upper management lack the
facts to properly asses their own hiring pipeline and what may be the actual
problem to their hiring diversity.

