

Why Startups Should Try to Hire Women - christiekoehler
http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/08/04/why-startups-should-try-to-hire-women/

======
wheels
This didn't ever really get to the "Why?" part. It just basically says that
the opposite is stupid.

My theory: humans behave differently, and generally more civilly, in
environments where they (subconsciously) believe they have a chance of meeting
a partner. Heck, part of the reason I went to a liberal arts school instead of
a technical school was the fact that 4 years in an 80% male environment (which
was the case at the specific school that was in the front-running) sounded
rather drab.

What's actually unclear to me is if those social dynamics, as opposed to the,
let's call them "football team" dynamics, objectively produce better results
in a startup. It may be that the sort of bravado that emerges in football-
team-ish environments is useful to a startup. But then to swing the
hypothetical pendelum again, it might be easier to hire for a company that's
more enjoyable to work at, even if the things that made it enjoyable would be
a net minus in isolation. I'd posit that it is somewhat variable on the
specific set of folks working there; i.e. some employees would flourish in one
environment and others in its converse.

~~~
americandesi333
Sorry to hear that you chose your 4 years of school based on meeting someone
from the opp gender. Hoped that worked out for you :)

Have to say that your theory seems shortsighted to me and does not apply to
top performers of either genders, especially if you look at professional
environment. I have met quite a few women who go into certain educational path
to meet partners (medical school is a good example), but they are not
passionate about the field and therefore, never become the top performers.

On the other hand, if you look at top performing women in startups, they are
passionate about their work and are not there to find partners.

A startup should hire talent regardless of their gender... being a woman
myself in the tech field, I dont want to be hired because a startup is trying
to cultivate a 'enjoyable' work environment. Its about who brings the chops to
the table.

~~~
jcc80
"Heck, part of the reason..."

"Sorry to hear that you chose your 4 years of school based on meeting someone
from the opp gender."

You have people skills.

edit: quotes

~~~
americandesi333
You are mixing my quotes with the previous commenter's

------
pbhjpbhj
If you're bothered about equal numbers of people in Tech then just hobble men
so they don't have opportunity to follow their desired occupations. Voila,
equality.

> _It's probably human nature to like people who are like you , but learning
> to work with people with different personalities, genders, and backgrounds
> makes for a stronger team, not a distracted one._

People who are like engineers are like engineers. Shocker.

Lets get some lawyers and fashion models in there to do the engineering just
to mix things up a bit and provide a diverse environment shall we?¹

While we're at it lets make the engineers work in marketing to make sure they
have a diverse environment too.

\--

¹ - they may be good engineers but I'd really expect _most_ good engineers to
have _similar_ behavioural traits. The number of Mathematics students with
social anxiety seems to vastly out weigh the number of Art students with the
same. Certain personalities correlate strongly with certain subject and
abilities, I don't think we should be fighting that.

------
skrebbel
My experience is it doesn't matter much. The last startup I worked for had 4
women and 4 men (on average, over time; it varied a bit). I don't think gender
was a significant issue to anyone. People were hired for their merits and
treated as such.

Is that so special?

------
latch
This isn't something I've said out loud often. However, if I had my own small
startup, I'd be worried about hiring young women for one reason: maternity
leave.

Now, this obviously depends on where you're setting up your startup. However,
if I lived in a place where a long[ish] (6+months) maternity leave was the
law, I'd be pretty worried about newly hired women going on maternity leave.
For a large company, it isn't a big problem, but for a small cash-strapped
company, losing a significant % of your workforce for an extended period of
time sucks.

I've known women who went back to work, or switched to a job with better
benefits, because they planned on getting pregnant. And I've known some who
just happened to get pregnant shortly after getting a new job.

I strongly believe that the length of maternity leave should be proportional
to the length of time at the company.

~~~
alanfalcon
>This isn't something I've said out loud often. However, if I had my own small
startup, I'd be worried about hiring young women for one reason: maternity
leave.

IANAL but (in America, anyway) it's a good thing to never say out loud: it's
completely illegal. You may not discriminate hiring on the basis of gender,
and if any female applicant who got turned down for a job at your small
startup in the future and dug up this post... well, I wouldn't want to be in
your shoes.

~~~
mannicken
IANAL as well, but as far as I understand it's completely legal to say "I
don't want to hire women". Yay freedom of speech. However, If I am hiring
people (which I'm not and never done) and reject a woman based on the fact
that she is a woman, and she can somehow prove it, then yes.. I risk being
sued.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
latch
you are wrong...even with freedom of association upheld as a key part of the
first amendment, discrimination based on race, gender, age (and more) is
simply not allowed.

Section 1981 of Title 42 of the United States Codes
(<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/1981.html>) which protect people from
being discriminated against has been upheld.

~~~
mannicken
RTFM: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States>

"Laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United States,
outside of obscenity, defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting words."

Which means if I say "women are all stupid" I should be able to avoid getting
sued because of the 1st amendment.

If, however, I decline a job position because someone is female, and she or
someone else will be able to _prove it in the fucking court_, then I will be
guilty of violating the law in your link.

Do you or do you not see the difference between saying "man, I'd really like
to punch someone right now", "I would like to punch >you< in the head", and
actually punching somebody in the head?

First is just a general statement, second is a threat, third is violence.

Again, if I say "I don't want to hire women" and then go ahead and employ a
woman just because I need an employee and she's qualified, I'm fine in terms
of the law. It's similar to me saying "hey, I'd really wish I could rob a bank
right now" and then obediently following the law and not robbing a bank.

Please do not step on my freedom of speech in the future.

------
glimcat
There's always this study, although it's one of those "early results, many
possible confounding factors, few samples" cases where the results should be
taken with a big pile of salt.

[http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-
tea...](http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-
more-women/ar/1)

Women in tech are also already statistical outliers, so the probability that a
random female candidate is good may be slightly higher than for a random male
candidate. Tricky to study though, starting with it not being easy to
objectively measure how "good" a candidate is.

~~~
jdp23
The study described in the HBR article also aligns well with Scott Page's work
on diverity, which describes where diverse teams outperform.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html> has more.

------
benatkin
Uhm...so not buying the essay by Penelope Trunk. Most of my favorite startups
are 10%-34% female. I think the reason they don't get into fights is because
they're responsible. Also being an irresponsible founder is seriously
overrated.

------
yummyfajitas
tl;dr Penelope Trunk thinks that diversity is a distraction and provides
little value to startups. Jean Hsu disagrees, but is too lazy to tell us why.

------
kstenerud
Yeah, that's great and all, but the fact is, the percentage of female
engineers is very low to begin with, and in today's environment where talented
and available engineers is incredibly low, you simply don't have the luxury to
pass on qualified applicants in the hopes that someone who meets your
"diversity quota" will show up.

I look for the following when hiring:

\- Aptitude: Can they do the work?

\- Attitude: Are they excited about what we do and the position being offered?

\- Flexibility: Are they prepared to step outside the "role" and help out in
areas that we don't have fully covered?

\- Creativity: Are they going to come up with innovative solutions to the
various problems we'll face going forward?

\- Intelligence: Can they learn new things quickly? Things have a habit of
changing fast in a startup.

\- Maturity: Can they behave professionally towards everyone else and keep the
work environment a safe, healthy place?

If an applicant meets these criteria, we don't stop to see what "group" they
belong to; we snatch them up with all speed before someone else does!

------
zwieback
I'm sure it's not a question of qualification or skills - after all most of us
aren't running down gazelle's or plowing fields.

The question is whether you see yourself primarily as a male or female or
primarily as a developer or designer or engineer. I was just talking about
that with my wife, who worked as an engineer in a male-dominated field and she
never really thought about her gender. I've worked in mixed teams and feel the
same, it's really not an issue for me.

However, when bias and prejudice enters the picture the whole balance can be
quickly thrown off, even by a single person. I believe that's why in the US
large companies have strict policies against discrimination. Unfortunately,
these very policies often have the effect of introducing quota-related
problems when teams are not allowed to hire who they really want.

So, we're not there yet, but I think things are moving in the right direction.

------
bfe
She essentially says that a startup that implements a recruitment process that
taps a very large number of potential recruits in search of the best
candidates, and that effectively evaluates candidates based on their actual
qualifications for the job, will also inevitably recruit a more diverse range
of people. And wouldn't those same factors inevitably lead to recruiting
better people? So, at a statistically meaningful scale, there's going to be at
least some correlation.

------
DennisP
A better reason: small groups make more intelligent decisions when they have
more women in them.

<http://cci.mit.edu/publications/pressmentions.html>

------
Gullanian
Men in my country at least are just generally more interested in tech. A big
population of males who are interested in tech will naturally lead to a
heavily weighted male populous of proficient tech people. I don't get why this
is sexist it's just fact. I don't see much that needs to be fixed.

If there is discrimination in the hiring process though, yes that needs to be
addressed. However that's not the angle the article is taking.

Hiring a woman because you don't have many women in the work place isn't
optimal.

------
robjohnson
I agree with the author of the post in that the frequency of posts written
that postulate blanket statements that are supported by anecdotal evidence of
"something that happened to my friend" is way too high.

As for gender diversity, I think most founders would argue that the more
diverse a team you have, the better. The 'Business Model Generation' book goes
into this quite a bit and has some incredible insights into correlations
between diverse teams and the creativity of their brainstorming sessions.

------
fleitz
Company culture is gender agnostic, as a man I've worked with other men who
don't share my ideas on work culture / code culture. I stopped working with
those people and worked with others where we were all on the same page and
when I had to work with them I put my differences aside and helped out where
it made sense.

I do more of a cowboy coding style that worked really well for rapid
prototyping and then the others in the group could take over and put all the
niceties around the code. I liked to go for beers after work, they wanted to
go home. It was fine, I had beers with my friends. No biggie. I don't need to
spend every waking moment of my life with those I work with.

If a person don't share culture with people it probably has a lot to do with
them and not their gender. There are 7 billion people on the planet I don't
think men and women are that different that it isn't possible to find 20
people you can work with. I certainly know that if push came to shove I could
work with a group of 20 women, despite whatever supposed cultural differences
are said to exist.

I'm not sure why anyone would expect 40 other people to change their culture
just to suit one person. Work is about getting paid, and there will always be
bullshit to deal with at work, why people get paid is because there is stuff
they'd rather be doing. Work is never going to be perfect.

------
lmkg
I consider myself a (male) feminist and I encourage inclusiveness. I think
women's different experience and perspective can be an asset. However, I also
recognize that the culture that we live in is not yet gender-blind, and that
as much as we don't like it, people's perceptions of gender impact how we
interact with other people. This means that the advantages that inclusion and
diversity brings to a team, will generally have a cost. If you're trying to
construct an ideal team, you would be remiss to ignore the very real impact
that gender issues can and will have on your team. This may mean that a
female, while individually better for a position than a male counterpart, will
not provide as large of a net benefit to the team as a whole. Maybe she will,
maybe she won't, it depends on a lot of things, especially the team itself,
but it's certainly possible: the female's femaleness is something that needs
to be considered and may create problems.

I want to make this point _very clear_ : This does _not_ necessarily have
anything to do with the female herself. This is as much, or more, about the
males on the team and how they treat/act towards/interact with the females.
It's mostly about the interactions between people, and how gender
relationships are part of personal relationships. And it's _completely_ unfair
to the female. It's bullshit. But, it does happen, and if you're trying to
build a team, it's something you have to consider because it impacts how well
it will function.

I don't even have anecdotes, much less data, to back this assertion up, but I
suspect that the problems of integrating women (or other minorities, for that
matter) into a team lessen as their representation increases. 2 women on your
team means gender-issues than 1, and 5 means less issues than 2, and so forth.
But that if you're building a team incrementally, that first female is a
barrier, because you get the minimal benefit and quite likely the maximal
difficulty.

~~~
wickedchicken
> the female's femaleness is something that needs to be considered and may
> create problems.

This is the most effective way possible to make someone feel alienated. Tell
them their presence is problematic, that it's "not them, but us" and therefore
there is nothing they can do about it.

You want to know the dirty secret behind the claim that female programmers
make men uncomfortable? It's synthetic. It only exists because you think it
exists, like some bizarre fiat currency. The moment you (all of you) stop
caring, this concern goes away and you can do more productive things like
write code.

edit: whoops, didn't catch this one:

> gender relationships are part of personal relationships

You are professionals. Professional computer programmers. Professionals know
how to handle these kinds of things, and this is really just a case-by-case
deal. Making some blanket claim that "because there is a woman on the team,
there will be fights over who gets to date her" is placing some pretty weak
expectations on your team. I expect my team to be professional to everyone in
it. If someone can't handle that kind of situation, I may not have a place for
them on my team.

