>They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict averse.
I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep things equal".
On engineering teams you don't want constant negotiation. The psychological chess that people play when they negotiate salary doesn't yield a better product. What you want is people collaborating dispassionately to always choose the best possible option --- the most physically effective, the most beautiful, the most platonically ideal (whatever that means), etc. Truth isn't negotiated. Likewise for the example below, programming languages. A language should be chosen based on technical factors. Defending your opinion should mean presenting a compelling (true) argument, not somehow coercing your teammates to your view.
I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these "conflict-averse" women would be too.
This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from an outsider's perspective. Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it?
There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool:
1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.
2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse.
3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers.
All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time.
If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.
This whole diversity stuff is complete trendy nonsense!
If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has.
In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they praise mediocrity, not talent.
You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't exist in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth, most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of their gender but because of their coding skills.
Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination. Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender. Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are! It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical interview challenges.
As a self professed good software engineer, you know that debugging requires explicit and implicit assumptions to be reevaluated. Here are some you've made that may be introducing bugs into your thought process:
- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective
- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves
- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any
- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated
Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.
Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.
> At a different company, he noticed that a team of white engineers from affluent backgrounds chose to delay shipping an Android version of the product because they believed they would make less money on the platform. But it turned out that Android users were far more engaged than iOS ones, and the group later regretted prioritizing the wrong platform.
Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell, nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad reasons to do it.
I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x?
> I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a technical founder.
Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things? Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the engineering degree really have any bearing?
The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most effective.
> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce
I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes?
> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.”
Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal.
I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone for people to look up to.
>> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce
> I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes?
Exactly. I don't use the dishes at work, so I'm not washing them.
The point is that in society the ratio of men to women is 50/50. I'd also argue achieving that is a reasonable aim in female-dominated jobs, such as some teaching jobs.
I'm skeptical of the value of this, and I really wonder what their shareholders think. Your mandate as a founder should be to recruit the best people for the jobs you need, not reach some arbitrary split in gender/age/race/whatever.
Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0].
Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative.
As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment. I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question.
I think that, regardless of whatever moral or ideological viewpoints one may hold, this should still be lauded as an interesting experiment in a situation that's most definitely a minority case in this industry. People should just accept this as an interesting case study and keep an open mind, regardless if they think it will have positive or negative outcomes.
100% under forty. (USA is 50% over 40)
95% white and Asian.
<5% Latino and black. (USA and Bay Area are >33%)
<5% overweight and obese (USA is 40% overweight and obese)
21% duckface (0% of USA finds duckface appealing)
Yes....it sort of reminds me of the HuffPo tweet about a boardroom full of women...completely neglecting that 95+% of them were white women(upon visual inspection).
I'd like to know what your response it to the claims of ageism. The median age of American workers is 42, what percentage of your employees are over that age?
It seems like, to achieve diversity like this, especially in the Engineering team, you'd have to have a bias and preference to candidates that "increase diversity". How are you not passing on many people better qualified to do the job? To me, such a bias is, itself, discriminatory. Why judge candidates based on such shallow considerations as gender?
> For two years, Sarah Nahm was the only woman at Lever, the company she co-founded and now runs as CEO... has roughly 100 employees... has a roughly 50–50
In any company, the first X hires are likely doers - e.g. for different companies, all software developers, all plumbers, all landscapers, all accountants, all lawyers. Then the roles you hire for start to change. Lets say hire say 5 is a sales person, 6 is an accountant, 7 a marketer. Then a company starts to hire lower-skilled support staff like personal assistants / people to answer phones, a gopher maybe, then say cleaners. These lower skilled jobs are easily filled with either gender, but pay a lot less.
So my question, in a company with a female founder, and a proud 50-50 gender ratio, this seems the best chance to hit pay parity, and I wonder, has that happened? Is the ratio of pay $1-$1, or does Lever have the classic $0.77 on the dollar pay gap?
How do you start these conversations with the team, especially as far as wanting to reach more underrepresented groups?
When our company was very small it felt reasonable to say "We need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities", but after the team grows a bit I worry people might view that as "affirmative action" of some sort in a negative way - and I don't think I know how to handle that conversation.
Not to mention how this might interact with US employment laws around discrimination - I think I'm misguided in worrying about this because so many tech companies (like Lever) are vocal about their desire to hire more people from these groups, but it does feel a bit like there are landmines when discussing this topic.
I feel like I don't know what kind of language / goals I should be using. I DO feel like there's a distinction between good diversity efforts and accidentally shutting out some over-represented groups that don't deserve it - but I don't really know where that line is drawn.
Women are incredibly valuable, but there isn't anything inherently "good" about having an exactly even split M-F ratio. Is a company with 70% women and 30% men better than a 50%-50% split? What about the other way around? What about mostly men but a few women?
The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women?
Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general?
The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?
The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs?
I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society.
Having been a programmer and a lawyer, I can't think of anything about the respective jobs that is a good explanation for why my programming jobs were 10% women while my legal jobs have been 50% women. Even if we indulge stereotypes about men versus women, programming is if anything more social, collaborative, and cooperative while law is confrontational and adversarial.
So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.
And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most programmers to score is like 40/60. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40% of programmers were women.
US culture cherry-picks data and declares that any statistical discrepancy is caused by oppression or passive privilege. Other hypotheses are taboo and dismissed.
There's also a subtle background noise: a constant reminder that males are somehow defective and need to be taught how to behave, so to stop the oppressors. Thankfully, experts whose incomes depend on identity politics are here to fix your mess.
This is equal opportunity vs equal outcome. I believe equal opportunity to be correct, whilst the outcome depends on the individual. Regardless of what people want to believe, men and women are genetically different, seen in almost every mammal in the world. The outcome is unlikely to ever be even naturally. Women may tend towards caring roles, men may tend to roles with competition. If we are to optimise our society we should take the best people for the best roles, regardless of who they are. I think that's ultimately the greatest selection process.
The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters
Oh that's an easy one. Literally no-one cared about this while the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order and sometimes literally at the bottom of the company in a windowless basement. But now it's important and well-paid and people sit in nice offices on Herman Miller chairs, and suddenly out of nowhere a bunch of people who weren't geeks at school, who hated the geeks, have appeared and started demanding that they get some of this money and prestige too. Brogrammers are another symptom of this exact same phenomenon.
I support women, but I support men too
I'm an engineer. I care about what's between your ears, not your legs! :-)
Quite simple really. Because women don't want to do physically difficult jobs like oil worker, construction worker, mechanic etc.
If there are cushy office jobs where you have to sit most of the time, women are clamoring for equality in those. If you have to do a lot of physical labor, not so much.
Where is the feminist outcry to put women on oil rigs in the middle of the gulf?
Probably because there is an even split of men and women in the general population (more or less), but nowhere near that in tech.
And don't bother bringing up other industries; I'm not in those other industries, so I have no opinion or influence to try and help things there. I am in tech, so I can try and improve things here.
> The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?
They only have their jobs because better-qualified people don't. So, they should do exactly what the better-qualified people are expected to do today: improve their skills, find another field, lean on their spouse for support, etc. If we don't think there are enough jobs for the population, a) changing the gender ratio of people who are employed doesn't make that problem worse, and b) that's a different conversation about UBI or whatever.
If we truly believe in a meritocracy, we're going to have to kick out incompetent people. There's no getting around that, and there's no getting around the fact that it's unjust to keep employing incompetent people and just to fire them.
> I support women, but I support men too.
I support women, and I support men too. I support qualified men, qualified women, and qualified everyone else having jobs they're qualified for. As far as I can tell, gender isn't correlated with job performance, and there seem to be about 50-50 men and women in the world.
The moment that you or anyone demonstrate a reason to believe (not even conclusive proof, just a plausible hypothesis) that men are over twice as likely to be good at technical jobs as women, I'll support a 70-30 split. Similarly, the moment anyone demonstrates a reason to believe that women are twice as likely to be good at technical jobs than men, I'll support a 70-30 split in the other direction. I haven't seen such a reasoning in either direction, so I support the null hypothesis, the 50-50 split.
Same with dock workers, honestly! But I'm not a dock worker and I know nothing about dock working and this isn't Dock Worker News, so I'm not going to comment about it. I hope the dock workers are trying to hire the best people, too!
If you took all the time you spent writing comments like this and spent it instead on questioning why the norm for other companies is 10-90 or 20-80, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation quite so much.
Part of the reason why this announcement is significant is that people frequently argue that it is impossible to build a gender-equal team. This shows pretty clearly that it is possible. I don't think this is equivalent to saying that all companies need to be exactly even in the end.
> The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?
Do you think there is a shortage of tech jobs? If the end state was equal for men and women it seems more likely to me that plenty of people would still be employed, but the best jobs would be going to the best people rather than just the best men.
Does all that make sense? I'm genuinely curious about why equality is uncomfortable for you.
Male engineer at Lever here, and I can confirm that we don't make hiring decisions based on gender or gender presentation. It's not only highly illegal, but totally not the point of tracking diversity metrics.
The ultimate goal here is not to build a company with perfect representation of the general population, but to build a company which honestly evaluates and rewards the contributions of all its employees (because we believe that those kinds of companies do build better products, businesses, etc.) and you can't do that unless you're inclusive and consistently fair with everyone in the company.
A number like 50-50 gender balance doesn't mean that we've finished building that company (and no company is ever finished). However, an imbalance of gender or any demographic such as age, race, prior work experience (such as government, enterprise, startup), academic background, parental status, etc. at a company usually indicates that there's a blindspot or bug in a company's hiring or culture and it deserves a closer look.
100 is such a small N that 50-50 could just be rounding noise, I'd think. That's why I'm glad that they care about such things, but it doesn't suggest to me that they are truly unbiased in their selection process. The only thing that makes sense to draw conclusions about wrt diversity are the make up of a) large corporations b) university output and c) the distribution of groups throughout start-ups as a whole. They might have beat the average, but without more data, it really could be anything else other than what they posit they did.
This comment is uncivil to the point of outright trolling, so we've banned the account. If you want to participate within the guidelines you can email us at [email protected].
Any one anecdote is not sufficient to establish truth, yours included. Instead we usually employ the scientific method. In that context, the following two studies (which are good, frequently quoted examples, but are reproduced in many other context) make it more plausible that your observations are either outliers, or are colored by a personal bias:
- Blind interview where the gender is unknown lead to gender parity in hiring (example of a particular industry, reproduced in others): https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
If you would like so, I can provide some more links to aggregations, rebuttals, and meta studies that as a whole confirm the general ideas uncovered in the above studies, but with cursory googling you will be able to do the same yourself.
I can agree that poorly instituted or misapplied affirmative action policies are harmful for everybody. I can agree that "PC culture" can be poisonous and detrimental. But most objective measurements do show that there is indeed bias against minorities and women.
P.S. The self-aggrandizing talk about unicorns and millions is making the rest of your argument difficult to take at face value. Similarly with the fairly off putting implication that respecting women is the same as being subservient to women (the talk about "betas").
[+] [-] Archio|9 years ago|reply
>They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict averse.
I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep things equal".
[+] [-] _xhok|9 years ago|reply
I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these "conflict-averse" women would be too.
[+] [-] redthrowaway|9 years ago|reply
There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool:
1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.
2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse.
3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers.
All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time.
If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.
[+] [-] hal9000xp|9 years ago|reply
If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has.
In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they praise mediocrity, not talent.
You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't exist in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth, most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of their gender but because of their coding skills.
Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination. Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender. Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are! It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical interview challenges.
[+] [-] atroyn|9 years ago|reply
- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective
- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves
- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any
- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated
Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.
Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.
[+] [-] serge2k|9 years ago|reply
Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell, nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad reasons to do it.
I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x?
> I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a technical founder.
Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things? Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the engineering degree really have any bearing?
The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most effective.
> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce
I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes?
> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.”
Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal.
I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone for people to look up to.
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
>Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal.
I found that kind of odd. I would never have said the complement (calling it opposite is weird) of "guys" is "girls". It's "gals".
People will look at you funny if you say "guys and women".
[+] [-] patrickmay|9 years ago|reply
Exactly. I don't use the dishes at work, so I'm not washing them.
[+] [-] plinkplonk|9 years ago|reply
Then gay, straight, bi
Then equal ratios of every age band in a working age range
Then equal ratios of race: white, AA, Hispanic, Arab, ....
Then native language family. Surely the language you think in affects what you can think of - so the more the merrier
Good Luck, Lever!
(I am deliberately not adding a /s tag, or denying the need for one)
[+] [-] hnhg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Y_Y|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|9 years ago|reply
Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0].
Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative.
As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment. I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question.
[0] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-cit...
[+] [-] Apocryphon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotQuantum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladelfa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WildUtah|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateps|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troisx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
How many of the Lever employees are openly Republican or conservative?
[+] [-] rand83746|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisnotmyacc|9 years ago|reply
> For two years, Sarah Nahm was the only woman at Lever, the company she co-founded and now runs as CEO... has roughly 100 employees... has a roughly 50–50
In any company, the first X hires are likely doers - e.g. for different companies, all software developers, all plumbers, all landscapers, all accountants, all lawyers. Then the roles you hire for start to change. Lets say hire say 5 is a sales person, 6 is an accountant, 7 a marketer. Then a company starts to hire lower-skilled support staff like personal assistants / people to answer phones, a gopher maybe, then say cleaners. These lower skilled jobs are easily filled with either gender, but pay a lot less.
So my question, in a company with a female founder, and a proud 50-50 gender ratio, this seems the best chance to hit pay parity, and I wonder, has that happened? Is the ratio of pay $1-$1, or does Lever have the classic $0.77 on the dollar pay gap?
[+] [-] towlejunior|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon987|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] what2_2|9 years ago|reply
When our company was very small it felt reasonable to say "We need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities", but after the team grows a bit I worry people might view that as "affirmative action" of some sort in a negative way - and I don't think I know how to handle that conversation.
Not to mention how this might interact with US employment laws around discrimination - I think I'm misguided in worrying about this because so many tech companies (like Lever) are vocal about their desire to hire more people from these groups, but it does feel a bit like there are landmines when discussing this topic.
I feel like I don't know what kind of language / goals I should be using. I DO feel like there's a distinction between good diversity efforts and accidentally shutting out some over-represented groups that don't deserve it - but I don't really know where that line is drawn.
[+] [-] muninn_|9 years ago|reply
The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women?
Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general?
The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?
The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs?
I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society.
I support women, but I support men too.
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.
And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most programmers to score is like 40/60. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40% of programmers were women.
[+] [-] Red_Tarsius|9 years ago|reply
There's also a subtle background noise: a constant reminder that males are somehow defective and need to be taught how to behave, so to stop the oppressors. Thankfully, experts whose incomes depend on identity politics are here to fix your mess.
[+] [-] bArray|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdb7893|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|9 years ago|reply
> The obsession with having an even split…
Does it strike you that the article is describing an obsession? It seems like a strong word, used pejoratively in this case.
To me, the article is described an unusual and thoughtful approach that led to surprising results.
[+] [-] gaius|9 years ago|reply
Oh that's an easy one. Literally no-one cared about this while the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order and sometimes literally at the bottom of the company in a windowless basement. But now it's important and well-paid and people sit in nice offices on Herman Miller chairs, and suddenly out of nowhere a bunch of people who weren't geeks at school, who hated the geeks, have appeared and started demanding that they get some of this money and prestige too. Brogrammers are another symptom of this exact same phenomenon.
I support women, but I support men too
I'm an engineer. I care about what's between your ears, not your legs! :-)
[+] [-] hysterix|9 years ago|reply
If there are cushy office jobs where you have to sit most of the time, women are clamoring for equality in those. If you have to do a lot of physical labor, not so much.
Where is the feminist outcry to put women on oil rigs in the middle of the gulf?
[+] [-] st3v3r|9 years ago|reply
And don't bother bringing up other industries; I'm not in those other industries, so I have no opinion or influence to try and help things there. I am in tech, so I can try and improve things here.
[+] [-] geofft|9 years ago|reply
They only have their jobs because better-qualified people don't. So, they should do exactly what the better-qualified people are expected to do today: improve their skills, find another field, lean on their spouse for support, etc. If we don't think there are enough jobs for the population, a) changing the gender ratio of people who are employed doesn't make that problem worse, and b) that's a different conversation about UBI or whatever.
If we truly believe in a meritocracy, we're going to have to kick out incompetent people. There's no getting around that, and there's no getting around the fact that it's unjust to keep employing incompetent people and just to fire them.
> I support women, but I support men too.
I support women, and I support men too. I support qualified men, qualified women, and qualified everyone else having jobs they're qualified for. As far as I can tell, gender isn't correlated with job performance, and there seem to be about 50-50 men and women in the world.
The moment that you or anyone demonstrate a reason to believe (not even conclusive proof, just a plausible hypothesis) that men are over twice as likely to be good at technical jobs as women, I'll support a 70-30 split. Similarly, the moment anyone demonstrates a reason to believe that women are twice as likely to be good at technical jobs than men, I'll support a 70-30 split in the other direction. I haven't seen such a reasoning in either direction, so I support the null hypothesis, the 50-50 split.
Same with dock workers, honestly! But I'm not a dock worker and I know nothing about dock working and this isn't Dock Worker News, so I'm not going to comment about it. I hope the dock workers are trying to hire the best people, too!
[+] [-] tarmstrong|9 years ago|reply
Part of the reason why this announcement is significant is that people frequently argue that it is impossible to build a gender-equal team. This shows pretty clearly that it is possible. I don't think this is equivalent to saying that all companies need to be exactly even in the end.
> The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?
Do you think there is a shortage of tech jobs? If the end state was equal for men and women it seems more likely to me that plenty of people would still be employed, but the best jobs would be going to the best people rather than just the best men.
Does all that make sense? I'm genuinely curious about why equality is uncomfortable for you.
[+] [-] zmillman|9 years ago|reply
The ultimate goal here is not to build a company with perfect representation of the general population, but to build a company which honestly evaluates and rewards the contributions of all its employees (because we believe that those kinds of companies do build better products, businesses, etc.) and you can't do that unless you're inclusive and consistently fair with everyone in the company.
A number like 50-50 gender balance doesn't mean that we've finished building that company (and no company is ever finished). However, an imbalance of gender or any demographic such as age, race, prior work experience (such as government, enterprise, startup), academic background, parental status, etc. at a company usually indicates that there's a blindspot or bug in a company's hiring or culture and it deserves a closer look.
[+] [-] noobermin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuperImprobable|9 years ago|reply
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+in...
[+] [-] oh_sigh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EduardoBautista|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diversary|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theparanoid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeuei8|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] krastanov|9 years ago|reply
- Blind interview where the gender is unknown lead to gender parity in hiring (example of a particular industry, reproduced in others): https://www.nber.org/papers/w5903
- When everything else is equal, the same applicant is rated lower if they are female: http://www.yalescientific.org/2013/02/john-vs-jennifer-a-bat... (link to the study itself http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full )
If you would like so, I can provide some more links to aggregations, rebuttals, and meta studies that as a whole confirm the general ideas uncovered in the above studies, but with cursory googling you will be able to do the same yourself.
I can agree that poorly instituted or misapplied affirmative action policies are harmful for everybody. I can agree that "PC culture" can be poisonous and detrimental. But most objective measurements do show that there is indeed bias against minorities and women.
P.S. The self-aggrandizing talk about unicorns and millions is making the rest of your argument difficult to take at face value. Similarly with the fairly off putting implication that respecting women is the same as being subservient to women (the talk about "betas").
[+] [-] hogrammer|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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