With such politically charged issues, it's always a problem of people wanting to believe something is possible (and mandatory to pursue) banging their heads against what is true and actually possible.
If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?
A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true.
Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
I'm going to preface this post by saying that I don't have a problem with most of my coworkers (male and female) being Asian. In fact, I prefer it. I'm not Asian, but the majority of my friends, classmates, and coworkers throughout my life have been, and that continues even now during my career in tech.
Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed nowadays, I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by prestigious American universities.
My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents.
I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important than race and class. I'm a male of color who has been in the industry for more than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel some resentment. I've convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career switch because there's just so much assistance (financial, educational, and otherwise) available for women. From what I've seen, there is just so much more provided to help women get into the field.
I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together when it comes to prioritization, but this isn't the case for most companies, who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely. It's fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job.
What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying "stop hiring men" or "only hire women" is easy, even if you are asking people to discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. "Stop hiring Asian women" is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone listen?
I don't think the point of criticizing "it's a pipeline problem" is that there isn't a pipeline problem, but that it's an easy out to avoid taking action at whatever stage of the 'pipeline' you happen to be working at.
If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is.
The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you.
The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.
The exciting thing if you are a hiring manager is that, as long as there is talent that is being passed-over for the wrong reasons, you can beat your competitors in one of the most challenging ares of building a compay by being good at avoiding this error. A friend noted recently that a compounding benefit of hiring a gender-balanced team early is you won't lose female talent you find later when they refuse to join a team of all guys. But you have to be careful too, to not hire someone just because they fit a social profile you want more of on the team. Talented women don't want to be on a team where all of the women there were "tossed a softball". It's not only condescending, but it fosters the bias it intends to combat. Whoever is at fault, it is that there is a gender imbalance is worthy of debate. But addressing it is best viewed as opportunity, not an act of charity, if seen through the right lens.
Is the right thing to assume we should target 50-50 gender representation as a first-principle outcome target in all fields? If so, it’s a negative sign that the marquee companies analyzed hired at about the gender split of universities they targeted.
Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?” From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”.
By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that, by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons. Army/Marines, oil/gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent?
If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?
I’ve got a bunch of hobbies and none of them are even close to gender parity. Go check out poker rooms in Vegas and find me a single table where the players are 50-50 men-women. Visit flying clubs, carpentry groups, engine mechanics shops, you won’t find gender parity in any of these. And nobody is really tackling any of these as some urgent problem to solve. Why do professions need to aim for 50-50 but not non-professional hobbies?
EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters attributable to a “pipeline problem”?
My alma mater Harvey Mudd College has had rough gender parity in Computer Science for several years now. It's a small school but other colleges could learn from their practices.
I know it is not politically correct to say it, but I remain unconvinced that gender parity is a desirable goal. Particularly given the current state of research into differences in gender averages.
Here is a real example. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#... men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal with the same variance, that means that if we pick the top X% of the population on spacial reasoning where X is fairly small, we will get about an 80/20 split of male/female. Within that top group there will be no remaining difference between men and women.
Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students.
What happens if we force gender parity? If the research on gender differences is right, selecting on spacial reasoning except making sure to select 50% women would result in a situation where you had 50% men, 12.5% women who are as good as the men, and the remaining 37.5% women who are worse than EVERY man at spacial reasoning. The result is that 3/4 of the women are worse than all the men. Is this a better outcome? Why?
Now I picked an example where men have an advantage. But men don't in all fields though. According to other research, women are better on average at management. This is an argument to accept the data and do our best to hire and promote on competence.
Now that argument applies to hard engineering. It isn't software development. I do not know why the ratio is so extreme in software development. (More extreme than in, say, mechanical engineering.) However I have also never seen data suggesting that sorting on interest and ability shouldn't result in the ratios that we see. Before we double down on equality as a mandate, I would like to see that data collected.
As long as, on average, the men and women you hire are equally good, your hiring process is not broken. If your data finds that there is a difference in average ability, then adjust your practices to get higher average competence. Encourage everyone to have the opportunity. Make it clear that all people with title X are equivalent regardless of secondary characteristics, AND work to make that true. (I believe that it is pretty true today.)
In the article they talk about more women in tech in India than in US. India is a highly sexist society having a male child is preferred over having a female child. Still more females are in CS than in a more egalitarian society like US. I think it is because there are less economic choices in India.
So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don't like that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most.
Not one mention of age as being a factor as passing over good talent because of ageism. I'm 54, I walk through the door to interview and people run the other way before I even sit down with them because I probably look like their Dad -- meanwhile, i'm not only as current on skills than anybody I'm talking to, I'm probably the best option at a startup since I've seen it all (three and four times over). It's ridiculous that you age out of this industry at 45.
Underneath all this: although companies need talent, interviews are adversarial and not structured to create a supportive environment so candidates are at their best. Quite often the interview setup is to see how the candidate performs at their worst-- stressed, time pressured, on the spot, performing for fragments of time to a number of people while in what (feels|is) an asymmetrical power relationship.
Well, the gist of this is: there aren’t enough women in “tech”, so different standards should be applied for women until there are. Setting aside all the other problems I have with this: law and medicine have much stricter barriers for entry. There are no practicing doctors or lawyers without advanced degrees, but there are plenty of women in both professions. So even if you accept the premise, it’s still pretty clear you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
I think it's pretty bold to post something like this. As a person of color, I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting...however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs.
After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating class. I heard anecdotally from those majoring in EE how they had professors actually discourage them from continuing because they were 'too anxious' about grades and other stuff.
I'm male and I was the only LatinX person in my CS major; there were several more in EE by comparison. Part of the problem might be cultural pressure...my parents were extremely disappointed when I decided to major in 'Computer Science' rather than a major with 'Engineering' in the title. They did not get that it was part of the school of engineering, that for all intents and purposes I was an engineer, and the job kicks ass. They wanted to be able to say I was an 'ingeniero' to family in Peru. I ignored them.
As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.
It feels stupid to say but when I interview with people of other races, I feel more confident. When I interview with immigrants as well. It's my personal bias that I need to work against.
EDIT:
I'm not arguing that these anxieties are rational or desirable...they simply exist in my mind and that makes interviewing more challenging. Just as a musician may fear they'll forget their parts when they go on stage even if they are virtuosos, these sources of anxiety are real. For engineering interviews, not acknowledging some of these issues lowers your signal to noise ration. Someone might be a fantastic engineer but a 45 minute interview might present enough anxiety that they won't be able to show it.
I am Brazillian, mixed race, my dad family is from europe, my dad has green eyes, and I can apply for EU citizenship.
My mother family is mixed of black and native american.
Almost every single time I faced discrimination, was because I was "white", for example open hostility by 100% black people assuming that I was "white" and evil or something, or when I was informed I should not apply for affirmative action because I was too white looking, or many, many times I was called racist as soon people saw a picture of me during some argument or another.
To me it is obvious that further segregation and racism, is not the answer to segregation and racism.
So I'm ready for the downvotes, but its worth it. I don't think it is generally good to look for divisions and more ways to separate from the whole. I don't know if that is because you're out somewhere in super woke SF or similar but you've already used terms like "LatinX" and "person of color" like someone who is already woke but maybe stop for a sec?
Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in.
I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true.
Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.
<--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.
> I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting
Ok, see, this assertion bugs me. The linked post SPECIFICALLY talks about biasing hiring and recruiting in favor of women. Diversity efforts, by definition, are hiring and recruiting bias, but for supposedly benevolent reasons. But you’re dismissing that and implying that there are subtle, hidden, unremovable biases that only certain people are capable of even seeing. If somebody were to suggest that you’re imagining things, there’s no way to test your theory against theirs, since you’re begging the question (in the original philosophical sense).
> it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing.
I get it. Interviewers still think they should evaluate how a candidate will "fit into our culture" without any examination of what that means. For a lot of teams that still translates to "same shows, same games, same fondness for happy hours, same comfort for vaguely inappropriate jokes". If a candidate doesn't seem to fit into that sort of "culture", it's easy to pass them over for the next one.
There are many stories of people who had horrible experiences with Google interviews. White people get anxious, too. You acknowledge yourself that those feelings may be irrational, but nevertheless I wanted to point out that you don't really know what it is like for white people going through those interviews. White people are not automatically being hired, either.
I'm relatively new to the US, can anyone explain why Asians or LatinX people born in the US in middle-class families should get better treatment than "white" immigrants who recently came from poor Eastern European countries?
Don't you think it is racist to actually care about the race of the interviewer? Would you even think about that if there wasn't a non-stop conversation about racial differences? Maybe the nonsense diversity discussion is only making it worse by creating anxieties that wouldn't even be there?
It's interesting that you went on to describe your bias against white interviewers. It's going to be quite difficult for white people to hire non-white people into their organization if non-white people are biased against performing well for white interviewers.
Since you can find bias everywhere, that means there is lots of room for improvement everywhere. But when you talk about bias at the university level, isn't that evidence in favor of there being a pipeline problem? From a hiring company's point of view, that is. For a university, high schools are their pipeline.
I wish I knew what to do to help ameliorate the anxieties you've experienced, because as the white guy giving the interviews, I'm terrified that something about my approach or demeanor is enhancing those anxieties in my candidates (and I've seen entirely too many promising candidates wash out where I had to put as my feedback "I think they can do this, but they couldn't do it during the interview, and I suspect they got too nervous").
> Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge.
Anything specific that white interviewers could do differently to make you feel more at ease?
> It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that.
Well yeah, it's Google, so that's possible. Or maybe the company is large enough now that those kinds of high level individuals are diluted in their engineering pool? But it certainly had that reputation early on, that any random person interviewing you could be top in their field of expertise.
> The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.
Hah, yeah, that's very much part of the culture. Having the best argument or data or working code matters. Not how politely you talk about it.
Which can certainly have its advantages, as long as everyone can let go of personally identifying with their idea once they are convinced of a better one. Then it can be a real positive.
Working on anxiety can be life changing. I highly recommend the book "When Panic Attacks" by Dr. David Burns. In fact just the other day Dr. Burns had as a guest on his "Feel Good" podcast a tech guy who was rebuilding his web site (https://feelinggood.com/) in exchange for help with his anxieties. In a nutshell, the guy was a "handsome, successful, Yale educated, British" guy who was suffering from anxieties in social situations. Dr. Burns also has a book called "Feeling Good" which is geared more towards depression. Burns is one of the pioneers in cognitive behavior theory. If you're suffering from anxiety and/or depression I highly recommend his books/website/podcast - I will also note that Dr. Burns promotes drug free and rapid recovery that can be accomplished in many cases through "bibliotherapy" - e.g. just by reading a book and , most importantly, doing the exercises/work he recommends.
I'm asking to better understand - can you think of ways to make an interview process more comfortable? What about 'blind' remote interviews (ie, no video, but audio)?
>As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.
You've described me perfectly. Except that I'm an anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy from rural Oregon who was bullied throughout high school for being, I dunno, skinny, pale, and awkward. This has resulted in a lot of self-worth issues, social anxiety, and major depression, which I struggle with to this day, nearly 15 years after high school. I have been interviewing for high-level companies for the past year and...have not secured a single offer, probably because I suck at interviewing, but who the hell knows?
Anyway, I get what you're saying about the "Zuck" personality type, and that's refreshing for you to mention. I, too, am pretty intimidated by some of the people you describe. I am sorry that they make you feel that way. They probably don't intend to. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that there are a LOT of "non-POC" people, AKA Zuckerberg-looking folks, who are incredibly anxious and just want you to smile at them and try to get to know them as a _human being_. I don't want to be grouped together with all the people in this country that have light skin. It's not fair to me.
I suspect that some of the "non-POC" people (why don't you just say white people?) COULD wrongfully see you as an intended "diversity hire", and need to "prove your worth" accordingly, which is racist and wrong. But the problem is that the narrative you're putting forth is encouraging companies to take measures to make the workplace more diverse. If you follow this idea down the rabbit hole, I think it will hurt people that look like me, who have no acceptable "race card" to play. And that's OK. But down the road, it's going to lead to more racial friction. I don't want to be put into a racial box based on my phenotypes. What if there was a form of affirmative action that led to more anxious and depressed people getting better jobs? For a few minutes it sounds awesome, but it's probably the wrong way to go about things, because I think it would lead to animosity between neurotypical people and, to use a woke term, the "neurodiverse".
As a fellow Latin American, I find "LatinX" offensive.
English already has a gender neutral adjective to refer to us, Latin, and therefore Latin American.
LatinX means you've internalized the colonialization of white "liberals" [0] who would refer to us as Latinos or Latinas while speaking English to show off their poor Spanish and therefore pretend to be sophisticated and woke.
[0] I don't consider liberal bad or good, just that the people who use latino/a/X seem to self-identify as liberals.
I don't understand why people deliberately hire people of certain group. Be it women, or black, or whatever. Why? Why can't you just hire the right person for the job?
To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people.
Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing is crunching the numbers to "make it work on paper".
Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all jobs across the whole universe, everywhere?
It's a ridiculous concept, I don't understand who came up with it.
> STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds
> hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs
> biased hiring practices
> non-inclusive work environments
Is there any actual proof of any of this rather than some bogus numbers from noname Kapor Center who admit they are just evangelists?
I'll preface this with the usual "my views are my own" but I do think that diversity in the workplace is a very deep and interesting problem and that we do a major disservice to it by creating ridiculous metrics.
I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it's also not a binary - in order to reach 50% women we'd only have 50% for the remaining non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not exclusively male.
I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as objectives.
The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things.
It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to.
And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the article mentions it.
So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual hiring rate is at 15%, we still have a problem.
This stood out to me, and aligns with my observations in the (limited) female representation in the workplace:
> In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%
Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?
In India, your major is largely determine by your academic results and social pressure when you finish up secondary schools.
If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their kids into engineering.
Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well, you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender. If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots). Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless of gender.
As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when most engineering colleges started admitting females.
There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering major or STEM is a male profession.
I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors.
Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into engineering here :)
Studies show that the more egalitarian the society, the larger the differences in choices men and women make.
It's only when there's a lot of economic pressure that women that they start going into fields they don't tend to go into. India, specifically, has a lot of pressure for people to go into software dev.
Basing this solely as a person from India and not some research background,
In the small minority of hacker rank study set, I would say that women are just as much encouraged or frankly expected to be in STEM as men. Although I am fairly certain that this observation will quickly disappear and will be heavily male dominated on a larger percentage of the population.
Really, looking at the actual hacker rank source, it seems like their sample set is really tiny and heavily biased.
What you want to do rapidly evaporates when you're faced with the question of what you have to do. Engineering, medicine, and law are three real paths to success in India, so you will face heavy parental pressure to participate here, irrespective of gender. Success is being in your high-school engineering or medical stream. Escape from failure is being in the third stream but intending to participate in law. All else is failure.
Secondarily, Indian education admissions have a high co-efficient on standardized tests and a near zero co-efficient on 'well-roundedness'. Affirmative action is caste-based and implemented via quotas filled from the standardized-test scores.
Finally, lots of SWEs in India are drudge-work engineers. They may spend a few days changing the text on a ColdFusion page. For these jobs there is a bare selection mechanism that involves your university GPA-equivalent and whether you can speak English (usually). The large number of graduates will then spend their time 'on the bench' as spare burstable capacity to perform this sort of drudge-work maintenance. The lack of a selection mechanism removes a source of bias.
So some good things, some bad things. Some don't apply to Google India (like the last one, I think).
EDIT: Sorry, had to create a throwaway for this one, but I lived there (and observed this for many of my friends, though not for myself) and felt you deserved to have live info. I'll accept the full ban on my account for bypassing the rate-limit.
> > In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%
> Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to?
The gender equality paradox details many of these sorts of inconsistencies. For instance, why does Iran have gender parity in compsci while virtually all progressive cultures struggle to crack 20% in compsci?
at my workplace we try very hard to hire women programmers and we are at about 10% - 15% which is still quite low but better than other companies around us.
At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career.
I'm not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a single datapoint) but it sure is interesting.
HR is far more of a nepotistic clique as regards as hiring their own for race and gender, and they often wield power over everybody else on those terms.
To me the question is not why this statistic looks a certain way, but what is the actual experience of women in software engineering. And if you ask women, the problem doesn’t usually seem to be getting hired. It’s the work environment that is alienating.
So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.
This is a pretty old and well established research fact: For most people being a minority in any environment feels alienating.
The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the first year as a student to 30 years later into the career.
The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team leaders are female.
I have a 4 year old daughter who I'm trying to get interested in programming. The first step is to teach her reading/writing and math.
Every time we start with basic counting, after just 2 minutes, she's constantly telling me "daddy, I don't want to count anymore". I'm not giving up yet. But, we have to accept the fact that certain genders don't like math and don't like programming.
Sometimes, I see the same thing playing out at older ages. We once hired a female intern and our PM was like "ok everyone, now do your best to make programming seem as fun as possible so we can get this person to go into CS". I'm thinking, at that age, I would have killed for an internship, you wouldn't have had to convince me to "think it was fun", I already knew it was.
There's so much focus on gender equality in programming but where is the gender equality talk in other industries like: cosmetics, football, ballet dancing, etc
I have a very specific memory of the first moment I encountered a "math" book, in kindergarten. It was literally just a book of the numbers from one to ten, with pictures illustrating what those meant, etc. I wouldn't have been able to verbalize it, but the feeling was "I am going to f___ing love this.".
And indeed I did, and took to math and CS like a duck to water.
No idea whether that's common, nor whether it might be more common for males, but it's hard to see how someone with that intuitive drive wasn't going to do quite well in the subject.
I have to wonder if there's some missing detail, because I can't imagine a 4-year-old sitting down and doing counting exercises for two minutes without being distracted, boy or girl.
In fact, if it was a boy, many people would have chalked it up to "Well of course boys like to move around and be active. Who likes to sit down and count things, anyway?"
[+] [-] supernova87a|6 years ago|reply
If the percentage of female computer science graduates (as a strong proxy for the available candidate population) is 18% (Google for the facts and stats), how is every company to hit an idealistic goal of 50% representation?
A while back, I did rough envelope calculations that if one of the major FAANG companies hit their diversity goal, there would be none left for any of the rest of them. Look at these percentages and you can see unsentimentally that this must be true.
Why do we place the blame and assign malice of intent to those who have little control over the constraints? If we put actual performance metrics and pay on the line for achieving these physically unattainable goals, everyone would be fired.
[+] [-] uwuhn|6 years ago|reply
Whenever I see anything related to affirmative action being discussed nowadays, I think that it's only a matter of time until Asian women are treated the same way as Asian men. Once you've managed to close the gender gap in engineering, you have a new problem to deal with -- a lack of diversity among women engineers in regards to race and socio-economic class. A continued pursuit of diversity will require discrimination similar to that exhibited by prestigious American universities.
My coworkers (past and former) and friends who are women SWEs overwhelmingly fall into two buckets: American-born Chinese with parents who are middle-class or higher, and PRC-born Chinese with wealthy parents.
I get the strong impression that gender diversity is viewed as more important than race and class. I'm a male of color who has been in the industry for more than four years now, so I no longer have to worry about breaking in. If I were applying to CS programs or looking for my first job right now, I would feel some resentment. I've convinced and helped three of my friends to do a career switch because there's just so much assistance (financial, educational, and otherwise) available for women. From what I've seen, there is just so much more provided to help women get into the field.
I commend the big tech companies for lumping male URMs and all women together when it comes to prioritization, but this isn't the case for most companies, who are expending great effort on balancing the gender ratio while treating men of color as second-class URMs, or even ignoring their status completely. It's fortunate that the best jobs are the most fair, but even if a place sucks, a first SWE job is still a first SWE job.
What I predict will happen is the gender gap will begin to close, but the aforementioned diversity issues not related to gender will remain. This will be due to a combination of various factors, with the most significant being fatigue with affirmative action practices, and that discussing socio-economic and race is much more sensitive than discussing gender, Saying "stop hiring men" or "only hire women" is easy, even if you are asking people to discriminate against candidates similar to themselves. "Stop hiring Asian women" is not. And if you are willing to make that request, why would anyone listen?
[+] [-] stormbrew|6 years ago|reply
If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is.
The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you.
The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.
[+] [-] sakoht|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|6 years ago|reply
Is it equally plausible that we should be looking bottoms-up from the perspective of a fresh college graduate entering the field and asking the question, “am I likely to get a systemically fair shake when interviewing?” From the data presented, it seems likely that the answer is “yes”.
By all means we should work on the pipeline. I’m supportive to the idea that, by default, we should expect 50-50 representation, but when we find pockets where that does not hold, we must be open to understanding possible reasons. Army/Marines, oil/gas work, and airline pilots are other readily identifiable fields without a 50-50 representation. Is this good, bad, or indifferent?
If women who enter those fields achieve success at the same rate as the overall population, is the hiring and evaluation system (basically after their decision to enter the field) “fair”? If not, why not?
[+] [-] ryandrake|6 years ago|reply
EDIT: Also, why do we think it can be fixed? Can the gender balances in hobbies be fixed? Is the lack of female metalworker hobbyists or male quilters attributable to a “pipeline problem”?
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
https://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/how-harvey-mudd-college-...
[+] [-] btilly|6 years ago|reply
Here is a real example. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability#... men have about a one standard deviation advantage in spacial reasoning over women. Assuming that both distributions are normal with the same variance, that means that if we pick the top X% of the population on spacial reasoning where X is fairly small, we will get about an 80/20 split of male/female. Within that top group there will be no remaining difference between men and women.
Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students.
What happens if we force gender parity? If the research on gender differences is right, selecting on spacial reasoning except making sure to select 50% women would result in a situation where you had 50% men, 12.5% women who are as good as the men, and the remaining 37.5% women who are worse than EVERY man at spacial reasoning. The result is that 3/4 of the women are worse than all the men. Is this a better outcome? Why?
Now I picked an example where men have an advantage. But men don't in all fields though. According to other research, women are better on average at management. This is an argument to accept the data and do our best to hire and promote on competence.
Now that argument applies to hard engineering. It isn't software development. I do not know why the ratio is so extreme in software development. (More extreme than in, say, mechanical engineering.) However I have also never seen data suggesting that sorting on interest and ability shouldn't result in the ratios that we see. Before we double down on equality as a mandate, I would like to see that data collected.
As long as, on average, the men and women you hire are equally good, your hiring process is not broken. If your data finds that there is a difference in average ability, then adjust your practices to get higher average competence. Encourage everyone to have the opportunity. Make it clear that all people with title X are equivalent regardless of secondary characteristics, AND work to make that true. (I believe that it is pretty true today.)
[+] [-] mlboss|6 years ago|reply
So if you are going to college in India you will choose a subject that makes more economic sense. Even if that means studying a subject that you don't like that much. When there is freedom to choose profession without economic constraints people will choose subject that interests them the most.
Edit: I might be downvoted for last sentence.
[+] [-] gjmacd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meristem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbilstein|6 years ago|reply
After I graduated, my university managed to get the number closer to 60/40 of men vs. women but when I graduated there was just one woman in our graduating class. I heard anecdotally from those majoring in EE how they had professors actually discourage them from continuing because they were 'too anxious' about grades and other stuff.
I'm male and I was the only LatinX person in my CS major; there were several more in EE by comparison. Part of the problem might be cultural pressure...my parents were extremely disappointed when I decided to major in 'Computer Science' rather than a major with 'Engineering' in the title. They did not get that it was part of the school of engineering, that for all intents and purposes I was an engineer, and the job kicks ass. They wanted to be able to say I was an 'ingeniero' to family in Peru. I ignored them.
As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.
It feels stupid to say but when I interview with people of other races, I feel more confident. When I interview with immigrants as well. It's my personal bias that I need to work against.
EDIT:
I'm not arguing that these anxieties are rational or desirable...they simply exist in my mind and that makes interviewing more challenging. Just as a musician may fear they'll forget their parts when they go on stage even if they are virtuosos, these sources of anxiety are real. For engineering interviews, not acknowledging some of these issues lowers your signal to noise ration. Someone might be a fantastic engineer but a 45 minute interview might present enough anxiety that they won't be able to show it.
[+] [-] speeder|6 years ago|reply
My mother family is mixed of black and native american.
Almost every single time I faced discrimination, was because I was "white", for example open hostility by 100% black people assuming that I was "white" and evil or something, or when I was informed I should not apply for affirmative action because I was too white looking, or many, many times I was called racist as soon people saw a picture of me during some argument or another.
To me it is obvious that further segregation and racism, is not the answer to segregation and racism.
[+] [-] whb07|6 years ago|reply
Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in.
I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true.
Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.
<--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
Ok, see, this assertion bugs me. The linked post SPECIFICALLY talks about biasing hiring and recruiting in favor of women. Diversity efforts, by definition, are hiring and recruiting bias, but for supposedly benevolent reasons. But you’re dismissing that and implying that there are subtle, hidden, unremovable biases that only certain people are capable of even seeing. If somebody were to suggest that you’re imagining things, there’s no way to test your theory against theirs, since you’re begging the question (in the original philosophical sense).
[+] [-] plughs|6 years ago|reply
I get it. Interviewers still think they should evaluate how a candidate will "fit into our culture" without any examination of what that means. For a lot of teams that still translates to "same shows, same games, same fondness for happy hours, same comfort for vaguely inappropriate jokes". If a candidate doesn't seem to fit into that sort of "culture", it's easy to pass them over for the next one.
[+] [-] pksdjfikkkkdsff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcatcher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] age_bronze|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukilot|6 years ago|reply
It's interesting that you went on to describe your bias against white interviewers. It's going to be quite difficult for white people to hire non-white people into their organization if non-white people are biased against performing well for white interviewers.
[+] [-] skybrian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
What can I do to do better?
[+] [-] jimbokun|6 years ago|reply
Anything specific that white interviewers could do differently to make you feel more at ease?
> It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that.
Well yeah, it's Google, so that's possible. Or maybe the company is large enough now that those kinds of high level individuals are diluted in their engineering pool? But it certainly had that reputation early on, that any random person interviewing you could be top in their field of expertise.
> The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.
Hah, yeah, that's very much part of the culture. Having the best argument or data or working code matters. Not how politely you talk about it.
Which can certainly have its advantages, as long as everyone can let go of personally identifying with their idea once they are convinced of a better one. Then it can be a real positive.
[+] [-] f2000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshmarlow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TurkishPoptart|6 years ago|reply
You've described me perfectly. Except that I'm an anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy from rural Oregon who was bullied throughout high school for being, I dunno, skinny, pale, and awkward. This has resulted in a lot of self-worth issues, social anxiety, and major depression, which I struggle with to this day, nearly 15 years after high school. I have been interviewing for high-level companies for the past year and...have not secured a single offer, probably because I suck at interviewing, but who the hell knows?
Anyway, I get what you're saying about the "Zuck" personality type, and that's refreshing for you to mention. I, too, am pretty intimidated by some of the people you describe. I am sorry that they make you feel that way. They probably don't intend to. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that there are a LOT of "non-POC" people, AKA Zuckerberg-looking folks, who are incredibly anxious and just want you to smile at them and try to get to know them as a _human being_. I don't want to be grouped together with all the people in this country that have light skin. It's not fair to me.
I suspect that some of the "non-POC" people (why don't you just say white people?) COULD wrongfully see you as an intended "diversity hire", and need to "prove your worth" accordingly, which is racist and wrong. But the problem is that the narrative you're putting forth is encouraging companies to take measures to make the workplace more diverse. If you follow this idea down the rabbit hole, I think it will hurt people that look like me, who have no acceptable "race card" to play. And that's OK. But down the road, it's going to lead to more racial friction. I don't want to be put into a racial box based on my phenotypes. What if there was a form of affirmative action that led to more anxious and depressed people getting better jobs? For a few minutes it sounds awesome, but it's probably the wrong way to go about things, because I think it would lead to animosity between neurotypical people and, to use a woke term, the "neurodiverse".
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergfdgs|6 years ago|reply
English already has a gender neutral adjective to refer to us, Latin, and therefore Latin American.
LatinX means you've internalized the colonialization of white "liberals" [0] who would refer to us as Latinos or Latinas while speaking English to show off their poor Spanish and therefore pretend to be sophisticated and woke.
[0] I don't consider liberal bad or good, just that the people who use latino/a/X seem to self-identify as liberals.
[+] [-] rinchik|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rofo1|6 years ago|reply
To me, this is just as bad as actively discriminating against certain groups of people.
Why must everyone be absolutely and uniformly represented? It just doesn't make sense, that's not how reality works. It will never be so, and all you end up doing is crunching the numbers to "make it work on paper".
Are women or black or whatever group we discuss equally represented across all jobs across the whole universe, everywhere?
It's a ridiculous concept, I don't understand who came up with it.
[+] [-] whinythepooh|6 years ago|reply
Is there any actual proof of any of this rather than some bogus numbers from noname Kapor Center who admit they are just evangelists?
https://www.kaporcenter.org/our-work/ > Our pioneering work ranges from education programs and community building to evangelism and investing.
[+] [-] seangrogg|6 years ago|reply
I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it's also not a binary - in order to reach 50% women we'd only have 50% for the remaining non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not exclusively male.
I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as objectives.
[+] [-] romwell|6 years ago|reply
The goal is not to have 50% women, sharp. The goal is to fix the problem that in the US, where there are 5 men for every woman working in top major software corporations, and those are the ones that supposedly try to improve things.
It's 2019, and yet a company with all-male board was the norm until this year (arguably still is). We are so, so far from any form of reasonable balance that I am not sure which universe your comment applies to.
And yes, what you said matters, as does race, country of origin, and economic background. Intersectionality is a fancy word, but it's useful, and the article mentions it.
So that said, 50% is a useful number. It's useful to say that if the actual hiring rate is at 15%, we still have a problem.
[+] [-] abjKT26nO8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billti|6 years ago|reply
> In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%
Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to? What is India doing so well in this space to have over double the percentage of female software developers as the U.S.?
[+] [-] sdnlafkjh34rw|6 years ago|reply
If you score at the top in your entrance exams, you will applying to medical or engineering schools. The good schools are hyper selective and only take the top scorers (at a rate more selective than our ivy's). Very, very few people consider majors outside of these areas. Secondly, there is a huge amount of social pressure to be an engineer or doctor. It is quite often that parents choose your major, or at least heavily push their kids into one. There are lots of Bollywood movies whose plots are centered around parents forcing their kids into engineering.
Since your choice of major is largely determined by academic and social reasons there isn't a big gender disparity. Females do just as well on the entrance exams, and there is no societal view that engineering is a male major. If you are a parent who wants your kids to earn well and marry well, you will push your kids towards medicine or engineering regardless of gender. If you are female who scored well and got entrance into a top engineering school, dropping out would be unthinkable. It would be an insult to your family. You would be throwing away years of hard work in their view; some kids start preparing for entrance exams when the hit 14. There is even a suicide problem when people fail out of the top schools (see the movie 3 Idiots). Essentially majors and careers have a hierarchy which is the same regardless of gender.
As to why there isn't a societal bias that engineering is a male major, I'm not sure. It was definitely a quick change as it was only in the 1960s when most engineering colleges started admitting females.
There is definitely still a gender gap (many women are not supported to even finish basic schooling), but there isn't a huge societal bias that engineering major or STEM is a male profession.
I have heard that some of the USSR countries (Russia, Ukraine) have a similar culture and don't view engineering or STEM as "male" majors.
Maybe the problem is parents don't bully their daughters and sons into engineering here :)
[+] [-] celticmusic|6 years ago|reply
It's only when there's a lot of economic pressure that women that they start going into fields they don't tend to go into. India, specifically, has a lot of pressure for people to go into software dev.
Here's the LA Times talking about it:
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-women-e...
[+] [-] Pharaoh2|6 years ago|reply
In the small minority of hacker rank study set, I would say that women are just as much encouraged or frankly expected to be in STEM as men. Although I am fairly certain that this observation will quickly disappear and will be heavily male dominated on a larger percentage of the population.
Really, looking at the actual hacker rank source, it seems like their sample set is really tiny and heavily biased.
[+] [-] scarejunba2|6 years ago|reply
Secondarily, Indian education admissions have a high co-efficient on standardized tests and a near zero co-efficient on 'well-roundedness'. Affirmative action is caste-based and implemented via quotas filled from the standardized-test scores.
Finally, lots of SWEs in India are drudge-work engineers. They may spend a few days changing the text on a ColdFusion page. For these jobs there is a bare selection mechanism that involves your university GPA-equivalent and whether you can speak English (usually). The large number of graduates will then spend their time 'on the bench' as spare burstable capacity to perform this sort of drudge-work maintenance. The lack of a selection mechanism removes a source of bias.
So some good things, some bad things. Some don't apply to Google India (like the last one, I think).
EDIT: Sorry, had to create a throwaway for this one, but I lived there (and observed this for many of my friends, though not for myself) and felt you deserved to have live info. I'll accept the full ban on my account for bypassing the rate-limit.
[+] [-] naasking|6 years ago|reply
> Does India not have the various gender biases we often attribute a large part of the problem to?
The gender equality paradox details many of these sorts of inconsistencies. For instance, why does Iran have gender parity in compsci while virtually all progressive cultures struggle to crack 20% in compsci?
[+] [-] jdmoreira|6 years ago|reply
At the same time I noticed that the majority of engineering managers, product owners and agile coaches in our company are women. Some of these women were programmers at some point in their career.
I'm not deducing anything from this (especially since it’s a single datapoint) but it sure is interesting.
[+] [-] romaaeterna|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|6 years ago|reply
So if you want a number to target, it’s not a proportion of female employees, it’s the retention rate. And that’s not affected by pipeline problems.
[+] [-] belorn|6 years ago|reply
The problem look very similar if you want male employees in a female dominate work place or female employees in a male dominated work place. Retention rate is going to be problem, and it is going to be a consistent problem from the first year as a student to 30 years later into the career.
The common result is that people move into local groups where they can be part of a majority. Male teachers going into physical education where most the other physical education teachers are also male. In IT we see female programmers go into design or team leader, where most other designers and team leaders are female.
It is a very hard problem to solve.
[+] [-] thorwasdfasdf|6 years ago|reply
Every time we start with basic counting, after just 2 minutes, she's constantly telling me "daddy, I don't want to count anymore". I'm not giving up yet. But, we have to accept the fact that certain genders don't like math and don't like programming.
Sometimes, I see the same thing playing out at older ages. We once hired a female intern and our PM was like "ok everyone, now do your best to make programming seem as fun as possible so we can get this person to go into CS". I'm thinking, at that age, I would have killed for an internship, you wouldn't have had to convince me to "think it was fun", I already knew it was.
There's so much focus on gender equality in programming but where is the gender equality talk in other industries like: cosmetics, football, ballet dancing, etc
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
And indeed I did, and took to math and CS like a duck to water.
No idea whether that's common, nor whether it might be more common for males, but it's hard to see how someone with that intuitive drive wasn't going to do quite well in the subject.
[+] [-] yongjik|6 years ago|reply
In fact, if it was a boy, many people would have chalked it up to "Well of course boys like to move around and be active. Who likes to sit down and count things, anyway?"
[+] [-] jeromebaek|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]