How any company can expect to build a sustainable long-term business when not one of their 14 Partners/Advisors is female is beyond me.
This piece seems... I don't know the right word for it. It's not reverse sexism. But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see some boards with 14 members of only one gender? So while it is conspicuous this particular board is all-male, how can we say a business cannot possibly be viable with only one gender on the board?
14/14 company partners were male. They claimed to support diversity within their organization.
The probability that the "supportive of diversity" claim is true and that the make up of the board is all male by random chance is quite small (naively, 1/(2^14) ).
> But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see some boards with 14 members of only one gender?
A board of 14 with only males does not logically prove that there must exist discrimination. It's also true that we as humans aren't limited to only acting on provable logical conclusions, but are entitled to make inferences from factual circumstances.
> This is especially surprising considering that many of their partners are ex-Accenture, a company that in my experience placed a strong emphasis on recruiting and promoting female talent at the highest levels.
The minute someone throws out Accenture as a positive example of how to run a business is the minute they lose their own credibility. It turns out it's easy to hire whoever you want if competence is not a requirement. Otherwise, if you hire in a field where most qualified candidiates are men, your employees will be predominantly men.
Ignoring your unfair generalisations about Accenture employees, I made no assertion that Accenture as a whole was a good way to run a business.
In the 3 years I worked there, there was a lot that I disagreed with, but one thing they did well was their effort to drive towards greater gender equality.
While I agree that it would be awesome to see more women represented in companies, particularly at higher levels of management, I'm not sure this post makes sense to me.
If one of those top management executives were female, what makes them different from the "TOKEN FEMALE" on the other associate-level pages? Is it different if there are two women in C-level positions? Where do you draw the line between women being powerful in their own right vs simply TOKEN FEMALES on a team?
(Note: I'm all for hiring women, and I encourage my friends (male and female) to take up programming, and I do my best to help them get jobs in the industry. But this guy's argument just strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism and what that means.)
Of course not. Feminists will tell you this with a straight face: it's only sexism if it disadvantages women.
That's why feminists only started caring about STEM when it became high-status. Feminists are glad to let men do all the low-status shit jobs, like garbage collection or construction or working in oil fields, as long as such work remains low-status. 20 years ago, programming was low status and women were obsessed with becoming doctors and lawyers because medicine and law were very high status. 20 years from now there will be lots of women programmers just like there are lots of women doctors and lawyers today.
This is extremely dangerous and often gives the opposite effect. An example is situation with universities in Sweden. There was a parity for all degrees. As a result, lots of women didn't get to uni because 50% was reserved for male, even though they had higher grades. They filled a law suit and won (European Court of Human Rights).
There are plenty of reasons why you should care about gender diversity - many of them linked in the article/letter, if you had bothered to read it. The most obvious being: because you said you care about diversity. CompanyX claimed to support diversity and integration, but didn't make it a priority. If one can't trust the management to hold itself accountable on something so visible, why trust them about anything else?
This is a sexist article, because it tells a company that they should hire people just because they are women, it's also racist because it remarked that the team was white as a problem.
What if I started a company, and all good candidates were male, and the women weren't on par? What if no women applied at all? I don't get this whole gender thing. If statistically less women apply to a STEM degree, or tech related job, how is it the fault of "white males"? White male guilt at it's finest if you ask me.
If you actively see discrimination, do something about it. I actually work with a team that is 90% women, it just happened that way. The male applicants sucked, the women were great. My friends teams however, are only male, because they had no female applicants.
Why try to force equality? Am I missing something?
What if the person doing the hiring silently disregards all female applicants? How would you tackle that problem?
OP if you had a company would you hire a less qualified woman than a more qualified man in the name of equality?
This movement seems counter-intuitive. If the applicant is good, hire them, male or female, young or old. Our team consists of elder women, young fresh grads, interns, and working class middle aged women as well, all across the spectrum. We all mingle just fine and still shoot the shit.
Hiring GOOD people is the only thing that should matter. Throw out all this ideology and affirmative action nonsense.
Your viewpoint is predicated on an assumption: that equality is the equilibrium state of human society. In such a world where this equilibrium exists, there is no need for "ideology and affirmative action" because any affirmative actions to create inequality will be erased through the passage of time as the world returns to the equilibrium of equality.
The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see this "affirmative action" (http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads). Even if you believe that there is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time?
The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize.
One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get any women in the door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole different century than the tech sector.
[1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names differently.
[2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there is a decent chance your boss will be this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311 ("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more naturally drawn to STEM fields...")
[3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women? Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level.
> Why try to force equality? Am I missing something?
OP here. Good question. A long time ago I thought in a very similar way because I was strongly opposed to discrimination in all forms and because I think that there is often a backlash effect against affirmative action.
Between then and writing the linked article, what changed? Well 2 things:
1. Increasingly studies have shown that diversity or equality in itself contributes to the performance of a team more than just having lots of GOOD homogeneous employees - as per Natch's excellent comment (by GOOD here I'm using the study's metric of IQ.
Link: http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
2. I have come to the realisation that some of these societal norms have a far more insidious effect of us than we often realise or accept. That is to say we will often judge "GOOD" through our own very polarised perception. Thus women are often told that if they want to succeed in business they are told that they need to act "more like men", just like how black people were (are?) told that they need to act "more like white people". The dominant culture creates the societal norms, but this has a negative impact on my first point because we lose the balance and discourse that comes from having a diverse organisation, so we miss an opportunity to improve the performance of our teams. To combat this there needs to be an artificial effort to challenge dominant norms and see greater diversity.
Finally notice how my article refers to gender equality, not Women's Rights. I believe the case for gender equality is as equally valid in Tech as it is in Consulting and HR.
My daughter's in STEM, along with a few other girls, though it seems that the class is mostly male. I would wager that, at least at the middle-school level my current daughter's in, STEM involvement has more to do with the parents and less to do with the child's natural inclinations.
That isn't to say that kids don't have free will, obviously, or that they can't effect their own preferences in their lives, but I'd wager that my daughter's inclination for math and science has more to do with both of her parents having that inclination, and hence, her more frequent exposure to it.
While I tend not to worry about these sorts of things, and/or how big a deal they are, I would wager that much of this is self-perpetuating. Mothers who aren't inclined towards technology aren't able to impart technical inclination to their daughters. I couldn't swear to whether my daughter's interest in tech comes from me or my wife, but if we assume that daughters often take after their mothers, and their mothers aren't technically inclined, it's easy to say that the problem is not self-healing.
> What if I started a company, and all good candidates were male, and the women weren't on par? What if no women applied at all?
Then it's pretty clear you've done a bad job of advertising your job openings. Did you, perhaps, just ask for referrals among your own personal network?
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
This piece seems... I don't know the right word for it. It's not reverse sexism. But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see some boards with 14 members of only one gender? So while it is conspicuous this particular board is all-male, how can we say a business cannot possibly be viable with only one gender on the board?
[+] [-] dangerlibrary|12 years ago|reply
The probability that the "supportive of diversity" claim is true and that the make up of the board is all male by random chance is quite small (naively, 1/(2^14) ).
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
A board of 14 with only males does not logically prove that there must exist discrimination. It's also true that we as humans aren't limited to only acting on provable logical conclusions, but are entitled to make inferences from factual circumstances.
[+] [-] philwelch|12 years ago|reply
The minute someone throws out Accenture as a positive example of how to run a business is the minute they lose their own credibility. It turns out it's easy to hire whoever you want if competence is not a requirement. Otherwise, if you hire in a field where most qualified candidiates are men, your employees will be predominantly men.
[+] [-] Tzunamitom|12 years ago|reply
In the 3 years I worked there, there was a lot that I disagreed with, but one thing they did well was their effort to drive towards greater gender equality.
[edit typo]
[+] [-] Jemaclus|12 years ago|reply
If one of those top management executives were female, what makes them different from the "TOKEN FEMALE" on the other associate-level pages? Is it different if there are two women in C-level positions? Where do you draw the line between women being powerful in their own right vs simply TOKEN FEMALES on a team?
(Note: I'm all for hiring women, and I encourage my friends (male and female) to take up programming, and I do my best to help them get jobs in the industry. But this guy's argument just strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism and what that means.)
[+] [-] gadders|12 years ago|reply
I wonder if people women in Human Resources are running campaigns to recruit more men into their departments?
[+] [-] philwelch|12 years ago|reply
That's why feminists only started caring about STEM when it became high-status. Feminists are glad to let men do all the low-status shit jobs, like garbage collection or construction or working in oil fields, as long as such work remains low-status. 20 years ago, programming was low status and women were obsessed with becoming doctors and lawyers because medicine and law were very high status. 20 years from now there will be lots of women programmers just like there are lots of women doctors and lawyers today.
[+] [-] devonbarrett|12 years ago|reply
Titling an article about sexism with 'Be a Man' probably is not the best way to go about advocating equality.
[+] [-] Tzunamitom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukasm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] knodi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerlibrary|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samolang|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hacker789|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rfnslyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfnslyr|12 years ago|reply
If you actively see discrimination, do something about it. I actually work with a team that is 90% women, it just happened that way. The male applicants sucked, the women were great. My friends teams however, are only male, because they had no female applicants.
Why try to force equality? Am I missing something?
What if the person doing the hiring silently disregards all female applicants? How would you tackle that problem?
OP if you had a company would you hire a less qualified woman than a more qualified man in the name of equality?
This movement seems counter-intuitive. If the applicant is good, hire them, male or female, young or old. Our team consists of elder women, young fresh grads, interns, and working class middle aged women as well, all across the spectrum. We all mingle just fine and still shoot the shit.
Hiring GOOD people is the only thing that should matter. Throw out all this ideology and affirmative action nonsense.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see this "affirmative action" (http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads). Even if you believe that there is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time?
The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize.
One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get any women in the door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole different century than the tech sector.
[1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names differently.
[2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there is a decent chance your boss will be this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311 ("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more naturally drawn to STEM fields...")
[3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women? Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level.
[+] [-] Tzunamitom|12 years ago|reply
OP here. Good question. A long time ago I thought in a very similar way because I was strongly opposed to discrimination in all forms and because I think that there is often a backlash effect against affirmative action.
Between then and writing the linked article, what changed? Well 2 things:
1. Increasingly studies have shown that diversity or equality in itself contributes to the performance of a team more than just having lots of GOOD homogeneous employees - as per Natch's excellent comment (by GOOD here I'm using the study's metric of IQ. Link: http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
2. I have come to the realisation that some of these societal norms have a far more insidious effect of us than we often realise or accept. That is to say we will often judge "GOOD" through our own very polarised perception. Thus women are often told that if they want to succeed in business they are told that they need to act "more like men", just like how black people were (are?) told that they need to act "more like white people". The dominant culture creates the societal norms, but this has a negative impact on my first point because we lose the balance and discourse that comes from having a diverse organisation, so we miss an opportunity to improve the performance of our teams. To combat this there needs to be an artificial effort to challenge dominant norms and see greater diversity.
Finally notice how my article refers to gender equality, not Women's Rights. I believe the case for gender equality is as equally valid in Tech as it is in Consulting and HR.
[+] [-] mewwts|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rollo_tommasi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmelton|12 years ago|reply
That isn't to say that kids don't have free will, obviously, or that they can't effect their own preferences in their lives, but I'd wager that my daughter's inclination for math and science has more to do with both of her parents having that inclination, and hence, her more frequent exposure to it.
While I tend not to worry about these sorts of things, and/or how big a deal they are, I would wager that much of this is self-perpetuating. Mothers who aren't inclined towards technology aren't able to impart technical inclination to their daughters. I couldn't swear to whether my daughter's interest in tech comes from me or my wife, but if we assume that daughters often take after their mothers, and their mothers aren't technically inclined, it's easy to say that the problem is not self-healing.
[+] [-] ForHackernews|12 years ago|reply
Then it's pretty clear you've done a bad job of advertising your job openings. Did you, perhaps, just ask for referrals among your own personal network?