> "Only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26% of all American coders." - Wired
and
> Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires.
> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal
> *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system.
This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split.
Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard.
If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.
Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant?
The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified.
The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix.
Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.
> This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women.
They are Department of Labor statistics which, I believe you will find, measure not the people qualified to be employed in a particular role, but the people currently employed in that role.
So, contrary to your position, if the current numbers on that are 74/26, it is not a logical contradiction that every company in the industry could get closer to 50/50, without either reducing the total number of employed programmers or convincing anyone who doesn't already prefer to work as a programmer to "enter the field".
You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.
(I'm not saying that the latter population, without changes earlier in the pipeline, would necessarily support a 50/50 split either, I'm saying you can't draw conclusions about it from the former population.)
>If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.
It's not mathematically impossible. You'll just have the "excess" 48% of the population working in fields that have the opposite gender balance. (Whether or not this is desirable is an exercise left to the reader.)
The biggest thing that I feel like these initiatives always miss is that the onus on fixing the problem of gender equality in tech shouldn't be on the companies at this point in the game (not to say that won't change), but on getting more women interested in tech in the first place. Overwhelmingly women don't seem to care about the technology field. We need to focus less on bending over backwards to find appropriate female candidates from such a small pool, and focus more on what organizations like Girls who Code[0] who are trying to get more young women interested in technology. Once there is actually a sizable amount of women involved in the field, then maybe the conversation over discrimination or lack of diversity may be worth having. But until then I cant just make female engineers poof into the interview room like magic and thats not for lack of trying.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, so you can't narrow your focus, but instead approach it from multiple angles. Women aren't encouraged to get involved in tech because they can't find good role models, and there are no good role models because women aren't being encouraged to get involved with tech. It's important to have initatives like this to get more role models so we can encourage more women and get more role models to encourage more women ...
Exactly. It is anectodal but, every women who works in our office (and mostly on other offices I see) is either business related, or semi-techie (QA Engineer). We just can't find any women coders that can actually pass a basic competency challenge for more than two years.
One of the major things that discourage women from entering tech is a lack of role models. So companies can have a big impact right now by hiring more women.
> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."
This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1]
As for the job description rewrites such as:
"We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately."
"Sensitive to clients’ needs,"
Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop.
I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job.
As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line."
> This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control.
The advice is from a CEO, presumably to CEOs (whose set of concerns include longer range strategic goals, and whose tools are broader, than those who are merely "hiring managers".)
> For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.
People who are qualified to work as computer programmers are not exclusively graduates in computer science and computer engineering. I'd be surprised if even the majority of working programmers had degrees in one of those fields.
“I can't believe that any woman” — stop right here. Whenever anyone on HN ever says this, they're really showing themselves to:
1) lack imagination
2) lack empathy (egregiously so)
3) generally be wrong about whatever follows next
What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same. This is IDIOTIC and you're revealing yourself to seeing women as "a demographic" rather than as 3.6 billion unique individuals who each have their own unique personality, interests, etc.
Also, you're revealing your massively shortsighted perspective and utter inability to educate yourself a little on the matter before chiming in with your assertions, but let me help you improve perspective and learn something new:
> A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.
So, your assertion that it's "ridiculous goop" has actually been proven (repeatedly) by scientific studies, and is a tremendously stupid assertion to begin with (it hinges on the assumption that all women are exactly the same).
Perhaps next time, before opening your mouth, assess whether you actually have any fucking knowledge of what you're about to assert.
>The premise of “We Only Hire The Best Candidates.”
>The idea is not to hire women just because they're women. Hire women that are amazing at their jobs.
Okay, so should you pick a female candidate who is estimated to be 1% worse than a male candidate? That answer just sidesteps the whole question.
I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.
EDIT:
>"You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."
That's seems sexist. Since the majority of tech students and tech graduates still are male, the non-biased ratio shouldn't be 50/50.
Let's assume that the best candidate should always be chosen.
How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate that it can distinguish people within 1%? I would love to see a writeup of your methodology, and how you confirm those numbers.
> I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't hire the "best" candidate, where "best" has some vague, unclear and subjective definition. But whatever best may mean, I doubt it is "fair" unless inherited wealth and traits also fits into your definition of "fair". Question of "fair" totally sidesteps the bigger problems. I think what this post states is that not having a monoculture may have a greater benefit than hiring a subjectively "best" engineer.
As an anecdote as an example of larger issues of fair being a weird thing to think about, I have an example. I have a 6 year old daughter in chess class. All last semester she's been too shy to raise her hand to answer chess questions from the male chess teacher. He's a great teacher, great with kids but I noticed he predominately encourages the boys to answer his questions, and sure enough when I finally convinced my daughter to raise her hand on the last day of class he totally never picked her.
She was raising her hand for almost every question and this teacher sometimes even ignores the hands up and asks the same boy he's been asking all day, even though that kid didn't have his hands up, and even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this. My daughter was so dejected by this experience, of raising her hand, finally being ready to answer a chess class and this guy totally doesn't even see her. She was crushed, and I was too. We're still going to go to this chess class, but if this teacher doesn't change I'm going to talk to him. This is an example of why "best" and "fair" are hard. A few generation of teacher tracking encouraging boys over girls makes me sceptical that the produced "best" was fair in the first place.
The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline. Hiring in tech is the end of pipe-line, if people do not enter the queue i.e. get some form formal or semi-formal techEd they are not going to make it to the other end.
Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative.
Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share.
So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions.
Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).
Note that the job descriptions the site labels as "better", and which it presents as neutral, are those that are explicitly labeled as "feminine" in the source it quotes. If you want to recruit an even ratio of men to women, use actually neutral job descriptions. The original source [1] notes that the experiment only tested female aversion to the masculine job descriptions, and not the other way around. Treat these examples as the ends of a spectrum and shoot for somewhere in the middle.
Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do.
i did edit from "masculine" and "feminine" to "average" and "better" as i found masculine/feminine ultimately problematic. this reference is simply a few examples of what a change in language can do. they still describe the exact same job and functions.
I always feel slightly bitter about stuff like this. As a male, I don't ever recall being encouraged to work in tech. Any geeky pursuit made me the subject of ridicule. There was always a battle with my mother as a child to even be allowed access to a computer. Bleh.
I'm really impressed with this post in general. I understand that these concepts are beyond the scope of this page, but I hope to hear more from OP about getting more women prepared as candidates for engineering/software jobs. I agree that there is a gender bias in hiring practices, but I think it's a symptom of the more systemic problem driving women away from STEM fields.
I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.
fair enough re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions. nothing on the site is original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters.
I'm going to have to contest the complaint on "gendered wording". Ironically, this is coming from the same people who will often berate you for "tone policing" them, judging by the ideological dispositions of several of the linked resources in the footer.
I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator.
Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days.
But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves.
So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.
I'm not going to change the wording of my job postings to "make women more comfortable". That's bullshit. Women are adults too, we should not do them the disservice of coddling them. It is much better to let them rise to the challenge. Many do, and many do very well. As noted in the article, and something I agree with, companies do better with women in management. However, this is not due to babying them.
I object to the part about gender coding the language. I think people should be able to speak and write the way it comes naturally to them. It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men. Apart from that, the "better" descriptions were vague and unclear as to what the focus was. "understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.
I'm a man, I support having more women in tech (thought I don't agree it is the companies responsibilities for this) but I can honestly say, her rewritten job descriptions would make me NOT want to apply (maybe that is the goal?).
1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients'
2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients'
First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.
>"understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.
This particular language was for describing the company as a whole, rather than a position.
To me, this phrasing sounds like the firm differentiates itself based on having a better understanding of its customers, which is a useful thing for consultancies.
> It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men.
This is a good point. If you get to the point where people are scared of expressing their thoughts for fear of offending someone who took them the wrong way, you have a serious problem. Most people are not going to put in the effort; they're just going to keep their mouths closed and dodge the confrontation entirely. This leads to bad ideas winning.
Sure, it's one thing about posting a job description. But if you're going to apply that mindset to your job description, you're probably going to apply it to everything from water cooler conversation to official meetings to emails.
And yes, it's important that people are respectful and make your environment a great place to work. But it's a really bad idea to go over the top in welcoming 10% of your workforce and alienating the other 90%.
As a husband to a female minority executive in aerospace and a brother to an engineer/executive in green tech, I have to say this is focused on the wrong issues. From what I have seen, qualified women get hired and get promoted. The biggest problem that remains is one of conduct by male employees on the job.
Also, for the life of me, I just can't understand why people want to take a census and say ok, our population is 50%/50% male/female, 50%/20%/15%/5% white/black/hispanic/asian, 80%/9%/9%/2% straight/gay/lesbian/transgender, so let's make sure those magic ratios are equal across all home makers, software developers, the rich, the poor, etc... There is no end to it and it's folly.
> Wealthy white women are not the most disprivileged class <
If we are considering equality. A native american man is way more disprivileged then a caucasian univerity educated woman. I mean name one VC backed start up with a Native American CEO?
I am Metis (Native American) and frankly the low employment on reserves could be mitigated by remote work. Having more coders and startup from reserves/communities could be an amazing way to help many of the cripling social issues.
We could have a Native American Steve Jobs... and then have him played in a film by Johnny Depp :)
TL:DR > It is not really fair to almost exclusively focus on the most privilidged dispriviledge class.
PS > Also those are some big numbers for ROI with no sourcing. Sceptical me is skeptic.
PS. there's absolutely sourcing for those ROI numbers. Here are a few of the sources for the studies linked to directly below the ROI metrics (Anita Borg Institute), and pages 11-12 of that report detail all of the sources and studies. Here it is, in case you missed it on the site ---> http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for...
Those metrics are based on studies by: Cristian Dezsö at the University of Maryland, and David Ross at Columbia University Business School; Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Cindy Padnos, founder of Illuminate Ventures, who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship; The London Business School report, Innovative Potential: Men and Women in Teams; the September 2013 research report, Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth by The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI); Professor Anita Woolley, an economist at Carnegie Mellon; Cumulative Gallup Workplace Studies; and McKinsey & Company's annual series "Women Matter."
Maybe I'm just more drawn to the average descriptions cause I'm male, but some of the language feels off in the "better" descriptions.
> We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.
Intimately sounds wrong here to me. Intimacy is something I would associate with things of romantic nature.
> Strong communication and influencing skills.
vs
> Proficient oral and written communications skills.
They sound like descriptions for different jobs. One sounds like a job where you need to be able to close deals or lead people the other sounds like a generic soft-skill that everyone says they have.
Turning "Direct" to "Support" also gives a different meaning.
The descriptions feel like the position is more entry-level or wishy-washy. I'd imagine the "better" descriptions would approachable to both genders, as they don't seem they demand as much or need people to be assertive/confident.
Maybe this works out well in practice, as maybe you lose a lot of suitable candidates to effects like impostor syndrome. They just feel like they are advertising two different jobs.
I think you could say train more women in tech and you would have a better staring point. The 80s and 90s were graduating more females.
From Wikipedia:
In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.
I don't understand what makes those average wordings gendered and the 'better' wording not gendered.
From my readings of Dr. Deborah Tannen, (who writes books on the topic of the differences in male and female communication styles, and their possible cultutral origins) they both seem like they are gendered, with the 'average' wording being an example of masciline-ish speech (my interpretation, not hers) and the 'better' wording being more feminine-ish.
I'm happy to learn how I've misinterpreted it, but I'm not seeing it. Can somebody please enlighten me?
> Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings"
I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.
The wording changes in job descriptions strike me as treating a symptom rather than a cause.
Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?
[+] [-] opendais|11 years ago|reply
and
> Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires.
> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal
> *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system.
This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split.
Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard.
If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.
[+] [-] arrrg|11 years ago|reply
The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified.
The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix.
Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
They are Department of Labor statistics which, I believe you will find, measure not the people qualified to be employed in a particular role, but the people currently employed in that role.
So, contrary to your position, if the current numbers on that are 74/26, it is not a logical contradiction that every company in the industry could get closer to 50/50, without either reducing the total number of employed programmers or convincing anyone who doesn't already prefer to work as a programmer to "enter the field".
You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.
(I'm not saying that the latter population, without changes earlier in the pipeline, would necessarily support a 50/50 split either, I'm saying you can't draw conclusions about it from the former population.)
[+] [-] FedRegister|11 years ago|reply
It's not mathematically impossible. You'll just have the "excess" 48% of the population working in fields that have the opposite gender balance. (Whether or not this is desirable is an exercise left to the reader.)
[+] [-] MPetitt|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://girlswhocode.com/
[+] [-] acbart|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonewhite|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danilocampos|11 years ago|reply
To say nothing of how hostile the industry leadership can be to women (cf Richards/SendGrid, GitHub, Tinder, Urban Airship).
[+] [-] jasode|11 years ago|reply
This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1]
As for the job description rewrites such as:
"We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately." "Sensitive to clients’ needs,"
Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop.
I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job.
As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line."
[1]http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
The advice is from a CEO, presumably to CEOs (whose set of concerns include longer range strategic goals, and whose tools are broader, than those who are merely "hiring managers".)
> For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.
People who are qualified to work as computer programmers are not exclusively graduates in computer science and computer engineering. I'd be surprised if even the majority of working programmers had degrees in one of those fields.
[+] [-] KuraFire|11 years ago|reply
1) lack imagination 2) lack empathy (egregiously so) 3) generally be wrong about whatever follows next
What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same. This is IDIOTIC and you're revealing yourself to seeing women as "a demographic" rather than as 3.6 billion unique individuals who each have their own unique personality, interests, etc.
Also, you're revealing your massively shortsighted perspective and utter inability to educate yourself a little on the matter before chiming in with your assertions, but let me help you improve perspective and learn something new:
Study: Women Do Not Apply To ‘Male-Sounding’ Jobs http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sound...
You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...
> A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.
So, your assertion that it's "ridiculous goop" has actually been proven (repeatedly) by scientific studies, and is a tremendously stupid assertion to begin with (it hinges on the assumption that all women are exactly the same).
Perhaps next time, before opening your mouth, assess whether you actually have any fucking knowledge of what you're about to assert.
[+] [-] nawitus|11 years ago|reply
Okay, so should you pick a female candidate who is estimated to be 1% worse than a male candidate? That answer just sidesteps the whole question.
I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.
EDIT: >"You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."
That's seems sexist. Since the majority of tech students and tech graduates still are male, the non-biased ratio shouldn't be 50/50.
[+] [-] aristus|11 years ago|reply
How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate that it can distinguish people within 1%? I would love to see a writeup of your methodology, and how you confirm those numbers.
[+] [-] bellerocky|11 years ago|reply
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't hire the "best" candidate, where "best" has some vague, unclear and subjective definition. But whatever best may mean, I doubt it is "fair" unless inherited wealth and traits also fits into your definition of "fair". Question of "fair" totally sidesteps the bigger problems. I think what this post states is that not having a monoculture may have a greater benefit than hiring a subjectively "best" engineer.
As an anecdote as an example of larger issues of fair being a weird thing to think about, I have an example. I have a 6 year old daughter in chess class. All last semester she's been too shy to raise her hand to answer chess questions from the male chess teacher. He's a great teacher, great with kids but I noticed he predominately encourages the boys to answer his questions, and sure enough when I finally convinced my daughter to raise her hand on the last day of class he totally never picked her.
She was raising her hand for almost every question and this teacher sometimes even ignores the hands up and asks the same boy he's been asking all day, even though that kid didn't have his hands up, and even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this. My daughter was so dejected by this experience, of raising her hand, finally being ready to answer a chess class and this guy totally doesn't even see her. She was crushed, and I was too. We're still going to go to this chess class, but if this teacher doesn't change I'm going to talk to him. This is an example of why "best" and "fair" are hard. A few generation of teacher tracking encouraging boys over girls makes me sceptical that the produced "best" was fair in the first place.
[+] [-] sremani|11 years ago|reply
Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative.
Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share.
So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions.
Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).
[+] [-] danilocampos|11 years ago|reply
Oh yeah? Then how come with blacks taking 10% of CS degrees and Latinos taking 8%, their representation at Google and Facebook is only 1% and 2%?
Meritocracy?
[+] [-] john_b|11 years ago|reply
Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do.
[1] http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...
[+] [-] kgunette|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorfoo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purringmeow|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arnor|11 years ago|reply
I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.
[+] [-] kgunette|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|11 years ago|reply
I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator.
Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days.
But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves.
So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.
[+] [-] mjfl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oddevan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimeusename|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BSousa|11 years ago|reply
1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients'
2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients'
First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.
[+] [-] jaredsohn|11 years ago|reply
This particular language was for describing the company as a whole, rather than a position.
To me, this phrasing sounds like the firm differentiates itself based on having a better understanding of its customers, which is a useful thing for consultancies.
[+] [-] omegaham|11 years ago|reply
This is a good point. If you get to the point where people are scared of expressing their thoughts for fear of offending someone who took them the wrong way, you have a serious problem. Most people are not going to put in the effort; they're just going to keep their mouths closed and dodge the confrontation entirely. This leads to bad ideas winning.
Sure, it's one thing about posting a job description. But if you're going to apply that mindset to your job description, you're probably going to apply it to everything from water cooler conversation to official meetings to emails.
And yes, it's important that people are respectful and make your environment a great place to work. But it's a really bad idea to go over the top in welcoming 10% of your workforce and alienating the other 90%.
[+] [-] splintercell|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjfl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aristus|11 years ago|reply
Seriously. The OP took the time to make a reasoned, step-by-step argument for hiring more women in order to build a better company. Grow up.
[+] [-] IanDrake|11 years ago|reply
Also, for the life of me, I just can't understand why people want to take a census and say ok, our population is 50%/50% male/female, 50%/20%/15%/5% white/black/hispanic/asian, 80%/9%/9%/2% straight/gay/lesbian/transgender, so let's make sure those magic ratios are equal across all home makers, software developers, the rich, the poor, etc... There is no end to it and it's folly.
[+] [-] McDoku|11 years ago|reply
If we are considering equality. A native american man is way more disprivileged then a caucasian univerity educated woman. I mean name one VC backed start up with a Native American CEO?
I am Metis (Native American) and frankly the low employment on reserves could be mitigated by remote work. Having more coders and startup from reserves/communities could be an amazing way to help many of the cripling social issues.
We could have a Native American Steve Jobs... and then have him played in a film by Johnny Depp :)
TL:DR > It is not really fair to almost exclusively focus on the most privilidged dispriviledge class.
PS > Also those are some big numbers for ROI with no sourcing. Sceptical me is skeptic.
[+] [-] kgunette|11 years ago|reply
Those metrics are based on studies by: Cristian Dezsö at the University of Maryland, and David Ross at Columbia University Business School; Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Cindy Padnos, founder of Illuminate Ventures, who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship; The London Business School report, Innovative Potential: Men and Women in Teams; the September 2013 research report, Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth by The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI); Professor Anita Woolley, an economist at Carnegie Mellon; Cumulative Gallup Workplace Studies; and McKinsey & Company's annual series "Women Matter."
[+] [-] rpsw|11 years ago|reply
> We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.
Intimately sounds wrong here to me. Intimacy is something I would associate with things of romantic nature.
> Strong communication and influencing skills. vs > Proficient oral and written communications skills.
They sound like descriptions for different jobs. One sounds like a job where you need to be able to close deals or lead people the other sounds like a generic soft-skill that everyone says they have.
Turning "Direct" to "Support" also gives a different meaning.
The descriptions feel like the position is more entry-level or wishy-washy. I'd imagine the "better" descriptions would approachable to both genders, as they don't seem they demand as much or need people to be assertive/confident.
Maybe this works out well in practice, as maybe you lose a lot of suitable candidates to effects like impostor syndrome. They just feel like they are advertising two different jobs.
[+] [-] jgrahamc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xrctl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|11 years ago|reply
From Wikipedia:
In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
I graduated with an Information Systems degree and we probably had something like 30% - 35% females that I walked with.
[+] [-] vampirechicken|11 years ago|reply
From my readings of Dr. Deborah Tannen, (who writes books on the topic of the differences in male and female communication styles, and their possible cultutral origins) they both seem like they are gendered, with the 'average' wording being an example of masciline-ish speech (my interpretation, not hers) and the 'better' wording being more feminine-ish.
I'm happy to learn how I've misinterpreted it, but I'm not seeing it. Can somebody please enlighten me?
[+] [-] kgunette|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
followed by
> Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings"
I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.
[+] [-] omegaham|11 years ago|reply
Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?