Over 40% of women leave tech mid-career. Our goal is to decrease that number and help companies increase diversity of their workforce.
See which companies take diversity seriously, and find a better job in tech.
If you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you!
The company, realizing that the research would require that they treat their employees better, buried the research and started a PR campaign to talk about how they try to hire more women.
So we really need better regulation of companies - so that we can improve life for all of our citizens. I would like to see laws requiring employees on boards, limiting working hours, requiring higher pay for part-time vs. full-time workers, and perhaps required training for all managers for "low power distance" management. Really, I'm for anything that might improve quality of life for our citizens. We live in a time of extreme automation - why are so many of us forced to work in such poor conditions?
It would mean that women have it better than men, which is not a popular narrative today.
I also think it would be nice if folks who posted to Apply HN posts tried a little harder to engage with the application. This is not really the place to just make chit chat about gender issues.
There are lots of campaigns and initiatives for encouraging young women to start tech careers, but we are taking a different approach by encouraging women to stay in tech.
I will suggest you devote more effort to developing a means to talk to companies about "best practices" and how to do this better. Try to frame it in a non judgey fashion. Try hard to avoid sounding like you are moralizing. People will interpret your position that way anyway simply because of the space you are in. You will need to kind over compensate for that to have any hope of being heard as not being on your high horse about this.
I liked the Design for Diversity section. At the moment, all the titles I am seeingseem to be about web and app design. I hope you have plans to also write about how companies can design the company to attract and retain a diverse work force.
Let me suggest you do your best to find good research and to frame it in terms of what is in it for the company. I like your bit about how much job turnover costs. You need more in that vein. Case studies of how to do this sell and how it promotes success for the company would be a good thing.
I don't know where I saw it recently, but I have seen stats that correlate diversity to profitability. This would be another good angle to high light: Hey, all you Programmers, you are leaving money on the table.
If I ran this, I would be angling to help non diverse companies do this better as a means to further my mission and grow my user base/potential paying customer base. I will suggest that helping companies find "low hanging fruit" -- I.e. relatively painless ways to promote diversity -- would be a great way to start enticing companies down the slippery slope of goodness here.
Companies seem eager to improve, many of them ask us what more could they do to successfully to attract and retain diverse talent.
We are in the process of writing more content, also about what companies can do to attract and retain a diverse workforce.
You are absolutely right, finding good research is paramount and framing it in terms of how it benefits the company.
We have lots of work ahead in contacting and adding companies on the website, to have a useful resource for users. But the feedback we have gotten so far from users is very positive and ensures us that we are on the right path.
Thanks!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2015/12/06/why-divers...
Best of luck.
From my experience, in a big tech corporation, there are two major issues:
1. Women starting out (fresh out of college) don't appear to want to be software engineers, yet do it to pivot to another job.
2. They decide to have children, which often means they leave work for a time, and decide never to come back (although the offers are there)
Everyone should take diversity seriously, but I am curious if you have any hard stats on why women leave in the first place? That'll actually allow this problem to be solved.
Based on discussions we have had with users each story is unique. Many of our users are worried about getting "too old" to learn the latest technologies, and are trying to figure out how to get to a managerial position.
Many of our users have also told us that by switching to a company that promotes women, and supports diversity in other ways, was a better fit for them. A career in tech can be very rewarding if you find the right environment / company / job.
[1] Harvard Business Review (2008) The Athena factor: Reversing the brain drain in science, engineering and technology http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...
It's known that diversity improves organisational performance and competitiveness. Diverse teams improve ROI, increase innovation and solve problems better.
Still only 25% of the IT workforce are women, and over 40% of them leave tech mid-career. We think people who build technology should represent the people who use it.
There is a lack of talent in STEM, so in addition to attracting new talent, we need to find ways to retain current talent, who will build the future of technology. A career in tech can be very rewarding if you find the right company and job.
"The evidence based on meta-analyses, which systematically aggregate the results from all relevant studies, tentatively suggests that gender diversity within teams does not exert any influence on team performance (Webber & Donahue, 2001; Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007; Joshi & Roh, 2009; Schneid et al., 2014). A notable exception is the meta-analysis by Bell et al. (2011), which evidences a negative association between gender diversity and team performance..."
Yes, however diversity can create better performance when it comes to 'out of the ordinary' creative tasks, e.g. product development. There are benefits for innovation and getting fresh ideas. But there are different types of diversity that can generate various sorts of conflict, which affect how a team performs. The benefits of diversity don't occur overnight, but can improve performance if managed successfully. [1]
The studies you mentioned (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007; Joshi and Roh, 2009) had mixed findings because they observed different aspects of diversity (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, and demographic diversity) and analyzed the relationship between these and team outcomes.
[1] Jayne & Dipboye, 2004. Leveraging diversity to improve business performance.
It's known that gender diversity improves organisational performance and competitiveness. Diverse teams improve ROI, increase innovation and solve problems better. Still only 25% of the IT workforce are women, and over 40% of them leave tech mid-career. We think people who build technology should represent the people who use it. There is a lack of talent in STEM, so in addition to attracting new talent, we need to find ways to keep more of the current talent, to build the future of technology. A career in tech can be very rewarding if you find the right company and job.
Actually this is what we were also worried about, but we have been in contact with many companies, and not all of them see diversity as a priority. Those companies who take diversity seriously are excited about our mission and want to showcase their company to our users. We have had long conversations with all the companies on our site, and heard what they are doing to support diversity. But you are right, there is so much more we can do, and we can't wait to go forward with this.
For adding content. I was about to suggest creating a diversity ranking, but of course this has already been done (e.g., [1] and [2]). How do you intend to become a thought leader in this space?
[1] http://www.diversityinc.com/the-diversityinc-top-50-companie...
Those are great resources. However, our users are mostly from the USA, Canada and Europe, which is why are planning to add companies and jobs from all of those locations.
In user testing we found out that women would like to see targeted job ads for them. Research shows that men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them [1]. If a tech job is advertised directly to women in tech, it lowers the barrier for applying for a job.
There are lots of campaigns and initiatives for encouraging young women to start tech careers, but we are taking a different approach by encouraging women to stay in tech.
[1] Harvard Business Review (2014) “Why women don’t apply for jobs unless they’re 100% qualified” Source: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
I agree, upvoted this. Good luck.