In my experience distributed company is best if you want diverse team from start. I worked at company where 70% of engineers were women.
Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?
By whom?
In the US?
If you're hiring from the whole planet, that's not the valid measure.
this is difficult for a variety of reasons.
if you don't know female engineers you might not see yourself doing this. especially if you parent neither see this as a fitting career path
Meaning, they are hiring in proportions which are consistent with their applicant pools, those pools are just different because of friend networks.
People that study these things always take a macroscopic view and talk about sexism/racism in the industry in aggregate and rarely in any specific company.
Nobody said that except you, which betrays your agenda.
Good engineering talent is in short supply and has been for two decades now. It certainly won't do any harm to explore alternate recruiting channels.
There is always an opportunity cost. Exploring alternative recruiting channels means not utilizing recruiting channels that have been optimized to find talent regardless of race/gender.
>Nobody said that except you, which betrays your agenda.
Articles that state that software engineering companies are sexist because they don't have a 50/50 gender split are very commonplace.
My agenda is not being discriminated based on my race or gender fyi.
If a great man comes along hire him. If a great woman comes along hire her.
If you have a quota of X you are going to hire less qualified people, thus creating a culture of quotas and not performance.
Lol.. oops.
The right way is to look for qualified candidates from multiple backgrounds. For example, plenty of companies recruit from MIT but how many recruit from Spelman College?
You also have to look at differences in the middle of the pipeline. Imagine you only give a phone screen to 5% of female applicants, but 10% of male applicants. You have to think very hard about why that happens. Maybe your ways of rating resumes have a built in bias.
For instance, imagine that I only interviewed new grads that had at least two internships in large tech companies. A rubric like that looks neutral, but you'll discover that the demographics of CS graduates vs those that have those two internships are very different (far fewer women, and a lot more people that will identify themselves as asian).
I agree with your approach, but the gender is not the only diversity metric. If you push this toward ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, introversion, geekness level, you might end up in a difficult situation and your company will look like Noah's ark. Instead, what I would do is to specify the tasks that needs to be carried out and define metric to measure it, then do a blind hiring. Attributes like graduation or work experience is irrelevant if the candidate passed the test. During the probationary period, if the team doesn't like the new members or the other way round, you can let them go.