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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,”

Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees.

As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal.

However, I cannot overemphasize how demoralizing it is, especially when they aren't proven to be any better.

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But I understand that people prefer to hire friends / former colleagues. It's really really hard to know if people are a good fit for a position from just a couple of interviews. It's much easier if it's someone you've worked with before; you'll know if they can do the job or not.

"...friends / former colleagues..."

...spouses, children, nephews, the guy who gave you a jump-start in the Walmart parking lot...

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal.

And it's not necessarily wrong.

It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level.

It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale.

Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam?

And how do we get from here to there?

Let me ask an incendiary question (I feel not great that I even have to qualify this, but I'm admittedly nervous of talking about these sorts of issues in certain lights given social context nowadays); but you're clearly thinking about this comprehensively enough that I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I don't necessarily have an answer either.

Is some amount of inequality at scale _necessarily_ a bad thing, if it arises from a fundamental systemic property of the socio/business/economy context we've bought into? I'll make a rather absurd parallel; look at money itself. To have more money enables gaining more with less effort, (citing the common "boots" theory of economics, basic laws of investing returns, etc) Therefore, enabling anyone to have more money than someone else creates significantly compounding inequality. Should we ensure that can't happen? I acknowlege it's a bit of a strawman but I would hope it also conveys a point both of implicit systemic cycles and tradeoffs of redressing them. As you concede, there's a tangible benefit towards hiring known entities and cohesive teams, even though at scale it tends to favor the incumbent majority.

Rather than ask if the inequality is in itself bad, I'd try to look at the funnel and see if there are any truly improper barriers to the out-group, and focus on rectifying those. Like in CS I'm always wary of KPI based iteration since it can cause "overfitting"/ignoring transitive effects, and "raw diversity numbers" to me is a very opaque KPI.

(Whether the systems that lead to these patterns is good is a totally separate discussion and one so huge I don't think I have the background to speak on it well, but I'm trying to question pragmatic steps to be taken that don't involve a burn-it-down-and-rebuild or throwing the baby out with the bathwater)

How would we distinguish this from true performance-based reviews? The question has to be asked, because when its the other way around, we defend it as normal. But this way it has to be rigged? Isn't it perfectly possible that a true objective management review would find many women to be competent? More competent than most men? Why not? Just because 'men usually win' in this context? Because its ok when men are in charge and promote mostly men? That's just 'business as usual'.

> Even if they were not deliberate about it

Which is statistically close to impossible.

...but when men are in the 80%, that's a statistic you can believe?

Yes, because men outnumber women in that field

Not at Yahoo! Not any more. When give a fair playing field, the women outnumber the men.

So in a profession that is generally 80% male, and 20% female, you think that women are so amazing that they will make up 80% of the top leadership in an even playing field?

That seems unlikely.

Oh, I don't know, let's math it. I keep hearing that women need to be twice as good to make it half as far. Sooo, 20% women in STEM x 2 x 2 (twice as good; and, multiply by two to make up for half as far) = ... 80%

Q.E.D.

Whoever downvoted me not only has no sense of humour but is also clearly bad at math. Maybe you need to be replaced by a lady.

Wow, someone is sexist.

I think what's he saying is that the field of candidates - before Yahoo even gets to make a pick of hires - is skewed in favor of men. So a 100% impartial selection process would just propagate the same gender imbalance.

In this world, at this time?

If it went from 20% men to 80% men in a short period of time...no.

But should she be ousted and a new (male) boss installed and it goes back to 80% men, then all would be well and normal? No laptop outrage then.

I'm not suggesting that the change was a statistical fluke. I'm suggesting that maybe in this case some women at Yahoo! were better management candidates than some of the men. In a ratio that's large but not unprecedented. Look at the rations found in other companies - so often its 80% men but that's not seen as unusual or wrong.

Those companies still exist and are profitable, are they not?

Sounds similar to the wage gap argument here: if it exists, where are all the companies hiring cheaper workers capable of doing the same work, exploiting the supposed market inefficiency?

I am OK with this. What annoys me is the discrimination against non asians happening in the valley these days. I mean, gee wilikers.

Surely you mean non-whites and non-asians.

Caucasians are still a huge portion of the Silicon Valley work force. It's women, hispanics, and african americans who make up some tiny percentage...

Are you so sure that there are fewer women, hispanics, and African Americans in Silicon Valley because of discrimination, specifically?

Do you have a source for the discrimination?

Palantir was recently accused of discrimination against Asians because they hire them at a much lower rate.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/26/regulators-accuse-pal...

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