How Lever (YC S12) Got to 50–50 Women and Men

I have never seen a highly emotional negotiation tactic work. Screaming / demanding will more likely get an offer rescinded. Best negotiations I see usually go "market pays X for Y, here's the data to prove it from multiple sources", "competitor is paying X+Y%", "This job requires X% more time than stated, I have done this before. Here is the proportional increase I should get for the extra time."

The example with the competitor might seem as a one off. But market rate has a range, and it changes. Whatever competitors offers will eventually become market rate, if all else being equal (location, company prospects, coworkers, etc).

I'm not sure you can escape it. I'm not sure you want to escape it. "Hey Jane, wouldn't the code be better written like this?" enters the process of negotiation. Do you really want to not explore a better way to write a given section of code because of some perceived conflict?

And maybe she will respond with: "Nice thought, but I avoided doing it that way because of a bug on platform X.", so you come back with: "Oh, I did not realize that. I still believe there is room for improvement. What if we did _this_ instead?". To which she returns with "I never thought of it that way. Good idea."

And there you have an act of negotiation. You won't always reach an agreement. Jane may not like your updated suggestion either and you ultimately walk away, leaving the code unchanged. But even when disagreements occur, I'm not sure I would want to go near an engineering team that was afraid to do that, to be honest.

> I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself.

Perhaps we have differing ideas of what negotiation is. Senseless fighting and trying to beat someone down into submissiveness doesn't sound like the process of negotiation at all to me.

But yet... You name several possible states of "truth". For which either team member may or may not weigh as heavily..?

And, negotiations re-enter the conversation..

"Please stop the yelling Bob, that's not helping your argument. You come back with an offer from another company and I'll see what I can do."

Negotiations going aggressive is a sign of immature negotiations. Speak calm and slow. Keep it short, the longest it goes, the more chance it has to go wonky.

I think so. For instance, as a software developer, we might reach a point where we have to make a choice about which programming language to use for the new project. As usual, everyone on the team has differing opinions about what programming language is the right one for this project. You (usually) can't just have everyone go off and use whatever they language they feel like using, so a negotiation process is necessary.

A team of strong negotiators will work through all the plusses and minuses and reach a consensus of which one is the best choice for everyone's needs. Everyone may not be completely happy, but they will be confident that the right choice was made. If you have weak negotiators, they will be apt to yield before making their case, leading to a good chance of not making the best technology choice, and almost certainly resulting in people who are not confident in the direction of the project. Soon, you have a toxic work environment.

Are they?

When I negotiate on pay it is with my manager and maybe someone from HR. How does this translate into social penalty?

Do you have studies which show women who aggressively negotiate salary and change jobs at a similar frequency to men typically earn less than women who don't? Or have a worse social environment than men?

I have a feeling you are extrapolating based on very limited studies.

One thought that comes to mind is hazard pay in the military. A and B are in same role and share the same base pay. But A works at a desk, and gets no hazard pay. B goes to war, and gets paid extra for dodging bullets.

How many of these companies end up paying in the top pay ranges?

Why is that?

You get screwed everywhere in life if you don't have, at a minimum, mediocre negotiation skills.

Craigslist, car buying, house shopping, gardening services, plumbers, painters...

Heck, even the grocery store has room for negotiations in some cases - "Come on, I only have this one bag of cat food, can you ring me up here in the cosmetics department instead of me standing in that big line?".

We should encourage people to get better at negotiations, and not just because they might get paid more... rather, you will succeed in life more and will be far more confident in yourself and your own abilities.

Life is one big negotiation.

Here's the acid test: who gets a bonus if your company happens to hire five doormats in a row? Is it the best negotiator on the engineering team?

The market rate for senior software engineers could easily be $250-300k if everyone negotiated aggressively. The ceiling on developer pay is the value they produce, and developers at many/most companies produce well above $300k in value a year. The hiring pool for senior talent is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. If all developers were paid $250k/yr, I would expect top companies to hire just as aggressively.

Negotiating aggressively could simply be bringing you closer to the perfect-equilibrium market price without implying that you're bringing down the salaries of non-negotiators.

If anything, it's the non-negotiators bringing down salaries for everyone. Their not negotiating allows (some) companies to think the market rate is lower and to avoid paying for the higher negotiated rates.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

I think a big question is why companies do it (there is a comment thread above tackling this).

A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.

If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.

Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.

More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.

I born in a small provincial town in a poor third world country. There was literally no social support of doing programming because vast majority of people had absolutely no idea what it is (in 90s). I was doing programming completely alone!

To start coding you need: open a book, download compiler/interpreter, write a code snippet from the book, run the code.

To start competing in algorithm competitions: register by entering your email, read a problem statement, write a program, submit your program.

To start contributing to open source: download software, hack it, send a patch to a mailing list.

That's it, no social interactions involved. Yet I still don't see much of women among programming hobbyists.

I have no idea why women are not interested in CS. They just don't.

To any female feminist I prepared an answer - open a text editor, write a code, run it, repeat.

And please, don't talk about discrimination, I was rejected many times based on my lack of degree, lack of experience (when I just started), on my citizenship (when I started looking for a job abroad), on my bad Engish and many other reasons I don't know. And still, I managed to find a job in 4 countries with completely different cultures (UZ, RU, SE, NL).

P.S. I have different background and born in mixed family. You can't just fit me into your typical western political classes - left, right.

which would seem to go against actively selecting people of a specific gender or trying to achieves a fifty percent representation of women or whatever.

I don't think anyone objects to the programming equivalent of a 'blind audition'. What is happening seems to be anything but a 'blind audition'.

Being "White" in the US is as much cultural as it has to do with skin color. Hispanics, even those of light complexion, tend to be a part of Latin culture and thus do not consider themselves to be "white".

Just 4 years in, we are far from done building our culture and achieving our values. In truth, we will never be done; there will always be more room to improve and grow.

Yes, we currently have many younger workers. However, we already do take steps to welcome all workers, such as healthcare plans that include dependant coverage, maternity and paternity leave, and clearly defined work expectations. We also increase opportunity for experienced candidates to demonstrate what they can bring to the team with bar raising interview formats like our engineering project interview and career trajectory interview.

We do not ask employees about their political affiliations.

We believe that inclusion is worth the investment. At the core, creating an inclusive environment is about employee engagement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement) One company that studies the importance of employee engagement consistently is Gallup. Here is an interesting article on the intersection of diversity and engagement: http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-e... "Engagement and inclusiveness are closely related. Gallup has also found that engaged employees are more likely to say their company values diverse ideas."

My recommendation would be to check out Project Include; they've invested a ton in putting resources together: http://projectinclude.org/

Medicine or law used to fill rooms with men, but like most other fields, that changed in the past few decades. The question is, what is the differentiator with CS that has led to the severity of the current imbalance?

Programming can be social, though it often isn't. But the basic job is changing machines. While in law the task is to affect people.

In my "things you can't say" speculation, I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around. Being the only woman in a room full of men can be quite different depending on what kind of men.

Not only is it tiring to be a minority, but it is also much easier be in a profession that incorporates ones own gender identity into the work culture (a phenomenon that has become very common in the last 50 years). A man or woman who enters the opposite culture has two choices (as a study said), leave or assimilate a work culture which is opposite to their own. Data show a rather clear trend for both groups, which is that most leave after a short time, while many of the remaining tries to find a subgroup within the profession where they can create a local majority.

10% may just represent those that have yet to leave, or who for many reason aren't affected.

But you don't really need a CS degree to be good at developing software, especially for the myriad of other roles in a team that aren't low-level coding. Let people study what the hell they want, then pick the smartest ones and teach them. By shifting the recruitment focus from on algorithmic and data structure knowledge to other types of problem solving ability, you have a larger and more uniform talent pool to recruit from and you'll get more usable software (i.e. the usability increases, not the amount of software). If you keep doing this and the industry is balanced, CS degrees should follow. If not, you already have a solution.

I became a programmer because I was doing this thing for fun and all of a sudden someone started throwing money in my direction. I later became a farmer (another male dominated profession) under the same conditions. In fact, every job I have ever had in my life was a result of doing something for fun resulting in someone wanting to pay me to continue to do it. But if I start doing legal-related things for fun, I'm never going to turn that into a job as a lawyer.

What if males are more apt to do something that allows them to fall into jobs? If the programming profession were regulated like the legal profession, you may not get any more females wanting to be programmers, but you would eliminate all the males who simply fell into the position. A thought.

Having worked as a tech guy in a law firm there are many differences between programming jobs and legal jobs.

A huge one is tech is 10x more diverse and frankly it's a big turn off for many women. Many women place a premium on the social side (just like the much derided brogrammer) and frankly at most companies the social side is far worse than at the average law firm.

It has come to a point where dissenting opinions on the matter are actively vilified and who knows what other forms of actual discrimination. I guarantee you that I would treat every person I interact with with absolute courtesy and respect their known boundaries in all aspects except their opinions. And I am reasonably sure that there are hiring teams out there that would skip me because they'd find my comments distasteful or worse. "Culture fit"

Of course women (and men) want equal access to comfortable, high-paying jobs. That being said, there has certainly been an outcry to allow women to enter combat roles in the military, partially because the highest-paying roles tend to go to people with combat experience.

On the other hand, while I am not familiar with oil rig workers, there are many female truck drivers complaining about what they perceive as unsafe, unwelcoming work conditions. I suspect you just haven't been reading their stories.

The problem is that we're turning this "50/50" split into some sort of magic number that solves diversity "problems", and we're only doing it in this one specific industry, and without any particular reason. What's the ratio of male hairdressers to female hair dressers? If I was interested in hairdressing, should I get a full scholarship to beauty school and preferential hiring treatment based on my gender and a focus on having an exact 50/50 split at the absolute best hair salons in the world? Why is this any different than any other industry? Why not equality across the board?

Somebody will come and cite pay, but there are other jobs that don't require as much education that pay quite well too. So why aren't at least focusing on those in addition to tech jobs? I bring up the dock worker example because it's a typical glass basement example that can be used.

The truth of the matter is that tech jobs are sexy right now. Lavish perks, great offices, fantastic pay, etc.... Nobody wants to advocate for equal opportunity for tough jobs and 50/50 gender ratios in those tough jobs.

If you start with for example a group of people that is 75% male and select the top n workers. The top n will be 75% male and the only way to arrive at 50% female instead of 25% is to replace some of the more qualified males with less qualified females further down in the stack. The ones higher in the stack are by definition already taken.

This isn't saying that men are more qualified just that they make up a larger portion of the pool. Places that select a higher portion of males than the population suffer from the same deficiency.

Two years ago, the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosted a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors were invited to attend - you didn't even need to be accepted to the university.

The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how does the industry recover and get a 50/50 gender ratio? The problem seems to start way before industry, as much as some would prefer to think otherwise.

It's interesting how you straw-man the other person of being uncomfortable with a good-sounding word such as "equality". So, because they're against something noble as "equality" then they're automatically the bad guy?

I'm not the OP, but if you ask me I would tell you that we have different definitions of equality. People not like me want to write the wrongs of cosmic injustice and circumstance under the guise of fixing "discrimination" by treating people unequally. But really, at the end of the day, we would probably agree with you that equality is a good thing and we'd welcome a universe that was equal. But it's not; chance, circumstance and history dictate as much. It's not "equal" for the people being discriminated against so that this company can have a feel-good tick-box somewhere about being 50-50. Does this help out females that are potentially being treated unequally by society? Yes. Does this "throw out" perfectly good and capable males because they happen to be in the bath-water? Yes.

Two wrongs don't make a right. And it certainly isn't fair.

No one argues that. What is true is that it's impossible for everyone to have a 50/50 teams (because most fields don't attract precisely 50/50 men/women), and it also makes recruiting substantially more expensive if you hope to maintain a high and equal standard for both men and women. This is a consequence of the fact that, assuming skill distributions are roughly the same across genders, there are simply much fewer (in absolute terms) women of a given skill level than men of a given skill level in CS or engineering.

Why? How are you making this determination? Should your demographics reflect the US population? State population? Hell, why not world population? Why are any of these inherently better or worse than any other?