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Comment by muninn_ | Hacker News Reader

Women are incredibly valuable, but there isn't anything inherently "good" about having an exactly even split M-F ratio. Is a company with 70% women and 30% men better than a 50%-50% split? What about the other way around? What about mostly men but a few women?

The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women?

Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general?

The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?

The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs?

I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society.

I support women, but I support men too.

View on HN

Having been a programmer and a lawyer, I can't think of anything about the respective jobs that is a good explanation for why my programming jobs were 10% women while my legal jobs have been 50% women. Even if we indulge stereotypes about men versus women, programming is if anything more social, collaborative, and cooperative while law is confrontational and adversarial.

So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.

And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most programmers to score is like 40/60. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40% of programmers were women.

>Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men

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?

So, Vox has an article where they go in depth about what's behind the wage gap [0], and they ended up reaching an interesting observation about pharmacists:

> The wage gap for pharmacists has shrunk significantly because the profession has changed.

> In the 1970s, pharmacies were primarily independent and self-owned businesses. A single pharmacist might be responsible for keeping his or her shop open. The pharmacy would need to be open typical business hours; the owner would need to be available to do that.

> Now large chains own most pharmacies. And while you might get nostalgic for the mom-and-pop shops, you should know this change has been undeniably good for female pharmacists’ earnings.

> The majority of pharmacists are now women. And their wages have grown faster than those in other professional roles, like lawyers or doctors.

> Bigger pharmacies hired more pharmacists, and customers essentially saw the workers as interchangeable. Most patients don’t care about seeing a particular pharmacist — they just want to make sure they get the right medication.

> This meant it wasn’t important to be around 9 am to 5 pm — a shift from 6 am to 2 pm would do the pharmacy just as much good. And nobody accrued higher hourly wages for working exceptionally long hours.

And speaking of doctors, the article has this to say:

> You see this shift happening elsewhere too. Primary care doctors, for example, have shifted away from running one-person practices to joining larger, multi-doctor offices. In these situations, doctors become more interchangeable: When I go to my medical practice in downtown Washington, DC, I usually just want a doctor who can solve my problem — and I care less about which doctor is doing that.

The short version is that the Walmartization of professions has resulted in them becoming more amenable to women. If you want to correct the imbalance, a lot of programmers who think of themselves as auteurs are going to have to accept moving to a shift work model where individual professionals are interchangeable and might as well be anonymous. Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children (another thing the article points out: most child-rearing in the US is performed by women, even when both parents work).

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

Hum... In my country, pharmacies are still independent and self-owned businesses (it may be by law, so possibly 100%), but the profession has also shifted from a majority of men to almost only women.

So, I have doubts about the reasoning displayed in this article.

Not sure what country you refer to. In Australia though a similar requirement has become somewhat meaningless as the market is controlled by a few massive franchises.

So, what's to keep somebody from uncharitably interpreting those results as "Women do better in industries once the importance and contributions of an individual worker become irrelevant"?

That seems a bit harsh.

But the nature of the jobs hasn't changed. It's no less important for your pharmacist to give you the right medicine. What's changed is individual credit seeking and self promotion has been deemphasized.

I've seen this first hand in the legal industry. Business generation has shifted from getting a call from your golf buddy to formally pitching your team/strategy/rates. Meanwhile, 30% of GCs and new partners are women. Not a coincidence.

The claim was that pharmacists aren't running their own businesses anymore. It's hard to spin that as a win for 'equality' if the profits have been redirected to the executives and shareholders of medium-sized chains and Walmart.

Yeah. The way I read that is "Now that you can't make much money as a pharmacist, it's no longer attractive to men."

> But the nature of the jobs hasn't changed.

I don't know if that's really true. A lot of pharmacist jobs are essentially retail sales roles.

> Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children

Or I guess women just won't join startups?

And startups aren't the only places where women work more than 8 hours/day.

Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general? There's something called the Norwegian Gender Paradox. A Norwegian comedian made a documentary about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask.

There are 7 episodes but here is some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?

> Maybe they just don't like CS or STEM fields in general?

Well that's facially not true: women receive more than 40% of the bachelors degrees in physical sciences, mathematics, and biological sciences.

> The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them. For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women! And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

There is also evidence that women place a higher value on concensus and cooperation. That explains why programming, which involves working together to build things, has a much harder time attracting women than law, which involves being the proxy for acrimonious disputes between people.

> The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them.

I hope you place just as much skeptism on the research done in social sciences. Watch the documentary, not a single social science researcher in the doco had any evidence what so ever. They simply dismissed the any research that ran counter to their views.

> For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women!

That makes little sense. Having an open office is not going to make the people on opposite sides of the office get up and talk to each other if they really don't want to. And why would the act of writing social software be more social than writing other types of software?

> And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

I am not a doctor or an accountant. I won't make assumptions about those professions. This may simply be the overlap area between men and women where these professions have things that appeal to both men and women almost equally.

I'm not suggesting individuals stick to their gender roles. If you want to go and do something, go do it. But I am suggesting that using employment numbers as a proxy for equality could be very wrong and encouraging one gender to do one thing or another could be a waste of time.

Remember, in the countries where gender equality is the best, gender sterotypes are still prevailant and the numbers remain stable. At the very least you have to question the idea that gender roles are enforced by society or that our ideas of what an equal society looks like is wrong.

Do women receive more than 40% of degrees in CS (or CS, maths, engineering, physics which I think are the other degrees likely to feed into a programming job)? My estimate is that the figure is more likely to be 5-20%.

Women receive 40-45% of the degrees in math and statistics, but less than 20% of degrees in CS. The percentage of CS degrees degrees awarded to women is down from 30% in the mid 1990s.

There is no rational "biological" explanation for why women would somehow be "biologically" averse to CS while pursuing degrees in a closely related field at much higher numbers. There is no "biological" explanation why women's interest in CS would drop dramatically over just a few decades.

Overall it may be true. But look at the break down. Here's the numbers from 2015.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...

The serious explanations I've seen focus on interest more than talent. Women just aren't that interested in programming computers, even when they have the talent (on average, with many individual exceptions).

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.

> 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.

You're looking at the two professions at two different levels. Changing machines is what the programmer does, but the end result is people communicating with each other. The end result of legal work is affecting people, but the actual job is down in the weeds of comma jockeying. Especially on the transactional side. There is nothing people oriented at any level about implementing obscure credit structures dreamed up by some finance nerd. But there is no shortage of women willing to do that work.

> I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around.

That is not consistent with what I've heard from talking a lot of professional women. Women in finance aren't talking about how great the 85-15 ratio is just because Goldman hires a lot of frat guys.

I agree here. Over the holidays I was speaking with a sister of mine, she recently finished her undergrad degree and moved from working in a salon (all women) to working in an office environment with a very strong sales culture (~90% men).

She made the observation that she enjoyed working in a male-dominated work place more so than the female-dominated work place and gave several reasons relating to social dynamics.

Looking at SAT score, it does not explain why 90% of veterinarians are women, nor why 90% of men who graduate as a teacher end up in either math, physical education, or as an after school teacher like sport trainer.

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.

If could be more mundane than that, it could boil down to degree perception and usefulness. Sure you need a law degree to practice law. And having a CS degree when writing e.g. a highly scalable databases will definitely help.

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.

Lawyer is something you plan to do, programmer is something you fall into?

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 been a programmer and a lawyer, I can't think of anything about the respective jobs that is a good explanation for why my programming jobs were 10% women while my legal jobs have been 50% women

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.

What on earth do you mean by tech is 10x as diverse? And what specifically is so much more compelling to women about the "social side" of being a lawyer?

> What on earth do you mean by tech is 10x as diverse?

Diversity in culture.

Diversity in language.

Diversity in education.

Diversity in pay.

Diversity in location.

Diversity in religious belief.

For example my boss has no tertiary education and 2 of my coworkers only speak broken English.

US culture cherry-picks data and declares that any statistical discrepancy is caused by oppression or passive privilege. Other hypotheses are taboo and dismissed.

There's also a subtle background noise: a constant reminder that males are somehow defective and need to be taught how to behave, so to stop the oppressors. Thankfully, experts whose incomes depend on identity politics are here to fix your mess.

This is equal opportunity vs equal outcome. I believe equal opportunity to be correct, whilst the outcome depends on the individual. Regardless of what people want to believe, men and women are genetically different, seen in almost every mammal in the world. The outcome is unlikely to ever be even naturally. Women may tend towards caring roles, men may tend to roles with competition. If we are to optimise our society we should take the best people for the best roles, regardless of who they are. I think that's ultimately the greatest selection process.

It's a recruiting tool in many cases. Both men and women want to work for a more balanced company generally

I find this kind of strange. I've never thought about what percentage of asians or blacks work at a company, or what percentage are men or women before considering a job opportunity. It just has never mattered to me. 100% men, 100% women, 100% asian. I just don't care.

Thank you! I've also literally never given a thought to it and generally don't care. If you're smart and cooperative I'll love working with you -- male, female, trans, black, hispanic, whatever-the-fuck-label-you-want. I was raised to not judge people by whats on the outside, and the whole fetishization of ratios (be it gender or race) is sickening to me. It itself is inherently racist/sexist and only perpetuates race/gender based categorization instead of unity.

To be fair the article is not about an "obsession with an even split" at all. It's about Lever's practices to promote diversity and inclusion.

These strike me as good and interesting questions. I read the article after I read your comment, and I have one follow-up.

> The obsession with having an even split…

Does it strike you that the article is describing an obsession? It seems like a strong word, used pejoratively in this case.

To me, the article is described an unusual and thoughtful approach that led to surprising results.

What they clearly are obsessed about is hiring literally not a single person who is middle age or above. http://imgur.com/a/ZsS81 They are so ageist it boggles the mind.

That pictures a bit old, but even still there're at least a handful of "middle aged or above" people shown. Also, I started working at Lever after this photo was taken. Not only am I middle-aged, but there are plenty of us here who are.

Can you highlight the five 40+year olds in that picture? I can maybe see two.

Not the OP, but if you ask me, I'd say that society as a whole has a very obsession-like fixation on equality of all kinds. It is the absolute hot-topic being injected into almost every discussion and field. From the other side as well because there are people that opposed to the way it's being forced-upon individuals/companies.

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"

The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters

Oh that's an easy one. Literally no-one cared about this while the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order and sometimes literally at the bottom of the company in a windowless basement. But now it's important and well-paid and people sit in nice offices on Herman Miller chairs, and suddenly out of nowhere a bunch of people who weren't geeks at school, who hated the geeks, have appeared and started demanding that they get some of this money and prestige too. Brogrammers are another symptom of this exact same phenomenon.

I support women, but I support men too

I'm an engineer. I care about what's between your ears, not your legs! :-)

Quite simple really. Because women don't want to do physically difficult jobs like oil worker, construction worker, mechanic etc.

If there are cushy office jobs where you have to sit most of the time, women are clamoring for equality in those. If you have to do a lot of physical labor, not so much.

Where is the feminist outcry to put women on oil rigs in the middle of the gulf?

I don't know if it is a lack of want but there is definitely a small pool of capable women. Women are on average significantly weaker and smaller than men so the pool of women who are as capable to perform hard physical tasks is very small compared to the pool of men.

Feminism is about an equal playing field, and that means that all work roles should be available to both genders.

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.

http://myoffshoreweb.com/job/10_oil_rig_jobs_for_females.htm...

Probably because there is an even split of men and women in the general population (more or less), but nowhere near that in tech.

And don't bother bringing up other industries; I'm not in those other industries, so I have no opinion or influence to try and help things there. I am in tech, so I can try and improve things here.

Just don't call it "improve".

This is nonsense. These things don't exist in a vacuum.

> The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?

They only have their jobs because better-qualified people don't. So, they should do exactly what the better-qualified people are expected to do today: improve their skills, find another field, lean on their spouse for support, etc. If we don't think there are enough jobs for the population, a) changing the gender ratio of people who are employed doesn't make that problem worse, and b) that's a different conversation about UBI or whatever.

If we truly believe in a meritocracy, we're going to have to kick out incompetent people. There's no getting around that, and there's no getting around the fact that it's unjust to keep employing incompetent people and just to fire them.

> I support women, but I support men too.

I support women, and I support men too. I support qualified men, qualified women, and qualified everyone else having jobs they're qualified for. As far as I can tell, gender isn't correlated with job performance, and there seem to be about 50-50 men and women in the world.

The moment that you or anyone demonstrate a reason to believe (not even conclusive proof, just a plausible hypothesis) that men are over twice as likely to be good at technical jobs as women, I'll support a 70-30 split. Similarly, the moment anyone demonstrates a reason to believe that women are twice as likely to be good at technical jobs than men, I'll support a 70-30 split in the other direction. I haven't seen such a reasoning in either direction, so I support the null hypothesis, the 50-50 split.

Same with dock workers, honestly! But I'm not a dock worker and I know nothing about dock working and this isn't Dock Worker News, so I'm not going to comment about it. I hope the dock workers are trying to hire the best people, too!

You're misunderstanding the point here. It's not that women can't be or aren't as capable as men. In terms of intellectual performance, although I'd say women on average are more intelligent than men, and men vary more widely in intelligence to either end of the spectrum, things are more or less "50/50". Interest in technology isn't 50/50.

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.

I can't speak to gender bias in hairdressing because I know nothing about the hairdressing industry. I think it's reasonable for articles about the gender bias in hairdressing (if one exists) not to be posted in Hacker News, and for commenters not to be familiar with it.

If there is a gender bias there, and there's something I can do about it that won't be sticking my nose where I don't belong (I don't really want hairdressers telling me how to do tech recruiting), let me know, I'm glad to support it. But until then, I'm in tech: this is my field, and the one I care about improving. This is a tech forum. And the people running Lever are in tech.

Simple as that, it has nothing to do with the job perks or pay. If there were outsiders putting pressure on the tech industry and not the dockworking or hairdressing industry, you'd have an argument--but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

You're just cherry picking what you want to pretend to be knowledgable about. You don't have to be a hair dresser to discuss trends in that industry. Just like I don't need to work for the Department of Labor to discuss labor trends.

And the question is why is there so much emphasis on only technology to make the workplace 50/50, but not similar pressure on other industries that might be experiencing some sort of imbalance? Besides, why is it a good thing or a necessary thing that technology be 50/50? If you want to argue that we need gender balance in this one specific industry, then I want gender balance in every industry. Otherwise, I'm not on board.

This is an article about the CEO of Lever and hiring practices at Lever. It's being posted on a forum about the technology industry. You're discussing it with people who hire people to be software engineers and not to be hairdressers or dock workers. I'm not interested in "discussing trends," I'm interested in actually doing the right thing for my company when I make hiring decisions. I assume so is the CEO of Lever. I want gender balance in every industry, but tech is the one I'm hiring in. I assume the CEO of Lever would be thrilled to see gender balance in every company, but there's only one company where she gets to make those decisions.

When you vote, do you make yourself as knowledgeable about the political problems of every other city and country in the world as with the political problems of your own city and country? Would you refuse to vote for a particular candidate who promises to do good things for your city and your country, but is silent on improving the lot of every other city and country?

Well you should apply the same criteria to yourself then and stop discussing the technology industry. If you're going to say that I have to be as knowledgable about every other city, country, municipality, or whatever, then you have to be knowledgeable about every university on the planet, every company, every hiring practice, every law, and every social/cultural norm, and that's just to get started. It's impossible to have complete knowledge of any topic, technology or otherwise, so your stringent criteria here for what constitutes the ability to discuss something, politics or economic trends or anything else is stringent enough that you basically can't discuss anything.

Anywho

What makes 50/50 gender balance "right"? What makes that desirable? The only arguments I'm seeing from anybody revolve around two things:

1. Diversity 2. The population is 50/50

If diversity is the aim, you have to come with some pretty convincing evidence that diversity = 50/50 male/female split.

If it's population, then you need to explain why technology has to have this split and not every industry, or at least explain why this is unique to technology.

Er, the critique that you have to understand everything else was your critique, not mine.

Anyway, my argument for the 50-50 gender balance being "right" is that it's the null hypothesis. Absent specific data, one should assume that every industry should have a 50-50 balance.

This is basically 2, except that my confidence about that statement depends a lot on the existence of data that would disprove the null hypothesis. I have little data about other industries, so while I would say that, yes, every industry should have a 50-50 split, my confidence about such a statement is pretty low for almost all industries; I can easily be convinced that there are physiological or sociological factors that justify a non-50-50-split.

I have much more data about tech, so I make the same claim that tech should have a 50-50 split that I make about industry. However, I am much more confident in that statement because I've seen a lot of attempts to reject the null hypothesis that haven't panned out. I would have to see some evidence that's at odds with a lot of existing evidence in order to be convinced of a different split.

If you have a pool of applicants and ranked them in order of ability and drew x applicants out of the top of the pool of y individuals you would expect all things being equal to see the selected group had demographics similar to the group as a whole.

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.

You would only expect that if you believe that the pool of applicants has three times as many men as women, but the distribution of qualified men and women are equal.

That's an assumption, and not the assumption I'm starting from. I think that your pool of 75% men and 25% women does, in fact, contain n/2 qualified men and (75% - n/2) unqualified men, and n/2 qualified women and (25% - n/2) unqualified women - that is, the number of qualified men and women is the same, but there are far more unqualified men in the pool. If your recruiting process has false positives (and everyone's does), you'll end up hiring much more unqualified men than unqualified women, as a result.

Mine is also an assumption, but it seems to line up better with the underlying null-hypothesis that, in the abstract, the same number of qualified men and women exist in the world.

No this is nonsense. All you have to do is look at the ratios of men and women pursuing programs like computer science at CMU or MIT or whatever. You have perhaps an equal number of potentially qualified men and women, but the number of men going to the training to make them qualified far exceeds the number of women.

First, the current gender ratio for MIT course 6 is about 40% women and 60% men; if you're getting significantly more men than that, you're getting less qualified men from somewhere. (If you want to set your target ratio to be the MIT or CMU enrollment ratio instead of 50/50, I'd also support that, but those ratios are much closer to 50/50 than most companies are.)

Second, I went to MIT for computer science. I TA'd a bunch of classes. There were quite a few students who were barely scraping by, and they were mostly men. This might be politically incorrect to say, but it's true. The fact that you see 60/40 enrollment ratios at MIT doesn't mean that MIT has 1.5 times as many qualified men as women in course 6.

This doesn't tell you how many women are employed as programmers because its one school its one course and further it doesn't account for people that choose not to stay in the profession or whom started out in a practical manner rather than in school.

The National Girls Collaborative Project said that woman received 57% of all bachelors degrees but only 18% of computer science degrees http://ngcproject.org/statistics further some sources say the ultimate percentage of female software developers is even lower, as low as 8%.

Women are succeeding at school but they aren't going into computer science and a greater percentage of them are leaving.

Your belief that there are just as many female developers as men is utterly unfounded and without merit.

The fact that you interact with a lot of female developers doesn't change the actual numbers and the plural of anecdote isn't data.

We have one side complaining that we need to erase the gender gap in computer science, another scoffing and saying girls just don't like computers. It probably doesn't help either case to pretend that there is no gap.

No not necessarily. I threw those schools out as examples, but we'd have to actually go and analyze pretty much every computer science graduate at every school over the last 30 years, plus self-taught, and look at how they perform against some really good metric that we've devised.

If you're looking at current ratios only, then you're ignoring the past ratios over the last, say, 20-30 years which would have been significantly more male-dominated.

I don't think there is any evidence supporting the assertion that more male applicants = more unqualified applicants.

If you took all the time you spent writing comments like this and spent it instead on questioning why the norm for other companies is 10-90 or 20-80, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation quite so much.

Part of the reason why this announcement is significant is that people frequently argue that it is impossible to build a gender-equal team. This shows pretty clearly that it is possible. I don't think this is equivalent to saying that all companies need to be exactly even in the end.

> The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?

Do you think there is a shortage of tech jobs? If the end state was equal for men and women it seems more likely to me that plenty of people would still be employed, but the best jobs would be going to the best people rather than just the best men.

Does all that make sense? I'm genuinely curious about why equality is uncomfortable for you.

It's certainly possible to build a gender-equal tech team. But to argue that all tech companies could build a gender-equal tech team, with the current hiring pool, is a hell of an assertion.

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.

Can you look out at the audience and honestly say that all 300+ people are going to be good engineers?

There are a bunch of white/Asian males who suck at their jobs. If you don't believe me, note the demographics next time you angrily git blame something.

Stop hiring them. Easy.

The problem is from companies who care more about hiring someone at all than hiring good people. It's pretty well-documented that men are more likely to apply for jobs they're not qualified for than women (see, e.g. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...).

Then women should apply for jobs they aren't qualified for as well. Problem solved. You'd be an idiot not to do that.

There are a bunch of white/Asian males who suck at their jobs (there are a lot of people who suck at their jobs across all demographics really) but if that's the group of people who applied... well, I'd rather have somebody than nobody. I'm nog going to go walk around outside and find women on the street to try to get them to apply for a job. Plus, I'd probably have the cops called on me.

>"I'm genuinely curious about why equality is uncomfortable for you."

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.

> people frequently argue that it is impossible to build a gender-equal team.

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.

> No one argues that.

I've encountered this argument in real life. I agree it sounds a lot like a straw man though and doesn't help much with my argument -- thanks.

And I agree that it is more expensive to hire this way because of how diverse CS graduates are. Do you think it might be worth it in order to help nudge the industry at large in a more positive direction?

Male engineer at Lever here, and I can confirm that we don't make hiring decisions based on gender or gender presentation. It's not only highly illegal, but totally not the point of tracking diversity metrics.

The ultimate goal here is not to build a company with perfect representation of the general population, but to build a company which honestly evaluates and rewards the contributions of all its employees (because we believe that those kinds of companies do build better products, businesses, etc.) and you can't do that unless you're inclusive and consistently fair with everyone in the company.

A number like 50-50 gender balance doesn't mean that we've finished building that company (and no company is ever finished). However, an imbalance of gender or any demographic such as age, race, prior work experience (such as government, enterprise, startup), academic background, parental status, etc. at a company usually indicates that there's a blindspot or bug in a company's hiring or culture and it deserves a closer look.

>However, an imbalance of gender or any demographic such as age, race, prior work experience (such as government, enterprise, startup), academic background, parental status, etc. at a company usually indicates that there's a blindspot or bug in a company's hiring or culture and it deserves a closer look.

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?

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