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Comment by tarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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