Donations and Women in Tech Panels Are Not a Diversity Strategy

In every institution I've ever been at, people talked about how to recruit more women, but in practice this meant grabbing the first woman who applied and using them as a prop to show how diverse they were. Professors have blatantly admitted to my female friends that they were being used for that purpose.

The first paper mentions that they only found a correlation, however contradicts themselves in attempting to turn this into causation, despite mentioning that correlation != causation: "While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful."

It doesn't seem like this was checked for backwards-causation (companies may be more likely to start prioritizing diversity when they are succeeding, but not when they are failing), among many other potential confounding variables, and it seems that they were very intent on trying to prove their outcome regardless of what kind of data they had, where the article starts out with "We know intuitively that diversity matters. It’s also increasingly clear that it makes sense in purely business terms." I didn't check everything from the second link, but this appears to be a very common pattern.

The third link attempts to appeal to the same sense, however goes much further, stating: "it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women." This would seem to prove far too much, and is obviously not a generalizable result unless you sincerely believe that replacing all men with women will make your company perform better. I'm unable to view the full text or data from this paper due to the paywall.

If you're concerned about the proportion of groups such as women in tech, the right time to get them interested is when they are very young. Not during or after college. With a baseline of significantly more men in tech, you cannot reasonably expect to achieve figures such as a 1:1 ratio of female to male employees. With that said, the author seems to be focusing more on problems after people enter the workplace. There may be a lot of issues here, but I think solutions need to focus on deeper underlying problems such as culture, rather than single bottleneck processes such as promotions (and that which leads up to them).

Then I charitably followed the links in the paragraph. The scientific studies are underwhelming (in terms of convincing a tech company to do something). The mckinsey article cheapens itself towards the end ("The unequal performance of companies in the same industry and the same country implies that diversity is a competitive differentiator shifting market share toward more diverse companies." That implication is terrible)

It's not hard to understand how diversity in the workplace might challenge our minds more, keep us more professional (in company culture and hiring practice), improve fitness in whatever other ways. But it's all conceptual, and until there's more scientific evidence, the literature has to settle for being obnoxious - light on information, heavy on telling the reader what to think before and after said information (tabloid style).

  1. Treat the women and people of color already working at your
     company well, including paying them equitably and preparing them
     for promotions.
  2. Overhaul your interview process.  Hire programmers that have
     the skills the company needs.
  3. Institute onboarding.  Make sure that everyone has the
     information they need to succeed at their jobs.

Most of the prospective employers I have approached regarding job openings have had a horrible interview process. And I would suggest hiring for aptitude rather than existing skills. Almost everyone focuses on "what have you already done?" rather than "what could you do if we hired you?" It's maddening. Companies can barely test for skill, and I have only seen one that even tried to assess aptitude.

That would be great if companies maintained persistent records of internal collaboration. Unfortunately, I have anecdotally observed a trend of decreasing job-specific training, and less robust internal technical documentation. Some companies don't even have a stepwise guide for doing a manual build of their main software product after getting the latest source.

In short, those are good suggestions, but they don't need to be specifically targeted by sexes and colors. Everyone would benefit if companies did this. So why don't they? It seems like a sane and decent company would become diverse without needing to make any specific effort to do so, whereas a dysfunctional company would see its problems manifest in many different symptoms, with monoculture being just one of them.