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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

"If you want more women at the event, hire more women at the company and create a culture that encourages that."

-- Yes, some magic wand will solve it?

If they are tech companies and engineers are the primary value drivers, and only 16% of CS grads are female, what kind of rock will they find balanced workforce?

Companies hire because they need people to feel a role, (eg. engineers, marketing, sales, hr... etc). If they need more engineers they have to deal with the workforce supply issues, where only 16% of applicants are female.

They are a business that need to build and sale products, and not a charity.

I live in NYC, and they have the opposite is here, most PR or fashion firms are more female dominated...

It is, what it is. Not sure it justifies hiring models to balance the gender ratio in a party, but the workforce imbalance is there to stay as long as there is such an imbalance ratio in CS grads.

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> I live in NYC, and they have the opposite is here, most PR or fashion firms are more female dominated...

In NYC the tech companies are also diverse. They solve problems of other industries with tech and hire for many different roles besides engineers. Tech companies in NYC generally have significantly more women compared to Silicon Valley.

~60% of the developers on my team are women. It's not magic. Also, in a big company most employees are not engineers, so the relative lack of female CS grads shouldn't mean there are so few women that you need to hire them for events.

Yes, for small team (sub 10), I have seen high ratio of females/males, but for larger companies, it is impossible.

If you are hiring 100s, or even thousands of engineers you are bound to the supply of the market. Unless you do some straight out hiring discrimination, and refuse to hire males. Similar to some Vegas clubs (they wont let males unless they have a female with them). Good luck building a successful business with those values.

It is Econ 101 dude... or dudette (not sure you are guy or a girl)

P.s. I personally would love to have seen balanced genders (working for tech companies sometimes it feels like you are in the army), but that's probably a utopian ideal that is not going to be fixed in my lifetime.

You are obviously bound to the supply of the market. What I'm saying is that the market is bigger than you assume. The number of women interested in and capable of a career in programming is much greater than the number of those who actually want to work at your company.

What do you estimate is the gender ratio for software developers? And how can you expect every company to go over it? Surely it is not 50% or over. In addition, for every company that goes over the average (perhaps like yours), another company must go under the average.

The number I think is important is not how many CS grads there are (no one on my team has a CS major) or how many software developers there are, it's how many people are interested in and capable of this job. I don't know what the "true" ratio is but I'm sure it is more than 16% of women which is where ardit anchored it.

It often comes back to this "pipeline" problem, but we need to think of our companies as being part of the pipeline. I don't have a CS degree -- I came out of college with a BA -- but I landed a firmware programming job, 2 jobs and 7 years later I am experience and "senior". If you're willing to train smart people, you can sideline the pipeline issue.

>~60% of the developers on my team are women. It's not magic

Which is leagues above the vast majority of engineering companies, as well as the overall population within the software engineering community at large. Yours is an outlier, and an obvious one at that.

No doubt. I'm not here to say any company can have ~50% female engineers if only they did what we do, but this idea that a more reasonable expectation would be 16% strikes me as bullshit.

So I'm boasting a bit, not claiming this is normal, but just to say... come on guys, think bigger.

iirc male CS grads outnumber females by more than 4:1, so ~20% seems about spot on, no? It's something that would have to be attacked at a level far before employment, e.g., social constructs and the education system. Once it comes down to the employer they only have one pool from which to draw applicants.

20% would be a lower bound. I majored in a hard science, not CS. Two great programmers I know, in senior positions, don't even have a degree. At my last company there was a decent Rails engineer who studied communication in college and had worked in affiliate marketing at his previous job. There was also a guy who was a lawyer and then went to code camp and got hired as an engineer.

The pipeline isn't sufficient to explain the gender ratio.

Ok, but if we assume that the number of non-CS grads who work in software development is proportional (seems fair) between males and females you're still in the same boat. Are you saying that women far out number men when it comes to sw devs who didn't major in CS?

I just don't see any data that supports what you're saying. 20% is the _upper_ bound.

Your question is about people who have already become employed software developers. Obviously those women don't far outnumber men in any respect. What I'm saying is the candidate pool of women is much larger than is assumed here (the candidate pool of men is as well). It wouldn't take a "magic wand" to start hiring them. Maybe doing so would amount to discrimination in some people's eyes, but I think this business of hiring professional models to entertain the men and give the appearance of parity is pretty sketchy as well. Corporations are apparently willing to take drastic measures to create the a certain kind of gendered workplace experience. Given the choice I would rather the results of their actions actually benefit society in some way.

> If they are tech companies and engineers are the primary value drivers, and only 16% of CS grads are female, what kind of rock will they find balanced workforce?

I'd be happy if I found a company that was that balanced, instead of more like 1-2%...

Does your company have 16% or more women in software roles?

There are people who are not "CS grads" who might be able to throw together a web app or two. That number doesn't mean anything.

The fact that a lot of women simply don't like programming, don't find it interesting, find it hard to learn and understand is meaningful.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... (read from "So if it happens before middle school, and it’s not stereotypes, what might it be?")

It seems that there is a things-people distinction in sexes and it shows.

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