Gusto Went for Women Engineers: How It Worked Out | Hacker News Reader

Gusto Went for Women Engineers: How It Worked Out

forbes.com

43 pointstlb61 comments

How can they title the article "How It Worked Out" with zero discussion of subsequent performance? This push for diversity is usually justified by a statement that diverse teams automatically produce superior products. Wouldn't they want to at least mention how it's going now that they have improved the team so much?

I've noticed a trend in headlines toward devaluing the word "how". "How X did Y" is really an article that simply states "X did Y", with none of the details you'd expect for a "how" article. It's frustrating because it makes it harder to find the legitimately useful "how" articles.

This seems realistic and fair: a goal tied to the percentage of women in CS and a clear cap on duration from the outset.

Isn't this just treating the symptoms to some extent? Sure there is a gender bias in hiring and salaries for women. But isn't the big elephant in the room the socio-economic and behavior bias created at a young age at homes and schools where gender roles are assigned very early?

Women didn't just drop out of the Software tech force in the 80's. What about all those personal computers marketed and targetted towards young nerds(ugmmmm boys)?

Software needs to be taught at grade level in an interesting way for people to catch on early. Natural biases and inclinations are just random noise unless we as people perpetuate them.

That's why they set their goal based on the proportion of female computer science graduates. If all you hire is CompSci grads, then your hiring proportion matching the graduate proportion is equality, no?

The gender disparity with interest in tech obviously starts from a much younger age, but that's a separate issue to address.

> But isn't the big elephant in the room the socio-economic and behavior bias created at a young age at homes and schools where gender roles are assigned very early?

So yes!

Perhaps a positive feedback loop can be created: as firms consciously hire for diversity, they create economic incentives (for parents and institutions) and role models (for young women) that can begin to change systematic biases.

When a company like Gusto invests in and reaches equal gender representation, does it make it harder for smaller firms to do the same, or does it help more women enter the engineering workforce?

If talented women are being overlooked just because they are women, doesn't it make sense to seek them out and give them an opportunity to reach their potential? If I look at a talent pool and see of those who haven't been hired yet are mediocre men as the best of the men have been hired and enormously talented women who haven't been hired because of sexism in the industry, I'm going to hire the women based on talent.

Opposite side of the argument - why would this overlooked talent bother to work for someone else (and luck out, or not)?

Also, you may hire based on talent, but still at a discount. Just because you can, and it is profit maximizing!

Personally, I'd rather keep the profits of my extra productivity for myself.

Not everybody wants to be in business for themselves.

The problem is that the situation you just described is a fiction. Most engineering divisions hire on talent, irrespective of gender, so the talented woman would have been hired over the mediocre man by the system which pays no attention to gender at all.

Perhaps so. But perhaps the talented woman also experienced a hostile or otherwise undesirable work environment and leaves after a short period of time. Or leaves the industry altogether.

A Baby Bell utilities company lost a court case in the 60s which requires them to hire women in the field. Their argument was that women can't handle the heavy tools. After losing they purchased aluminum ladders to replace the heavy wooden ladders and wrenches with longer handles so they had more leverage being easier to use. A reporter interviewed some of the men about the changes and asked what they thought. One man replied, "Everything is so much easier now. I wish we did this a long time ago."

Edit: I heard this story in the 80s when I was a kid. It may be real or not, but the point is the same. I'm still looking for the FWD: FWD: FWD: but I've never heard it again since the mid 80s.

> A Baby Bell utilities company lost a court case in the 60s

No it didn't; the Baby Bells were created by the 1984 breakup of AT&T.

EDIT: As a sibling post provides details, the error was calling it a "Baby Bell"; the essence of the story, at least the lawsuit itself, is true, but Southern Bell was a pre-breakup Bell Operating Company (an AT&T subsidiary), not a post-breakup Baby Bell. [Errors like pointing to a Baby Bell 20ish years before they existed are often, but as this incident shows not always, signs of folk mythology.]

The case was real, dunno about the new tools part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_Weeks

And perhaps this perception, true or false, that women need to be handled with kid gloves and will flounce out at the slightest microprovocation is hurting women's chances of being hired.

You said “this perception” then described some very different perception that I don’t hold.

I have no way of even beginning to address a comment that claims that we hire on talent. That's just false. Regardless of where you are on the 'women in tech are victims of sexism' dimension, you can't seriously claim that engineering divisions hire on talent. Engineering divisions can't even reliably discern talent.

I have said before that we need the equivalent of a Rooney Rule for tech. I don't know if this constitutes that.

Paying attention to how things are worded is a good first step. It fits with my experience of using less exclusionary language instead of intentionally inclusionary language. But the article fails to paint a compelling portrait of a company that genuinely has it figured out. It is not possible for me to determine if this is a defect in the writing or an indicator that they are running an experiment and don't actually know what they are doing with some kind of confidence (in the statistical sense).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

It's one thing to hire. Let's check back in three years and see how many have stuck around.

I would think that having a lot of female engineers would help both hiring and retention of female engineers

Probably more important, with retention, are working conditions. If a company has a high turnover rate, women aren't going to stick around just because they're 20% instead of 10%.

Anectodally, women may be less likely to switch jobs if they’re satisfied with their work environment.

...isn't that pretty obvious (and universal)?

Not necessarily. For example I am happy in my current job (it is, without a doubt, the best job I have ever had) but don't get paid anywhere near what I would like to so am actively looking for new work. If rdlecler1's anecdote is true a woman would be more likely to stay and only start looking to leave once the job starts making her unhappy.

> Initial steps included writing job descriptions that avoided masculine phrases like "Ninja rock star coder."

When my fellow male engineers see that in a job ad, they avoid it like the plague.

> Now that 17 of Gusto's 70 engineers are female.

After a focused campaign to hiring women, Gusto's results are nowhere near 50/50. And they had to go out of their way to hire women and focus resources to attracting women.

The male engineers at Gusto were no doubt happy to see diversity, especially since Gusto did not drop their standards just because an applicant is female.

Not so much "masculine" as juvenile.

Both those terms are often accurate and frankly they're correlated.

Yes. It's pretty much always a sign that they don't understand engineering and it's more like a Kindergarten that discovered putting together code constructs makes lights blink.

That's an extreme (because it makes it obvious) example — but the point is more broadly applicable. Leaving that one out attracts a more diverse set of applicants, like your fellow engineers, and more women. If you go the rock star route, you attract a very narrow band of person.

There's even more subtle phrasing in developer job postings that attracts men and discourages women, though. Even something as benign as "quarterly company retreats in the mountains" might discourage parents, probably women more than men.

Gusto's results are nowhere near 50/50

https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#demographics

It's unrealistic to expect a 50/50 distribution in the workforce when it's 80/20 in the academia.

Hey, they aren't even at 80/20 after all the hard work. A lot of women feel that it should be 50/50 since more than half of the population if female, so I was addressing that sentiment.

Do you think that 50% of boilermakers should be female? Should 50% of welders be female? Mechanics? Oil rig workers? We should probably be pretty upset that only 2% of dental hygienists are men as well, right?

https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...

I think cultural change when enforced by laws, while quicker on the surface, results in a lot of resentment. The discrimination becomes stronger and more difficult to detect.

Businesses should be free to hire who they want.

I'd love to see more female mechanics, electricians, carpenters and plumbers. In the US at least, those are well paying jobs.

And yes, more males should consider nursing and dental hygiene. Those are well paying jobs as well. Female nurses see and do some incredible things on a daily basis that any male would have no trouble respecting and admiring.

I (male) had a online coding challenge with a woman engineer from Gusto. I could literally feel her disinterest through the phone. Now I understand why.

[My previous comment confused Zenefits with Zenpayroll, and i've removed it to avoid further confusing the issue]

You're referring to Zenefits. Gusto was originally ZenPayroll. The Article mentions it "At the outset Gusto even had a similar name, ZenPayroll, which it changed in 2015 when it started offering a more complete selection of employee-tracking software."

thank you for correcting me!

> Gusto's women-only recruiting effort lasted six months. It stopped, Kim says, because "we exceeded our goals." In 2015 Gusto was trying to hit 18% women engineers, the proportion majoring in computer science as undergraduates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and it reached 21%.

This is a bit disappointing. It reminds me of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's answer to "how many women on the Supreme Court would be enough?"

"When there are nine."

Men have been in a position of disproportionate power for so long it's unimaginable to be on the other end of the spectrum, but shooting for 18% representation of women will only uphold the current gender iniquities.

They should have aimed higher.

If they hired more than the proportion with which they were graduating or even available at, that would not make any sense whatsoever, and might not even be numerically possible...

They state in the article that they exceeded it.

Aiming for a 50/50 split is unreasonable until the entire pipeline is evenly 50/50 split which is unreasonable because it will eventually boil down to birth rates which skews male [0].

Imagine you run a pet clinic in a town of 5,125 people. Population: 2,500 women and 2,625 men. Of those 5,125 people - six of them have gone to school and became veterinarians. You're looking to hire four veterinarians to staff your pet clinic. You'd like to equally hire two men and two women. Five of the six local graduates are female and the only male graduate doesn't meet the qualifications you are looking for. You cannot afford or cannot find two male veterinarians who are willing to relocate to your small town and work at your clinic. In the end, you hire an entire female staff. Not because you're sexist - but because you simply can't. You don't have the funds necessary to bribe two men to move to a small town to work for your pet clinic.

[0] http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/data...

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