Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers | Hacker News Reader

Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers

10degrees.uk

Why We Don’t Employ Female Developers

I will suggest that at least part of why no woman has ever applied is because your messaging sucks. This title is a terrible title that conveys that you choose to exclude women. This may not have been your intention, but that is what it signals. It sounds like you exclude them intentionally and you wrote this piece to justify it.

If you meant "We currently don't have a single female developer and we would like to see this change," well, you should have titled it that way.

People make decisions based as much on subtext, context, etc as on overt messaging. This is a UK company, but it sounds to my ear like it was written by someone who speaks English as a second language and doesn't grasp subtle differences that native speakers should grasp. I have no idea why that is.

But this article is rife with problematic language that suggests you don't want women developers and you feel entitled to exclude them. This is likely (at least part of) the reason not a single female developer has ever applied.

The title is meant to be provocative clickbait. Most women I know will have the ability to choose jobs without being put off by "messaging" just as well as anyone else.

Why would a woman subject themselves to a potentially hostile workplace when tons of other options abound?

This piece is a complete own-goal.

If they have no women employees now, that might be enough to scare away a female candidates in itself. I didn't read anything hostile in the post itself, it seems to be more like "this is bad, how can we do better at this?" not "we are proud we have no women employees".

The post have been written by a women, which happens to be employed there.

Yes:

> We don’t employ any female website developers at 10 Degrees. There’s one very simple reason for that: we’ve never had any women apply for our developer vacancies. Not one.

Not everyone who works for a company is necessarily a developer. The author is the company's business manager according to https://www.10degrees.uk/about/.

I guess I should have qualified as developer instead of employee, sorry about that.

Because they don’t support (positive) discrimination maybe..

They have never had female candidates apply. I'm not sure how positive discrimination would help in this case, they need to focus on outreach instead.

I agree that the title is unnecessarily 'click baitey'. Just the simple addition of ONE word would have set the tone for the article, and still engendered interest from someone like me - "Why we _currently_ don't employe female developers"

For me to read an article and learn from it, I have to be able to trust the source and the author. I trust that they have a non agenda specific way of explaining a topic and educating the reader. I am sorry, but if I see such 'bait and switch' tactics to sucker people in under false pretences, then that trust is immediately broken and I will click elsewhere, which is what I did after reading the first paragraph of the article.

> This title is a terrible title that conveys that you choose to exclude women.

It's just clickbait. It might even be justified in this case, since people are somewhat tired of the topic and are set enough in their opinions, that they will judge any related article by its title rather than reading it. In this case the message may be important enough to trick you into reading it.

Yes, I also wondered why this was titled to pick fights.

Yeah that title is comically bad - it makes me wonder if it was intentionally bad to be controversial? Either way surprising that nobody noticed this before publishing it.

Sooo... They should pander to women and pre-emptively assume that they're catastrophically sensitive to anything that might be construed as putting gender parity behind anything else, for any reason?

I don't know [wo]man, the cure might be worse then the ailment.

They are simply provoking the idea that pravils today. If you do not have equal part of woman in your organisation this is all besouse os sexism an misagyny.

I'm pretty sure triggering folks like you is exactly what the author intended with the title. It's a statement meant to invoke an emotional response that gets your guard up so you can (hopefully) see the error in your thought processes once reading through the article.

That’s an ineffective target at best, and you’ve misidentified the objection. Nobody’s “triggered”, they’re just rightly pointing out that it’s a stupid title.

> But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman. We want the best people on our team, regardless of their gender.

Does not follow.

They shouldn't hire someone because of their gender. But they might be missing women from their pipeline because they aren't recruiting where women are looking for jobs.

Particularly, since this is apparently a small company, they might succeed in building a well-balanced team because they only need to find a few qualified women, compared to a larger organization that might need to hire hundreds of women to create an environment where there are enough women to prevent a "locker-room" atmosphere.

More likely, since they only have 3-4 developers on staff, they just don't have enough hiring to get women anyway, so there's not much point to the clickbaity title to an article that isn't actually about their hiring.

> We want the best people on our team, regardless of their gender.

If your entire team is male, then either:

1. The best person for the job always just happens to be male.

2. You have to recognise that you already don't have the best possible people on your team. Logically, some of the best people are not male, and you don't have any of those, therefore some of your team must be not-the-best.

You've accidentally been hiring people just because they're male and reasonably capable. Remember how you were opposed to hiring people just because they're female and reasonably capable? Turns out you've been doing the same thing all along by accident.

I think what the author of the article meant to say was "hire" not "recruit". In that case, that line is absolutely valid.

Yes. This use of the word 'recruit' is a Britishism. We rarely say 'hire' for jobs, especially permanent ones.

Hire and recruit can have the same definition.

It’s doubly hard when you are outside the “tech” hotspots. Any competent female is usually snapped up by the larger players often with relocation costs and a salary that is impossible to match. So long as ther is a minority of females in the industry this is going to be an issue.

I must confess in some ways to being jealous of the attention that females get in the industry. It worries me because I would like there to be as many camps and the like aimed at all children including my son and not just girls. Hopefully in time the gender imbalance will be corrected. People will probable hate me for saying that but I have a feeling I’m not alone in feeling like this.

You're right, it's not as easy as it seems. If the most qualified person is not the most diverse from your current culture, there can certainly be a tough decision of feeling like you are choosing between a good diverse candidate or a great homogeneous candidate.

Most companies want diversity and performance, but unfortunately that perfect candidate might not always apply for your job.

I can understand both perspectives of wanting to give extra incentive to hiring a diverse candidate to create a diverse culture, but also feeling like being born similar to those already at the company might put you at a disadvantage or make you feel like "one of many" rather than a "unique perspective".

(elsewhere in the thread)

Why do people jump to the conclusion that "specifically recruiting women" = "lowering standards". It is actually a logical fallacy.

Suppose you wanted turkeys at least 10kg in weight. Suppose that there are only wild turkeys, either white or gray, with a 90/10 population white/gray.

Well, since you need to find and catch turkeys, it turns out that catching white turkeys is easier just because they are easier to see! So you end up with 10 big fat white turkeys and no gray turkeys at all. Are gray turkeys slimmer on average? Worse? Different distribution? No. They are just harder to find.

After a while, all the big fat white turkeys are gone, because everyone is grabbing them up.

But hey there's whole population of big fat gray turkeys that you _can't even see_.

This is why it is rational to specifically recruit women.

Even from a purely self-interested point of view, it's an untapped market. It'd be stupid not to recruit women. In fact, not hiring women would mean that you eventually have to lower your standards _for men_.

The issue is that a lot of companies are setting diversity targets that are considerably above the share of said diverse groups in tech. How does my company (on the order of thousands of employees) manage to constantly hire women at 1.5-2x proportional representation in tech?

A: we structure our hiring policies such that it's easier for women to get through the interview pipeline. I'd point out that we don't try to hire unqualified women, but we do make it such that a lot of qualified men don't make it. It's more about raising the bar for men - though plenty argue that this is still unfair.

I can understand tech companies' frustration. They're getting flak for not hiring many women, but people and news outlets rarely compare companies' diversity results with the diversity of tech as a whole. So it kicks off a competitive race where all companies are trying to have 40-60% higher than average representation of women. This is, by definition, impossible so companies end up resorting to changing the hiring pipeline.

All other things being equal, yes. But therein lies the rub (or the stuffing, if you will).

>Are gray turkeys slimmer on average? Worse? Different distribution? No. They are just harder to find.

Who knows? Anyone who tries to find out are hung out to dry. Now I value my precious bodily fluids so I'll refrain from commenting, but I've heard there's been some science done somewhere, once or twice.

You're introducing a logical fallacy here too, by arguing that "all white turkeys are gone," which is absolutely not the case for hiring male developers.

If your hiring pipeline is working, and you're successfully hiring qualified, capable candidates who all happen to be male, there would be absolutely no reason for you to change your practices which may result in you not finding the competent developers you need.

It is lowering standards if you have to transition from a working recruitment process to one which may not work, but ticks a diversity box.

On the other hand, there's the possibility that by trying to recruit women specifically, that their hiring process could improve. But who is going to take such a risk when they've already got a working process, and no solid argument that changing it will bring in better workers.

> You're introducing a logical fallacy here too, by arguing that "all white turkeys are gone," which is absolutely not the case for hiring male developers.

I'm not arguing that either, but even if I was, it wouldn't be a logical fallacy as much as it would be an empirically testable fact, and if I was wrong it would be a factual error, not a logical fallacy.

> It is lowering standards if you have to transition from a working recruitment process to one which may not work, but ticks a diversity box.

I don't see how that lowers standards, it might just be ineffective. The salient point being that lowering standards is about standards (i.e. "fatness of turkeys"), not how many people you hire (number of turkeys).

Now if you want to argue about whether specifically recruiting women would be _effective_, that's a different conversation, but my OP stands on logical grounds.

Two problems:

1.) You're not catching all the white turkeys. You are catching 9 white to 1 grey because that's the distribution of the population the turkeys wandering into your feed trap come from. Often your traps(small startup) will contain 10 white turkeys and zero grey turkeys when you check them.

2.) Women are not an untapped market.

Internal hiring data from $big_corp disagrees with both 1) and 2).

I remember math lectures from my studies. There were ~400 students and <10 females among them. Good luck hiring female engineers, if you find one.

Were these engineering math (DEs, linear algebra) or actual math classes (Real Analysis, Number Theory, etc...)

The ratio in my studies 10 years ago was much, much better in math degree courses than engineering courses.

That is odd ratio for math where did you study? It sounds even worst then CS gender ratio, which is super odd.

Then again, math is not development and they have little in common. (Speaking as female developer who always liked math.)

Electrical engineering in Germany 15 years ago.

Same for me. Studied computer science in Montreal. We had 3 females for about 100 students.

I imagine there might be some circular hiring here too where if the founders are if similar cultural backgrounds, they might know people or groups that share a similar identity and reach out there when looking to hire. A homogeneous company is easy to achieve when it's small and growing fast if the initial hires aren't in connection with a diverse group that is signed with their business needs.

Similarly, if I'm evaluating a company and meet a group of ten people that seem like they have a lot in common with each other but less with me, I might see that as an opportunity to be unique or I might see that as isolating which could perpetuate the current homogeneous hiring.

Source with visas if need be. The majority of female engineers I've worked with have been from China, India, and Eastern Europe. For whatever reason women from those areas seem to be represented much more in engineering.

It seems to be a causal effect, and not just a random coincidence.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

"In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

it could have to do with the fact that women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And often, that path leads through stem professions.

The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for stem professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject."

In Easter Europe, there is much less expectation that women is naturally lazy useless housewife. There is much less tradition of the "women are supposed to be naturally at home and do nothing whole day otherwise there is something wrong with them" I see repeated surprisingly often by Americans. There were no culture wars around women working in 1960. In Easter Europe majority of women (except very small aristocracy) always did useful things and worked whole day (same as men) - the place could not afford half population do nothing.

Importantly, pay gap between genders is bigger then in America. So much for women being attracted to money more due to desperation.

However, jobs are gender segregated a lot, probably much more. Tech is boy thing, clearly and openly. It is mostly that different things get qualified as "boyish tech" - for instance economics is mostly girly and seen as office administration job. Math is also much less likely to be perceived as "male thing". The attitude that girls don't have what it takes to learn math exists, but is less pronounced. I have heard it first time as adult, although I knew it would be weird for me to do something with physical technology. And I heard it most often from christian circles influenced by Evangelicals, for other people the stereotype was news.

There is a lot of push for boys to go to stem, including to tech occupations that don't earn much.

Edit: it is very odd to put reading and science into opposite. As if you would be interested in one and not in the other. There is not subject "science" in school either.

I don't think a small business like this has the funds on hand to hire someone from overseas just to meet some arbitrary gender metric.

But why exactly would a company do that if they can find engineers that meet their skill requirements locally?

This is a clickbait-y headline for the wrong reasons. I applaud their effort for recognizing the problem, but if they are truly interested in hiring female developers then they need to work harder. Either 1) do outbound recruiting and sourcing or 2) open a junior role.

We have a Junior engineer opening at ConvertKit, and have had well over 100 extremely high quality candidates, over half of which are female.

It's not enough to just lay out your "we're hiring" sign and expect your team's diversity to magically increase. Get proactive with outbound or hire a hungry, ambitious Jr engineer.

> Girls have the ability to be really good coders, they’re choosing not to.

This has got to be a tech hub problem of places like London and silicon valley. Maybe it is a start up problem.

In my years as a corporate developer in Texas women have been about 30-40% of the population at all skill levels. Women certainly haven't been the majority, but that doesn't mean women developers have been mysterious unicorns either.

What I have noticed is that the more experienced (old) the developer population gets in the corporate world, by average team member age, the less sex stratified it becomes.

A few years ago I took a Configuring Network Firewall class. The instructor mentioned that he has never once had a female student for the class.

Clickbait aside, they say they don't go out of their way to hire female developers. Ie, they don't positively discriminate; make diversity hires.

A couple of comments here have mentioned that perhaps women don't apply to be in a small, all-male team because it's all male. And that by extension, diversity (in gender and race) might have its own value for attracting the very best developers, even if those that you hire to get there aren't the best candidates amongst their interview peers.

(I get that there are other values in diverse teams, that's not what I'm focussing on here though. I'm talking about attracting future hires.)

Part of that makes sense to me. Does anybody know if there's any data backing it up? Do pure diversity hires make for more attractive work environments for future candidates?

I read the article and obviously it describes in detail why they have no females developers employed, but... considering how many people don't RTFA these days, they really should have chosen a different headline. At least from a PR perspective.

I get the sense they wanted a shocking headline to draw attention. I take it as a shrewd move to hook people with their outrage-instinct and then get them to read 4 pages of non-controversial stuff.

That is exactly what it is. I'm really surprised other folks aren't able to sense this.

The title of this article is terrible, and gives off the wrong impression right off the bat. However, this could also come down to a regional dialect issue, as people from my region could just as easily read that title and see "why we don't have female developers on staff" rather than "why we don't hire female developers".

The title was worded this way deliberately to bring attention to the issue. It's unfortunate that it gets a barrage of downvotes before people even click and read it.

It's not unfortunate; click bait has reached a point where it achieves the opposite of its desired effect. It's getting the treatment it deserves.

What a flamebait title. Sure, don't hire someone just because they're a woman. Consider each candidate based on their merits. Etc, etc. But if you look at your hiring funnel and it's entirely men, something needs to change. Hard to consider the merit of women engineers if you don't have any women whose merit you can consider.

> But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman

At least here in the US, it is actually illegal to either prefer females or discriminate against males in the hiring process (or vice versa), unless the sex is part of the role in question (i.e. hiring a person to play a female in a movie).

Why is this submission flagged? I would have thought an article from a small software shop of their hiring practices would be on-topic?

Because facts can upset some people.

> We don’t employ any female website developers at 10 Degrees. There’s one very simple reason for that: we’ve never had any women apply for our developer vacancies. Not one.

> We know from industry networking that there are many female web developers out there

Maybe their job adverts are inadvertently radiating “nope” signals?

Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at all. There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”, but that's only gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes. (Men are disproportionately conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy and cheeky.)

So I suppose if this is how they do hiring, that would explain why they're only getting men applying for their development jobs.

>Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at all. There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”, but that's only gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes. (Men are disproportionately conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy and cheeky.)

I think I'm going to have to politely WTF? that, if you don't mind.

I'm not sure which part you're WTFing, so I'll try to unpack my comment:

> Just from looking at their site, they don't actually seem to be hiring at all.

I couldn't see a clear Careers page on their site, which I found slightly surprising.

> There's a casual “hey, maybe contact us if you want a job!”,

On the About page there is a message like this. Literally it says “Looking for a new challenge? We are always on the lookout for likeminded individuals to join our growing team. If you've got the talent to help our mission and you share our values, please get in touch.”

That's a very general prompt for people who want a job to contact them. You need quite a high bar of self-confidence to apply in response such a general prompt.

> that's only gonna attract the Dunning-Kruger Dudes.

This is my cute nickname for people who believe they're great when in fact they're merely OK, in reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect. These people do have enough self-confidence to reply to the vague prompt. “Dudes” because I believe these people are disproportionately male:

> (Men are disproportionately conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy and cheeky.)

This is my opinion. In my 2nd-hand experience, young boys are generally encouraged to be boisterous and even naughty, whereas young girls are expected to be quieter and more shy.

Boys are more likely to be confident in their own abilities than girls, even when the two have similar skill levels. This assertion comes from a small-scale experiment in [a TV show](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09202jz), which is not proper science, and it's reasonable to reject this assertion as anecdote.

In any case, this is generalising and there are always counterexamples. But if any of this holds somewhat true, it may explain how the asymmetry arose.

Hopefully that answered your WTF!

I don't understand how you can make theories like that from thin air. Have you ever even been involved in hiring in a tech company? I have, and I'll tell you right now after interviewing well over 50 candidates, we only ever had 1 female applicant and she wasn't a good fit for the role due to lack of experience (we were looking for a senior and got a junior). That being said I work with some insanely talented female developers but they're mostly freelance and happy in that role.

The article makes a really solid point - invest in education and get women and minorities excited for the field instead of giving these groups a free pass to a job (see: Google) if you want to foster a healthy community and ensure a better future for everyone.

> we only ever had 1 female applicant

Exactly! Is it possible that the job advert, or something else about the company, was disproportionately attracting male applicants and putting off female applicants? (disproportionately, compared to the demographics of existing qualified developers) Would your company be capable of noticing?

> The article makes a really solid point - invest in education and get women and minorities excited for the field

Yes, this is definitely good! It's very easy to disclaim responsibility, because “the talent just isn't out there”. But this way, you cultivate more talent, and (if you put the work in) you get goodwill from everyone involved.

Yeah, I have not found anything that would suggest they are hiring. I would never responded to "Whether it's to say hello or start a brand new project with us. We'd love to hear from you!", I just don't expect that to be serious. I would also feel stupid or looking desperate to answer that, so I would not. I am more comfortable with more formal job descriptions, expectations and such. And male job seekers would not be harmed by clarity either.

I don't know whether I am norm or not nor whether that has anything to do with them. They are small company, there is a lot of randomness in these things, rolling dice and all that. My probably biased observation is that unlike what stereotypes say, men in tech are more likely to be attracted to personally "just fun" feeling ads then women who more likely work in "soulless" medium to large sized companies. May be wrong ...

Also pro-tip: the title is flamebaity. I know that especially on this topic almost everything feels flamebaity, but this one makes people emotional and biased before they even read it.

> Men are disproportionately conditioned to be over-confident, because boys are rewarded for being noisy and cheeky.

This is highly unlikely to apply to most of geeks/developers.

I disagree; geeks particularly are a product of (and create themselves; it is cyclical) a subculture in which being outwardly confident on matters not rewarded by the broader social group, at least of age peers, is, in-fact, rewarded.

You can't just sit around and wait for candidates to apply, you have to actively source them.

What this company is doing, trying to change attitudes early in life, seems like it has a much bigger net positive impact than going out of their way to hire female devs.

Correct. You can't just sit back and hope for better results without actively doing a lot to fix it.

My current company (not speaking as an official representative of them of course) is actively working to hire women, non-binary people and poc, especially to the devteam. We aren't there yet at 50% non-men; but we're actively trying.

We're sponsoring conferences, having people speak and doing a lot of active outreach. We also have great benefits and work is pretty flexible and understanding of family needs.

Why? The problem is clearly not lack of hiring of female devs. It's lack of existence of female devs.

Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found.

Creating a significantly higher demand for women developers is one way to help mitigate those causes and create more opportunity.

> Use the "5 whys" method to dig into this a little more. Yes, one major problem is lack of women developers, but why is that the case? Keep asking questions and you'll see that there's some terribly broken and problematic answers to be found.

Is that actually true, though? And if you think it is, how do you know? Here's what I know: The percentage of women that take the AP computer science exam in high school is about the same as the percentage of female software engineers. This means that whatever is keeping women out is happening before this point in the funnel.

That is true, but that doesn't address the issue that women as a group don't appear to be interested in programming jobs.

If the pool is 15% women (made up number, the actual number may differ), then it seems a reasonable expectation to have about 15% women devs on a team. But if the team is very small, we have to realize that the world is not perfectly homogenous, and some teams will have more than 15% and some less.

I'm all for making sure that groups aren't discriminated against in hiring, and if the overall hiring stats don't match the applicant pool, then that's a problem. But this constant pretending that women and men are not different is stupid. Men and women are deeply different biologically and that will reflect in social and cultural ways, which reflect in interests, and we can't force it to happen otherwise.

We should remove all barriers to fairness, encourage underprivileged groups, and educate, but we shouldn't try to force an equivalence that doesn't exist.

Yet, "looking for qualified female developers" sounds patronizing at best, and brusque at worst.

We need more girls in the field by cultivating different career ambitions.

Calling women "girls" is more patronizing than looking for qualified candidates.

I'm pretty sure ohf was talking about cultivating career ambitions in school girls. Yes, they are girls.

I think they did actually mean “girls” — we need more kids tinkering with tech and wanting a career in it.

Is it patronizing even if we also call men boys? And can you explain why?

Why is it patronizing? In media and film, such requests are frequently made.

In media and film, the gender of the employee makes a much bigger difference to the product. As an example, I'm sure female models are more effective at selling bras than male models.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. If there are no women in your hiring pipeline then you're either not reaching women candidates or not an appealing place for them to work. You need to change something about your hiring process to get those candidates to apply.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the other end of this as well, getting more women / girls into coding. Both are important.

I'm not a downvoter on that, but I'd imagine it's the tone that's getting dismissed out-of-hand, it sounds like it's implying there's some obligation.

You don't have to do anything (nor do you have to feel bad for using a normal hiring pipeline). You can choose to try to "fix" the gender-balance in tech thing [if you believe it's a problem], or not. There are millions of problems in the world, and it's up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to go out of your way to be proactive on.

Exactly. This is very troubling : "But we are not going to recruit someone just because they are a woman."

How else do you expect to get gender parity? It should be important to specifically source and hire women.

Why would you want parity? And your have to force women into fields they don't want in order to get it, just so you can balance your little scale. Whether or not someone is female isn't a particularly interesting aspect of their personality of software development skill. If your company has way below or above the industry average then there's pribably some unfair bias going on, but having women (or any other categorisation du jour) just to tick a box is absurd.

"How else do you expect to get gender parity?"

If women aren't interested in the job, you've already got gender parity. Women are moral agents and can make decisions too, you know. This is also why no one is complaining about the lack of gender parity in sanitation services.

Be careful, if you suggest all women don't naturally aspire to be Silicon Valley software engineers, you might be mistaken for James Damore. ;)

I personally don't see why software engineering seems to be constantly placed as the hallmark of jobs to work at, to the extent that if people don't want to do it, it's a problem. A lot of software engineering jobs are grueling, long-hour (or all-hour) jobs with questionable benefit to society. 'Hey, we made the ad company's ad tracking code 10% more pervasive! Wooo!' So you get a poor work-life balance in exchange for some slight premium on the pay you could make in a half a dozen related fields.

Meanwhile, the UI designer or business manager probably gets to go home at 5 PM, and nurses and teachers get to directly see and interact with people whose lives they are making noticeably better. Maybe the fact that more women don't want to be software engineers, is because women are running at a higher level than those of us who sign ourselves up for this stuff.

Which is to say, I don't see a problem with someone who wants to do a job doing it, but I don't see any reason we need to push people to do it.

> It should be important to specifically source and hire women.

I read this that you believe that an applicant's genitals or gender identity ought to be a positive qualification for employment. Am I reading you correctly/charitably?

I legitimately can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.

So you want to lower your standards based on someone's gender alone just to check a box? Seems like a bad idea to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com