Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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