For a great many products that technical teams make, women are on the order of half of their users.
I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.
I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.
Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?
I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.
In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.
The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.
Then why say this?
> women are on the order of half of their users.
You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.
Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team?
"supporting diversity" means absolutely nothing, it's empty buzz-speak. Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means).
In a tech world where you have probably less than 10% women, trying to achieve a "diverse" (whatever that means again) team is just putting quotas in place to reject people not in the approved whitelist of "diversity".
Have a good evening.
I don't like much to divide people across arbitrary lines which are often artificial, especially in the modern day where we have so much sub-culture that it's difficult to find anything in common in people supposedly from the same "group".
Here's the thing, the position that people should be judged on their merits, and "regardless of" those things is something I completely and unreservedly agree with.
In the real world, however, that just isn't the case. The overwhelming evidence of implicit bias in, for example, blinded résumés doing better than non-blinded when the candidate is a minority or woman puts the lie to that being the case.
Then, consider the research demonstrating that one of the most effective ways to correct insular and/or incorrect ideas about another group is to interact with members of that group. We're largely operating on internalized, false narratives when we pass on a résumé with the name "Linda" on it, but say, "I want to interview this guy" if it doesn't have a name on it. Exposure to the people we have those narratives about shows us how wrong they are. We need to over-correct for the tendency, in order to encourage the exposure.
"Where a man is judged on the context of his character" (yes, MLK, gender-bias is a thing) is a wonderful world, and one in which I very much wish to live. We have some difficult, uncomfortable work to do before we get there, and all the pushback I see about encouraging the participation of women and minorities in tech tells me it's likely to be even longer and harder than I'd thought.
So first, it's not because woman or black people are discriminated against by racist or sexist people that they make a distinct "group" themselves, they probably have as much in common as two random people in the street.
Secondly, affirmative action, like you are advocating here is also creating pretty bad side-effects. If you make the criteria for hiring much more favorable for women/black people/whoever you think is discriminated against, you just give more fuel to the discrimination. People will just think "Is this women hired because she is competent or just because it's a woman?", and now they have a legitimate reason to think that because they can point to official policies. I would also add that it's pretty bad for the people benefiting from the affirmative action since they are just reduced to their gender/skin colour/disability, they are just hired to fill a quota and they probably would want to be recognised for their skills or their thoughts instead.
Then as a last point, the team can be as diverse as the field in it, if you have 10% woman in IT, you cannot achieve 50% woman everywhere, it's just basic maths. The efforts should be concentrated in tech school.
As another follow-up to another comment of yours suggests, there are probably many ways to accomplish that end without quotas, or any number of other similar approaches. Asserting the problems with those doesn't negate the principle. "The crude, tip-the-scales-a-bit approach we've tried so far has some problems. I guess we shouldn't try to fix this stuff..."
Huh?
But the specific thing I, personally, want to see people do about this stuff is simple: to question their own narratives about it.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." — Feynman
As per HN guidelines : "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
This subject appears dear to you, so perhaps you want to try again?
"Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means)."
Please see my follow-up to 'realusername's comment, which is sibling to yours, for an elaboration of my position.
You -say- you care about diversity, but that's not the explanation you've given. At best diversity is a tool to be used in the very particular case where it would help competence representation. By your comment, it would be in the case of untrue stereotypes.
"Exposure to the people we have those narratives about shows us how wrong they are."
The problem is that studies have shown that most stereotypes are true. (Really!)
This brings me to the next point : you somehow fail to mention the cases where it would be counterproductive to push for diversity, even if they are most cases. (At least for your stated goal.)
So which is it? Do you pursue diversity, or competence representation? If it's competence, will you accept to openly fight against diversity?
We made a couple cross-departmental promotions into the tech team of people who would not have taken the initiative to present themselves as candidates despite having natural aptitudes. In the absence of role models and with the rampant hostility in this industry, good people may take some convincing.
For what it's worth, another cross-departmental recruit matured to be an absolutely incredible engineer, who went from a standing start to making big bucks at Google within 5 years. He happened to be a white guy, haha -- but that's what you get when you cast a wide net.
Maybe we can start by increasing that 10%? I think a variety of approaches can be taken that don't discriminate against anyone. Introducing coding in K-12 is one small example. It helps because it exposes the possibility of a career in tech to girls and minorities. At no point, it denies that same opportunity to boys or white children.
A company may value diversity and still base their hiring decision solely on competence. You could ensure that your job posting reaches a diverse audience, for example. Instead of just posting it through your regular channels, you could reach out to, say, organizations for women in STEM. Thus increasing the number of diverse candidates who apply. The idea is to give equality of opportunity. Nobody reasonable is expecting enforced equality of outcome.
If you have 10 positions and 100 candidates who apply, and instead of the usual 5 women applying, you get 30, all things being equal, you just x6 your odds of hiring a woman. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll hire 3 women either. But you increased your chances of diversifying your team. Notice that, at no point, you discriminated against anyone or favored them in the hiring process.
Are you saying all female developer team could not write good code for a product that is used by males?
Cos that sounds totally crazy to me... Quality of someones work has nothing to do with their gender in general.
You got rid of men in order to increase the number of women on your team. But when someone says they'd merely not hire women citing your own apparent justification, you disagree that it'd be OK and then respond to a strawman that nobody proposed.
Does your cloud ops team rolling out container clusters need 51% female representation to bring the female perspective to devops? How exactly is diversity going to help there?
Don't get me wrong, having an environment where women feel welcome, instead of a locker room boys-club, is quite sensible if you want to open the doors to that 10-20% pool of candidates that otherwise would not be enticed to join you. BUT, the argument that diversity of genitalia, melanin, and sexual orientations will somehow make Docker work better is nonsense.
There's plenty of evidence to show that super homogenous groups perform exceptionally well, and there are countless examples out there of teams that excel without any kind of "perceived" diversity among them. There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.
I agree. In fact, Apple's former VP of diversity (or whatever they called it), a black woman, was probably forced to resign because she stated a room full of blond white men could be diverse. It's practically a cult at this point.
Just saying "Hey guys, I don't know if this it totally sensible, can we take a breather and investigate if this really makes sense?" immediately equates you to someone with a tiki torch or an Uncle Tom, if you don't happen to be caucasian.
Ironically, this self-consuming zeal is at its most fervent in the Bay Area, which is AS progressive and left leaning as you can imagine. Everybody's preaching to the choir. And because invoking moderation in the area is seen as a moral transgression, the region cannot but constantly radicalize itself even further, due to lack of opposing opinion.
And yes, the Apple case is amusing. You could have put together a room of white men of all sorts of social, cultural and financial backgrounds from the US, South Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America etc and regardless they would have all been immediately reduced to "cisgendered, privileged white men". I guess we have a word for that kind of treatment, but apparently it only applies in one direction.
1.) Individual women inherently bring a perspective that individual men do not, and vice versa. And more importantly, the needs and perspectives of people in a given group can not be understood by those outside of it.
2.) A technical team necessarily benefits from diverse perspectives. What if they're building low level drivers for circuit boards? What if they're programming an application, but have no bearing whatsoever on the product decisions or design?
I find these ideas, particularly #1, to be diametrically opposed to liberal philosophies of universality and the focus on the individual. I legitimately find that line of reasoning to be abhorrent.