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Comment by bicubic | Hacker News Reader

Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal.

There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recruiters. It's hard enough to find any sort of talented engineers regardless of other factors. Shit, it's not uncommon to recruit from other countries and cover relocation costs these days.

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Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?

I worked at a company that prided itself as a meritocracy and we produced phenomenal value for our customers. We eventually got purchased by a huge corporation, which took over our hiring processes, and told us we could no longer assess a candidate's technical skill level. Soon after that, our best employees started leaving and they were being replaced with people that improved our diversity numbers, but had very little technical capability. If you were female, black, or LGBT, you were hired on the spot. Some of the female candidates were good, but the majority of the new hires were a dead weight and the productivity of the office tanked. I am all for equality, but it's sheer nonsense to hire based on gender, race, or sexual orientation.

Not the parent, but in my current company it definitely helps to be a women, more referral bonus for referring a diversity candidate (post joining), performance targets for managers related to hiring and promoting diversity candidates.

Please note there is no active discrimination against men, but preference in some cases would be to hire a women. Gender is the only criteria for diversity in here.

How is a preference for hiring women not discrimination against men?

Would a preference for hiring men be discrimination against women?

a rather curious question... what prompted it?

The person they're asking said that they dedicated a extra resources to try and hire female candidates because the office was all males. That implies that they were hiring specifically for gender, not for any specific skillset.

The parent post? Evidently, for whatever reason, male applicants and coworkers are a problem for their organization, so they go out of their way and invest in "additional resources" to hire female candidates from the hiring pool. They're not hiring on merit, but on gender.

How exactly do you hire for female candidates without discriminating against the "overwhelming" body of male applicants? I would be really interested to know how this goes on behind the scenes: do you have open positions but cherry pick female candidates while disregarding male candidates from the get-go?

If it's anything like conferences trying to increase diversity numbers, they don't specifically target one gender, they focus their recruiting efforts on sites and locations that typically have a much higher representation, like a girls college, or a girls hacker group. That way they aren't actively saying "we won't accept male applicants", but they ensure that 90% of the applicants will be from the target demographic.

>We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal.

How is this not sexism? Replace female with male in the above quote and tell me it isnt sexist.

Diversity is generally accepted to be a positive thing. Targeting women specifically furthers that goal. Targeting men specifically furthers no goal.

So yes, sexism is not symmetric. Same with race.

How much money and time goes into hiring more female septic tank cleaners? Garbage men? Construction workers? Truck drivers? If sexism isn't symmetric then feminism isnt about equality.

You start looking in different places for your applicants.

Can you share a little more what you did specifically to find female candidates?

Not the person you responded to, but a few hiring managers at my office found once they changed up the language in the job listing it made a huge improvement in female applications. If your staff is predominately male then you're wording will skew a particular way that may not seem inviting. Glassdor has a write up on how to go about removing gender bias with links out to studies: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gend...

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