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Comment by throwawaygender | Hacker News Reader

> We achieved a 50% ratio not by lowering our standards or by discriminating against men

To use a oversimplified model, assume everyone can be perfectly linearly ranked.

The gender ratio is skewed towards men at the top purely due to pipeline reasons (because college grads are nowhere close to 50/50).

Set a threshold to call your "standards" (say top 10 if you have budget for hiring 10 people).

If the top 10 are 7 men and 3 women, then you must give up on 2 of the men to fill it with 2 women from below the top 10.

Do you call this "not lowering standards"?

(I have no problem with lowering the bar to achieve better gender ratios because of long term social/game theoretical reasons. I just pedantically don't like lying to ourselves about not lowering the bar)

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Ok let’s take your simplified model assuming women and men are equally qualified but woman are less frequent due only to their choice, the top 10 are 7 men and 3 woman. Duolingo are looking for 2 new hires and hire 1 woman and 1 man. No problem.

Remember duolingo don’t hire 100% of the available workforce so they can stay 50/50 just fine, they are just snapping up the most qualified woman and making it harder for everyone else to follow suit.

For nicer numbers, assume the bar is top 10% and you have a budget for 10 new hires.

Looking at 1000 people, there are 70 men and 30 women who are above the bar, from which you can pick 5 men and 5 women.

But these 10 are still not the top 10 within the top 100! This is because the distribution of the top N never changes, assuming men and women are distributed identically. It is still 7 men to 3 women. The 10 you've chosen are not the absolutely best top 10 you could've chosen without considering gender.

You can double the size of the pipeline (e.g., there are now 200 people above your bar) and the argument will not change. The minimum ranking of their incoming class is still lower than just picking the absolute top 10 without considering gender.

I accept that this tradeoff is worth it (and above the bar, the actual performance difference between ranks is negligible). But I hate that people will not agree that is a tradeoff.

You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to interview 100 people, interview 150.

It's not about lowering the bar it's about making the extra investment to achieve diversity. It's worth it.

Put another way if you spend 20k hiring and you get a 9/10 male developer you could spend $30k increase the size of the funnel and get a diverse hire of the same quality.

I agree with this but the $30k could've also gotten hires of a higher quality ignoring gender considering the larger pipeline.

Also see my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18210856

> You just need to increase the size of the funnel. If you were going to interview 100 people, interview 150.

Then you are not in the "lowering the standards" part but in the "discriminating against men" part.

You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50 gender ratio without looking at the gender (Edit: When considering that all are all above the hiring bar).

“You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50”

Yes you can. As long as you are not hirering more than 60% of the Total available workforce.

My sentence did not end at the point. You cannot change the ratio without specifically looking at the gender, that is, specifically hire more of one group (because of their gender) and less of the other group (because of their gender).

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