Honest question, how does it work if you are trying to have a good balance man/women in your team? Especially in IT trying to keep a good mix and avoid man only teams? Is this kind of advise even “safe” to ask these days?
By far the better approach than removing information by having blind / limited information applications is to have MORE information, e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/re...
> We conduct four randomized field experiments among 1,801 hosts on Airbnb by creating fictitious guest accounts and sending accommodation requests to them. We find that requests from guests with African American-sounding names are 19.2 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those with white-sounding names. However, a positive review posted on a guest’s page significantly reduces discrimination: When guest accounts receive a positive review, the acceptance rates of guest accounts with white-sounding and African American-sounding names are statistically indistinguishable.
But this isn’t soley about race, nationality or gender, you have to find a good mix also in terms of personalities, skillsets etc. I always found system theory to be a useful abstraction when thinking about this. System theory asks the question which function a member of the system (the team) will take, given their personality etc. You cannot decide this from top down, it will just happen. Like in a family, where you can visit after 10 years and instantly, without beeing aware of it you put yourself into a certain position.
The question is: which function does a team/family member fulfill for the system?
A systemic view means the answer to this question depends on the constellation of the whole team and not just on individual members.
So my answer would be: make a team where everybody gets to align their personality with the function they will have within that social construct, make everybody a valuable part to the whole and make everybody realize, they are better off as a whole.
A good experienced team is like magic just because everybody precisely knows what their function within it is, and having a different background is part of these functions as well.
To my mind, this is the key point. It may be likely that a team with e.g. diverse skills/personalities will end up being gender diverse. But to assume that it has to be gender diverse, or that you can achieve a diversely skilled team by enforcing gender diversity seems to lapse into lazy gender stereotyping about how e.g. women's skills/perspectives are limited by their gender.
And by background I surely mean gender, but also things like educational background, nationality, personality etc.
Nobody should brute force for gender diversity just for the symbolic victory. Diversity done right has its benefits, but like all paradigms you have to use your brains when implementing it. Refusing to do so and then after a half assed attempt declaring it doesn’t work, is what you sadly witness quite often.
I know multiple women in tech and every single one of them had their gender used against them many times during their careers. Hiring men and women like in regular fields won’t hurt tech at all. I don’t really get why it has to be a big thing at all.
If you want someone who can contribute to a team in a certain way, then hire for that.
That is: you want your team to succeed, but you'll accept a little less productivity if the team is fun, or there's less drama, or you feel happy being with your co-workers.
>considering diversity needs //
What are these needs?
I've struggled with this issue recently - in my kids school all the teaching staff are female. All the appointed governors are female too. So the people choosing the staff are females used to working in a female-only environment. There's no [visible or reported] effort to bias towards employing any men. I think not having any men in teaching roles, only the janitor is a man, is a bad thing for all the kids in the school. But, I don't really agree with "positive discrimination" as it's just discrimination and a woman who fails to get the job solely because of her sex would, IMO, be being unfairly discriminated against.
My sense is that the unfair discrimination is perhaps necessary, but it sits very uneasily with me.
To my mind this is the same sort of consideration, choosing a worse candidate because on a broader perspective, considering characteristics of the system rather than only the character, there's a benefit.
tl;dr systemic optimisation rather than local optimisation.
The systematic interpretation of this law is that it is legal to moderately discriminate in the favor of women when they apply for a position (school, work) that has a male majority, while it is illegal to discriminate in the favor of men when they apply for a position that has a female majority.
Examples of male-majority situations where this is applied is CEO or board positions in publicly-owned companies or engineering school, while examples of female-majority situations where this cannot be applied is veterinarian or medical school.
I know this from film sets: I happend to be in crews, that were so diverse, that the only overlap in the end was that all of us somehow liked film. These were incredibly interesting and motivating crews, with a ton of creative ideas, willingness to go the extra length etc.
The worst crews I saw, were the ones where you had departments that had creepily aligned departments, that defined themselves by drawing a border to other departments. E.g. a light crew consisting completely out of white “dudes” all with the same ideas, jokes and taste, similar age etc. They did good work, but once they outnumbered the rest, the open discourse/exchange of ideas on set suffered.
But there are other ways to approach, and possibly fix, this problem. One would be increasing the reach, e.g. you could investigate if your job ads reach mostly women and instead advertise on some male-heavy media as well. Another would be fixing the underlying biases and misconceptions of the job (e.g. that teaching is a female job or that men that want to spend time with children are likely pedophiles) - though that one is obviously harder to do, you need society-wide influence. Or maybe you'd figure out that it's just the way it is, and there is a huge gender (or some other characteristic) imbalance in the whole pipeline (i.e. not just the applicants for the job, but already when people are applying to universities for the appropriate field of study) (in which case positive discrimination would mean you'd have to lower the bar to an unacceptable degree), which might be OK as well.
It's also odd that talk about the value of different perspectives and diversity can disappear as soon as some women create women-only workspaces for themselves.
It's examples like this that make me unfriendly to feminism. Equality of opportunity is a worthy goal, but either you support genuine diversity or you don't.
From what I understand, the suggestion is that if one person is obviously more qualified than another, you pick the most qualified person regardless of other factors, but if there are multiple people where it's unclear who is better, you pick the person who's from a marginalized group.
If we had some kind of ultra-precise scientific way to measure a person's level of qualification, the point would be moot; it would be highly unlikely that two people would measure exactly the same, so we would never be in a situation where we choose based on other factors than qualifications. It's precisely because it's impossible to determine exactly how qualified someone is (probably by the very nature of what we mean by "qualified") that the idea has any merit at all.
Presumably the best person for the job would be the one that maximizes the company's profit. Suppose it's easier to hire the female candidate that's better than all male candidates (hard as that might be to imagine for many on this site) if you currently have a woman working on the team. The existing team of eight high-performing men just isn't as appealing as a team of seven high-performing men and one not quite as high-performing woman.
I have heard from multiple women, that they will absolutely not join a team if they are the only woman on it.
You would miss out on a lot of talent that way.
Diverse teams gather more information which leads to better insight of edge cases, and ultimately to better products.
So in this case I do not see at all that software from "diverse" teams has gotten better.
I fact I think that overall software has gotten worse in the past decade. There is no structure, quality or documentation. The only thing that matters is that "something visible happens" so it resembles a product.
If men and women are fundamentally different then there are good reasons to choose men or women only in a given situation (along normal stereotypes: women are better caregivers, men are better manual labourers).
Recruiting in this way is illegal in a lot of places.
>they're all going to ask the same questions if they all have the same perspectives, biases, etc. //
Then shoudln't you choose people based on their ability to consider the specific perspectives you need?
One of the things about people is the ability to adopt the perspective of others readily.
Not sure about what "modern feminism" is about, but the goal is fairness, which means treating women as women and not requiring male characteristics. Basically, detaching personality traits more common in one population (eg gender) from actual job requirements.
Different genders/races/cultural backgrounds/educational backgrounds are connected to having different experiences in life. Of course you can imagine what e.g. sexism looks like, but when it happens to you every other day as a woman you will have it much more present than a man. Same thing with other aspects, people who have different racial/educational/cultural backgrounds bring different experiences with them and they might offer them precisely at the point where you didn’t think about it, not because you are a bad person, but because emulating all other perspectives your self is exhausting.
The variance between individuals of both genders and within races/nationalities/etc is big enough for you to look on the individual level. When you say “women are statistically on average better caregivers” and hire only women, not only are you missing out on very talented men, but the functionality of your team is reduced as well. E.g. because in some situation a male caregiver might be a better fit for a given client. Not because they are better or worse at their job, but because beeing male brings a whole set of experiences, cultural expectations etc with itself. The same apparently goes for other traits your employee might have.
Most jobs require teams to react to new and unpredictable challanges and having a broad range of backgrounds, helps them to always have a team member whi knows how to deal with it, because of their background ans life experience.
When you hire a team where you have a monoculture, it is hit or miss. It might work well for a certain job at a certain time, but if anything changes, your team might be less resilent, flexible and able to solve problems compared to a more diverse team.
Apprently there is, otherwise why claim that any gender imbalance in the workplace must be the result of discrimination? I agree with you that diverse points of view can be useful; but diverse points of view imply (average) psychological and cultural differences, diverse attitudes and interests, and these might well be the reason of the gender imbalance. To use a steereotype (don't kill me for this) if female software developers can bring value to a team because on average they have a better eye for UX or design, then it is also probable that more females will be in UX or design than males, creating a gender imbalance in the number of candidates for software development positions.
I don't think Feminists claim any gender imbalance in the workplace must be the result of discrimination. At least the ones I know usually hold much more balanced views here and the subset of them that is for a fixed quota of women in certain fields/levels usually also say, that they really don't think of this as a good solution, but as they unsucessfully atempted to change things using voluntary solutions for decades, they are now in favour of such solutions.
I am a European, so our feminist debate might differ from the one in the US. But you shouldn't listen to the ones screaming the loudest anywhere and think they are representative. If we'd judge white christians based on that it would mean the world would be filled with lunatics, when in fact it is much more nuanced.
> [...] then it is also probable that more females will be in UX or design than males [...]
I think nobody rational would argue agaisnt your thesis. The point feminists usually tend to make about this is, these bilogical tendencies are the only one thing that decides careers – there is also the question of work culture and sociatal expectations, etc.
If you do a little bit of research you will be fascinated how many women helped in the dawn of computation. This was, because before electronic computers, the word "computer" literally meant humans who did the calculations and these humans were predominantly female maths graduates in the dawn of the computer age. The job of a female computer was not well paid, only a fraction of what the male deciding mathematicians earned. But there weren't enough skilled people here, so women filled the position.
When computers became bigger, it started to become more male and the focus shifted from maths specialists to special degrees, the quality of software declined with the quality of education, more men started to work in the fields salaries increased, until at some point it was a male dominated field, with slight shifts in the recent years.
It is conviniently easy to say women are better at the thing they do at a specific point in history (which for some reason is always paid worse) and so they should just stick to it. E.g. today many women work in textiles and fashion, this was the polar opposite 150 years ago, yet today every unreflected person would swear that there is something inherently feminine about working in the textile industry. So IMO biological factors make a difference, but it has significantly more impact whether you live in a society that expects certain genders to fill certain roles. There will always be men or women that go against these roles, but wouldn't it be the best to live in a society where men are not expected to do/be/embody X and women not expected to do/be/embody Y? This would mean everybody could be closer to their true selves, and we end up with the best people for a given job.
In a practical setting the sensible and civilized stance to take on this is not to focus too much on gender and other features when deciding if somebody has the skill, while focusing on it when it is about the "systemic" question, whether somebody should be part of a team or not, with the goal of including people with different backgrounds.
This is just an assertion currently, and I am not inclined to believe it is true. I would believe it for more "people" and/or culture oriented problems, such as catering, but for the majority of software development problems, diversity in people is nothing compared to diversity of software development experience. Which, ironically if we take as given most developers are white males, we maximise on average by only hiring white males!
The idea that this kind of a priori judgement is not only acceptable but laudible has come as a bit of a surprise.
Not least because it would seem to justify rejecting female applicants for a role where a 'male perspective' is considered important.
All that time I've wasted writing code...
Following from that, it may be in your interest as a hiring person to bootstrap some diversity to remove that "unhealthy" idea early on.
One advantage I could imagine is mixed teams making the company more attractive for men to work at, making it easier to attract talented developers.
Run a company that women see as a good place to work, where they won't be harassed and where they're treated fairly. Once the company gets a reputation for being a good place for women to work you'll get a lot more applications from women, and the problem of balance will resolve itself because you can hire on merit if you have a good selection of candidates.
The hard part will be firing people who do things that give the company a bad reputation even if they're great workers.
Just imagine a 20 person company with 5 women who are being fairly treated: how do they get better gender balance? Even if these five persons were outspoken, how many people could they reach? Not to mention that a true character of a company is only revealed in a crisis (harrasment, known unequal pay, role progression...). This company will never get the breadth of candidates Facebook might to be able to rely on statistics. Without actively pursuing that as a goal, balance never happens.
Positive gender discrimination is a societal tool, a tool to fix unfair social treatment of genders at an early age ("here are pink dolls for you dear, your brother can go play games on the computer" just as a blunt example, but it's a lot more subtle in general).