Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

I see the impulse here, an attempt to correct historic discrimination through proactive action. There are a couple of problems here:

1. If you inverted this equation, it would be pretty bad (can I create a list of "white male" engineers to hire). Do we have a rational reason why we should be discriminating against certain groups and not others?

2. You are hiring based on gender, rather than purely on skills. This has the chance to make teams function less well, if they believe someone was hired not due to merit, but merely on gender. This could also make the person hired feel unworthy if they think it was only due to gender. In the worst case this could make team / company performance worse. Only a company who can spare efficiency could use this policy. The best would be to take the best possible candidates, some of whom are bound to be female (unless you presume there are no qualified female engineers).

3. Historically programming and computer field was dominated by women, we don't fully understand the reason for the shift, so fixing things at the endpoint (hiring) may or may not be "fixing" the root of the problem (possibly education bias?). If you can't explain why the situation is as it is, then you're just changing random lines of code and hoping that each "commit" will fix the bug, even though you have no idea why its broken.

4. Every situation humans find themselves in is the result of an unbroken chain of historic conditions, but attempting to correct for it usually creates more problems due to arbitrary decisions, which fail to account for all those causes, and which result in unforseen future consequences. The best policy given that you don't know anything about those circumstances is meritocracy (just hire the best). This allows those who were disadvantaged to eventually come to equal footing (we take our foot off the gas of arbitrary discrimination), but also means that we aren't making things worse due to ignorance (e.g. the daughter of a wealthy engineer with admission to ivy league tech program vs being "while male" the son of poor russian immigrants with no education, being "woman" here isn't the disadvantaged state).

> The best would be to take the best possible candidates,

I find this idea to be pervasive and completely inaccurate.

The hiring process we all go through is flawed and can at best say, "this person is likely capable of doing the job as required" and sometimes they even get that wrong! There's no way to accurately rank candidates by determining Person A earned 943 Qualification Points and Person B earned 894. So you might as well take the list of people you like, and hire from that based on other qualities you want from your team.

Trying to achieve a balance of genders is important on a lot of teams. A hospital might want to hire more male nurses because certain situations might call be better handled by a male, i.e., lifting heavy patients or for patient comfort during certain procedures. Thus, if you have a list of nurses you feel are qualified, you may favor hiring male candidate if your team has a huge gender imbalance.

Our field is no different, may you'd prefer to hire a female tech lead because of an influx of female interns from the local college or because your clients/customers have a female bias and hiring that candidate may provide intangible benefits.

Yes, this is a good point. Hiring "the best" is more like a multi-variable optimization problem. Pareto showed mathematically its very unlikely that there is a single "best", instead there is a population of non-dominated solutions that form the "Pareto frontier" which is a population of "less bad than other" choices. One variable in that might be gender. But again, forming a list of female engineers seems like its premature optimization on a single axis.

The best approach in these cases is as I said on another comment, take your top candidates, some are likely to be female and you can weight that dimension fittingly (e.g. we have no women, its slightly more important than having just any another C++ dev).

Thanks for the substantial comment! This is exactly the point: you see the problem in the present state and also can envision (and like) the state where this problem is solved. The tricky part is usually how you get from NOW to THEN :).

There are some other ways you can pose this question: 1) Can female gender be seen as an additional advantage by the hiring party? 2) Do women developers need any extra help to eventually get parity with men in the software development industry?

Good points, it is totally possible that 1 would be the case -- although we in tech like to think it would not be a factor (e.g. its all just logic), it actually probably is, since there are so many other factors that go into successful employee.

2. This one is tough -- defining and executing "proper help" this is so specific to each person (again like an heiress who might just need english tutoring vs son of the dish washer who needs money for college) that our attempt to fix with something simple like a "list of females" likely won't have the right effect without more insight. Not saying impossible, just difficult.

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