I wouldn't be too thrilled having my career advancement sacrificed in the pursuit of 50/50 men/woman representation.
Your comment assumes that Gitlab can't find as many qualified women as they can men.
You've decided (knowing nothing about the women except their gender) that they are only being hired for those roles because of their gender.
Here's a couple of examples from other areas:
* a university department in the EU announced that they will no longer hire males until they fulfil their quota.
* the German Green party has a rule that only women can occupy the top position at various levels.
Both of these are clear cases of sexual discrimination.
Uh, no.
The party is co-led by a man and a woman. The leaders of their parliamentary group is a man and a woman. The Green Party minister-president of Baden Württemberg is a man.
They do support quotas on executive boards, but that is a damn far cry from your claims of "only women can occupy the top position".
Internally in the party, they strive towards a 50/50 quota, but it's not a strict policy and the actual membership composition varies between elections.
> a university department in the EU announced that they will no longer hire males until they fulfil their quota.
Which university and which department? Also, a single department at a single university does not a widespread policy make.
Cite your sources.
This is confirmed for example by the situation in Saarland, where a man was chosen on the first spot. In the end there was so much pressure on that person from party colleagues (including one of the co-leads that you mentioned) that they had to step back, even if they had won fair and square.
The party-internal positions are mostly irrelevant, as the male co-lead of the Greens has found out when they had to make place for the chancellorship candidacy for his equal footed colleague with no government experience. And Kretchmann is probably one of the most successful Greens, it would be political suicide not to let him run loose :)
I don't remember which University, it was in a newspaper article. I have no idea if it's wide spread or not, the point was that the department(?) lead was comfortable not just mentioning, but advertising that practice in a newspaper, whereas the reverse would have gotten him in trouble immediately.
It could equally have been a fear that if more than 50% of women are qualified for the job some will have to be excluded.
It could not equally have been that.
Tech executives are vastly more male than female, and Gitlab specifically is trying to increase the ratio of women to men.
That means if Gitlab considers a group of similarly qualified men and women for an upcoming opening in "senior leadership" (whatever that means), a woman is guaranteed to get the job.
The only reason this would be unfair is if you pre-suppose that, more than 50% of the time, the "most qualified" person is a man.
The ratio is not based on ideology, it's based on the ratio of humans.
The "ideology" that makes them care about that ratio is the belief that someone's gender is not a determining factor in their qualification for senior leadership at GitLab.
If you also consider the number of adult men who are in prison or don't have an advanced education, you would actually expect to see more than 50% women to be representative of the general eligible population.
> shouldn’t the board have the same proportions as the population of people who want to work at GitLab?
No. "Want to work at GitLab" is also going to encode undesirable traits, such as "perceives GitLab to be a bad place for women to work".
If you know the company is mostly men at the top, you might assume women have a hard time getting promoted -- regardless of the reasons. That means you might not want to work at GitLab as much as an equally qualified man.
For the candidate: that's fine! No problem, there are lots of other places to work.
For GitLab: it's something they have decided is not desirable, and their quota system is how they are attempting to fix it.
What you're proposing would just be a vicious cycle that would reinforce what GitLab sees as a problem.
I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.
If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general, which is to say it would mostly be men and you'd still assume that promotions are fair.
But promotions aren't fair or strictly meritocratic, and there's often good reasons for that. For instance, if you get more women in leadership the tail can wag the dog and you can get more women interested in tech.
It's also true that men are vastly more likely to be autistic, and the social challenges with autism can make someone a fantastic engineer, but not a fantastic manager.
That's not true of all autistic people, but there's certainly a correlation.
Again, GitLab is talking about senior leadership -- not people who are writing code or ever needed to have done it well. Most tech execs don't even have CS degrees, because most senior leadership positions are in organizational things (operations, management, HR, sales, etc.)
> I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.
If this were true, and gender were the only variable, then we'd see stable ratios of men to women in computer science. We haven't seen that. There used to be far more women up until the 1980s.
> If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general
You're assuming many things here:
A. "interest in tech" is a stable personality trait and not influenced by opportunity
B. "senior leadership" at a tech company like GitLab is mostly technical roles
C. merit at tech companies is primarily a function of interest in technology
All of those are debatable at best, although I'd say they tend more toward the side of being obviously false once you actually write them out.
> The only reason this would be unfair is if you pre-suppose that, more than 50% of the time, the "most qualified" person is a man
I actually think discriminatory promotions is pretty unfair. Just because you think it's justified doesn't make it "fair". You can tell it is because of the term "discriminatory".
Meritocracy is not an objective, defined term, even in rote, technical jobs.
Further, people are very, very bad at hiring based on merit. There have been tons of studies showing that people tend to hire people who are like them (culturally, racially, gender, etc.)
Quotas are not harmful unless there are too few qualified people to meet the quota, resulting in a less-qualified person getting a job.
GitLab has hundreds of millions of people to choose from. They're not going to run out of qualified women.
Citation needed. I'm pretty sure discriminatory behavior is harmful. Just because you think it's justified doesn't mean it isn't harmful.
neither is race or gender, yet these initiatives still manage to exist.
> There have been tons of studies showing..
there are tons of studies that are non reproducible too, so which studied are the strongest evidence of this claim?
> Quotas are not harmful unless there are too few qualified people
if you reduce it to a binary definition of "qualified", maybe. But if the best person for a role, their qualification, is a continuum, then you can do harm simply by hiring qualified candidates over better qualified candidates.
> GitLab has hundreds of millions of people to choose from
by what criteria?
I just assume that in the situation where I was interviewing for a promoted role alongside an equally qualified female candidate also interviewing for that promoted role that I would have 0% chance of getting it.
Why would anyone ambitious want to put themselves in that position?
Reverse discrimination is still discrimination.
I believe they would have grounds to sue for discrimination in such a case though.