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Comment by bergenty | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger problem here is 50% for women. Mind blowing.

Yeah, same logic applies.

Not really, minorities generally easily make up more than 25% at tech companies. You don’t have to go out of your way to make that happen.

It’s just not possible to get 50% of women in without significant handicaps to the interview process.

Why is that mind blowing?

Because the pool of male engineers is ~4-8x larger than female candidates, so hiring 50% women is intentionally hiring worse employees because of their genitals.

Isn't the interview process the same for each role regardless? How does the size of the pool matter?

The interview process may be the same but the hiring choices ultimately must be discriminatorily skewed to achieve 50% women in the workforce if the percentage of women among the applicants is way less.

I've been part of a number of recruiting exercises to hire 20-100 SWEs at different levels. DE&I is front and center, both implicitly through corporate culture and explicitly through reminders, comments, etc in the process. It very clearly influences outcomes.

I've come to terms with it as the results have been pretty impressive in the last place I worked. It creates a 'put up or shut up' environment where excuses don't really get much traction. I led a team of eight SWE and six were women, representing both the top and bottom of skillset and teamwork in my crew, one in particular being easily top three engineers I've worked with in my 25 year career. She has the potential to go very very far.

It says half of the workforce, not half of engineers

The pool is skewed male because of sexist bullshit. Computers used to be viewed as predominantly clerical and thus women were far more prevalent. And it’s patently false to assume it has to effect hiring quality at all.

Nonsense, in countries with higher gender equality women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths, tech is not one of them. Men and women are not equal.

>women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths

Explain what you mean by this, without making a hacked butcher job of it.

I’ve got a fresh drink and plate of snacks, I’m actually giddily excited to see how you do (and of course have the X-posts drafted out already)

Ok, but why is the pool of engineers 80% men when the population is 50% women?

I'll offer one explanation: because the women that go into the field get treated like shit and burn out. There are many documented examples of tech businesses with systemic sexual harassment problems[0]. If your business takes steps to ensure its corporate culture does not fall into that same trap, then women who don't want to be sexually harassed will flock to you. That's how you get 50% women in a sexually-discriminated field: do the hard work of actually rooting out sex pests.

[0] Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard-King, Microsoft, etc

Hmm.

Is it conceivable to you that women may also be inherently less interested in tech- and more so in people-jobs compared to their male counterparts?

Maybe this interesting talk titled "Autism and the male brain" can serve to enlighten you on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8

Because it is not representative of the underlying demographics. There are vastly more men trained to work in the field (one representative datapoint: there's an 80/20 gender difference in computer science degrees).

If you are hiring equal numbers of women and men from a talent pool which is 80% male then you are almost certainly illegally discriminating on the basis of a protected class.

Or just heavily recruiting from women dominated spaces.

Also say what you will about it, once a company/team gets known for having women other women will flock to it.

Edit: haha people downvoting for the reality that women like working with other women.

To me, the "at least" qualifier makes it look pretty bad. So if they reached 75% it wouldn't be a diversity issue?

Also, they're saying: "At least half of our Tweepforce will be women". So they're suggesting that more than 50% of one gender is ok, as long as they're women.

A majority in one company of an overall underrepresented demographic isn’t the oppression that you so desperately want it to be.

Only 28% of software developers are women, so it’s impossible for all of tech to get to 50%. The only way to actually get 50% representation is by promoting tech careers to women, or by barring jobs/training to men

In my university not too long ago, my classes were maybe 14% women? May have been slightly more in others, but I remember counting at one point

We need to stop accusing companies of being sexist, they are bending over backwards to try to be the ones who get closer to 50%, which reduces the available female talent pool for other companies.

All these sexism allegations are completely toxic

The fix comes from outreach towards teen and preteen girls to convince them to consider stem. I’ve attended lectures on this

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