How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
tessrinearson.com
tessrinearson.com
For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns.
I replied that, if that were their goal, they would most likely have to lower the bar as compared to a male intern, or else pay the female interns more, give them more perks, or purposefully interview fewer qualified male interns.
My argument was that if Microsoft's hiring bar was the top 1%, most likely only 10% of that candidate pool is female. So, one must either drop the bar for females, interview more females in that pool than males, or somehow double the chance that a female in that 10% of 1% accepted your internship offer. However, in those days almost nobody rejected Microsoft offers, so that last route seemed difficult.
The only way to maintain equality of pay and skill without purposefully rejecting male applicants is to spend a huge amount of effort finding more female applicants than male applicants in that 1% and persuading them to apply. But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.
The HR representative got very angry, but couldn't articulate why.
That said, to a large extent you are correct but you are framing it poorly. One of the major steps of breaking the gender gap is to spend more resources on, not just finding women, but also encouraging women. The net result may be in paying disproportionate amount of attention to the group of women compared to the group of men but it should not imply either of the more obvious ways to interpret "pay less attention to males". That is, it shouldn't involve ignoring men or spending less time with any individual nor should it mean reducing any focus on finding good people regardless of gender. It should involve adding focus on the women, which is substantively different despite the ability to describe it with the same words. It's also not necessarily feasible for everyone but it certainly is for Microsoft, especially with the sort of focus they put on trying to bridge the gender gap.
You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending money specifically on recruiting females brings the budget to parity.
That doesn't make any sense. Recruitment happens before candidates even exist. Candidates are the result of recruitment.
Granted, there are a lot of trivialities in this example, but it's pretty representative of how such programs are supposed to work.
Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does not flag him down. Now the woman walks by and the recruiter walks up to her and interests her in company X. She takes her ideal job and is happy. The man takes a job at company Y, for less pay, and is unhappy.
When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.
I would hope that the recruiter isn't, in fact, signalling something along the lines of, "your odds of getting hired at this company are greater than your equally talented male friend." If I were receiving that much extra recruiting attention because of my gender, that is the impression I would get.
However, your second paragraph sort of has things backwards. The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend." Such signalling as I described before isn't about saying that their odds are better than their male friend but rather that the company is actively trying to not disadvantage women.
Do you have some sort of evidence for this? Anecdotally, talented female programmers stay on the market far shorter than males do. Most companies desire a gender balance, which makes the limited stock of female programmers more vlauable.
Dividing up the population into two groups using your favorite method and then demanding that the amount spent on each of the groups is equal is ridiculous. Not only that, but mathematically you almost surely can't even satisfy two people that have that philosophy simultaneously.
What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.
Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:
1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.
2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.
This is untrue. There are probably all sorts of societal issues that affect whether one enters the tech industry based on gender, but those aren't inherent to the process. It's also not clear that hiring practices will help the problem. A desirable company can improve its gender ratio, but only by hurting the ratio at other companies. (I don't think this is a bad thing.) Something has to cause more women to become programmers, and I doubt hiring practices are the solution.
In my experience, when looking for people to fill a position, that we end up with some quantity who exceed our requirements, all of whom we'd be happy to hire. The correlation between that quantity and the number of available slots is not strong. Once the candidates cross the "happy to hire" threshold, the decision comes down to what, in retrospect, seem like random factors (if we vaguely think the company might need a certain type of skill later, we might bump up candidates who have that skill, if someone on the team particularly got along well with some candidate that's a plus, etc etc). Evaluating people is not very precise at all.
The line about spending a "huge" amount of effort finding more females seems a bit misogynist on its face. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it would be a particularly huge expense. If the goal is to have an incoming ratio with 10% more females, it seems that the additional expense could reasonably be only 10%. It also is fallacious to assume that this is a zero-sum equation; that additional 10% (or 50%, or whatever) could be provided solely for that purpose, and would be unavailable otherwise.
Congratulations on successfully trolling the HR representative, though.
I think more interestingly, it seems like what I've seen is looking to hire interns where we can't even fill the spots we want with people who appear that they are likely to be actually qualified, they hire interns who are unlikely to be qualified because its worth it to filter down to the few that are. It seems that your suggestion that you get more qualified applicants than you have positions for, which really flies in the face of my experiences. Is it really true or were you exaggerating somewhat to make a point?
Maybe I've been lucky with the organizations I've been associated with, but none of them has thought of hiring as filling slots, or of internships as anything other than nurturing the most promising young people to become great hires later.
Are people really hiring interns to get work done? No wonder we have so much unimaginative cookie-cutter software! I mean, there's no doubt that tons of people use absolutely abysmal hiring practices where making certain decisions would make them even worse, but that's not really interesting to talk about.
"Fairness" as you use it should have no part in a business decision. The Microsoft HR team identified that for them to maximize their competitiveness (i.e. profit), they need more female staff members. That means that an "underqualified" woman suddenly becomes more qualified because she brings a business advantage to the table that a man does not. I have no problem with this.
1. Microsoft does not make decisions (mostly) based on fairness to prospective employees. It DOES make decisions based on having a good public image, part of which is being seen as diverse and inclusive.
2. The reason being diverse and inclusive is seen as good is because of a ton of research showing that being diverse is good for companies, good for employees, and good for entire underrepresented communities.
So it's not fine, but the fineness or not does not exist in a vacuum. The two situations are not arbitrary, and therefore, not analogous.
Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 million people in the field, and you will be hiring 1,000 this year. Also say that women make up 10% of the field. In this scenario, there are 10,000 people that you would be happy to work for you, and 1,000 of them are women.
If only 10% of prospective employees would even consider working for you (which is the case for many startups, and probably for present-day Microsoft), then you're trying to fill a class of 1000 from a universe of 1,000 candidates, and only 100 of the women both apply and meet your hiring threshold. The best you can do is 10% female interns.
If, however, everyone in the field wants to work for your company, you have a universe of 10,000 candidates, 1,000 are women, and you're trying to fill a class of 1,000. You can have a female proportion anywhere from 0-100% with no loss of quality.
This is not how companies operate, for the most part. If a company wants to hire 1,000 people and 10,000 applicants are in the top 1%, they will move the bar up to hire the top 0.1% instead.
Given a normal distirbution of applicants, there is a huge difference in talent (10x?) between top 1% and top 0.1%. The bar always automatically adjusts higher; otherwise, a competitor will hire the fraction of the 0.1% that you've passed over. Now the competitor has a 1,000 workers, and you have 1,000 workers, but the competitors are 10x more talented for the same pay (most of the 0.1% didn't get an offer from you, so there's no bidding war for their talents).
Actually, if a company spends more money recruiting each equivalent female employee than male employee, they do effectively drop their total hiring bar if spending more money lets the company climb the bell curve, because it's effectively a reduction in spending efficency, but that effect is small, and skill parity is still achieved.
(How would you stack-rank John Resig against Rob Pike? The two of them against Zed Shaw? The three of them against Guido van Rossum? Note also that even if you can stack rank their accomplishments, that won't necessarily reflect in their day-to-day performance. Guido van Rossum wrote Python, but he also wrote a bunch of AppEngine code that isn't all that much beloved.)
If you have 1,000 slots, 10,000 candidates in your tier, and 1,000 of them are women, you can hire any ratio of women to men that you like and all will be equally talented. Great, right? It's great for those that are hired; not so much for everyone else.
Say you make the gender ratio 50%. You hire 500 women and 500 men from the top tier. Every first-class company like Google or Facebook adopts this strategy. This means that the odds of being hired at a first-class company is 50% for women in the top tier, and only 5% for men in the top tier. For every interview a woman does, a man must do ten. Eventually all the slots in all first-class companies are filled up, leaving some top-tier men working for second class companies--but no top tier women are working for second class companies.
Say you leave the gender ratio unspecified and instead decide based upon the interviewer's gut feeling. Then you'll bias the hiring process toward schmoozers with good social skills.
Or you decide based on which college the applicant went to. Then you bias it towards people who were willing to shell out for a prestigious piece of paper.
Or you decide based on whoever responds to your offer first. Then you bias it against people who have lives and better things to do with their time than refreshing their e-mail waiting for a callback.
Really, the only solution is to acknowledge that life's not fair, and people sometimes get things for completely arbitrary reasons. Which is really hard for a lot of people to do - it was hard for me - but you end up being a lot more successful when you don't think too hard about all the folks who get undeserved job offers and promotions and think more about how you can tilt the odds toward being one of the lucky ones instead.
“You only got that internship because you’re a woman.”
Note that this statement does not imply she is unqualified. She could be absolutely qualified (and probably is). However, in the ficticious tiering example above, the female applicant has 10x higher odds than a male applicant of getting a sought after job at a first-lass company, even though both are equally qualified. For this example, at least, the above statement is explainable (minus the "only" part, which is just mean) by the huge difference in probability between her and her friend. Her friend would have to apply to ten times more internships in order to land an equivalent gig.
That's not how the world is.
It's not necessarily true when you compare between organizations, where different groups may make subtly different decisions with wildly different outcomes (although even then, a lot of the difference comes from different circumstances and not innate talent of the people involved). But in an organization, the need for teamwork and to "row in a common direction" tends to flatten out individual differences, and there're generally two possible classes: "valued contributor" and "holding back the group".
(This is also why large organizations like Google tweak their hiring processes to avoid false positives more than false negatives. One bad hire forces the team down to his level, as they always have to stop and explain things to him, or he'll block them from implementing a cleverer solution that he wouldn't understand. One good hire, however, very rarely raises the level of the team - he needs a lot of patience and very good empathetic & people skills to do so.)
No, that is simply not true. There might be a cutoff over which everyone is "reasonably competent", and perform "acceptably", but there are still huge differences between people.
You immediately say "no" to people that don't reach the "acceptable" bar. But above that, you have hiring quotas, and you try to maximize the value of the people you hire. Hiring someone just above the bar now means you get one less hire later. Someone much better might show up, and often does. And on the other hand if the current candidate is much, much above the bar - you fight to get that person hired, you work on convincing your peers in the hiring process. Because they are worth it. Such people have a much higher chance to be hired.
I've been on both sides of the hiring process many times and worked for many years in tech. To say that above some skill level everyone is the same, "can do it as well as any other" - not in all of my experience.
(FWIW, I would pay much more attention to individual performance differences if I were hiring for my own startup than I would when interviewing for Google. But I thought the context of this discussion was organizations large enough for gender quotas to matter, i.e. the Microsofts and Googles of this world. If it were my own startup, I'd try to hire from the population I've personally worked with, avoiding this whole discussion anyway. And I have never worked in an organization with a hiring quota - the companies I've worked for will all take you if you meet the hiring bar, and hold cash in reserve so they can scoop up a suitably-qualified employee if one presents herself. For that matter, I've been given offers at several places that were "not hiring", so I'm guessing quotas are just guidelines in many other places as well.)
You must have worked only at places where the amount of acceptable candidates is greatly constrained. Either because the hiring bar was extremely high, or there simply were extremely few candidates out there with the right skills.
In practice I've seen quotas everywhere I've worked. At small startups, at the beginning you often have no money to pay salaries, so you give out equity, and you don't want to be diluted into nothing from day one. It's also crucial to find great talent for the very beginnings of your company and codebase.
For large companies, there are always quotas because otherwise they would grow until they quickly become unprofitable, and of course there is a limit to how fast you can integrate new people into an existing structure. Each division and team has a target size for the next year, and they hire up to that limit.
I have never been in a company, big or small, where we said "hire as many good people as you find! no matter how many! we'll take 'em all!"
I've previously worked at 2 startups, founded 1, and also interned at a large and a mid-size company. None of them had quotas. The two startups were very constrained in the number of acceptable candidates, but the internships had a fairly large pool of candidates to choose from, and would make a position for a suitably-qualified candidate if one did not exist.
If the hiring bar is very high, it can be set high enough so as to limit the number of people you hire. So you end up hiring only (ones you think are) the very best.
The fact remains that even in such a "quotaless" situation, if you saw 1,000 amazing people you would not hire them all for your 10 person startup. That would be lunacy. In fact you would stop interviewing after hiring a tiny fraction.
The point here is that, contrary to the discussion before, it isn't that there is a "near-infinite" amount of candidates of equal talent. All companies want to hire the best, and the right amount of them within some reasonable range.
So it isn't that you can pick a criterion like "we will hire only left-handed people" without that having an effect, since left-handedness is only about 10% of the population (of all coder skill levels). If you start looking at far fewer candidates, you will miss some of the very best that otherwise you would want to hire.
If you are a 10 person startup, there are likely thousands of people in silicon valley who could work for you, and hundreds of thousands who could work remotely. You're not going to hire them all - it would take too long, you would run out of money, and you would have your equity diluted into nothing.
edit: shorten and focus
Note that the former never was able to pass interviews, but it was only enough to get a foot in the door. It goes without saying that I have worked with many extremely capable women that no one would question they deserve everything they have, but it is easy and to see why some insecure college students have some backlash at having explicit discrimination against them (usually for the first time ever), since they are not being able to see how the less explicit but very real institional discrimination against women.
There's more to aptitude than GPA and "technical chops". A student who started from zero (as is common for girls in CS) and had a 2.5 GPA after four years would look much more appealing to me than a student who had been programming since they were 12 and had a 3.0 GPA. They're on a steeper trajectory.
And whether you to a "top tier" or a "mediocre" university I don't think says much about your aptitude. I know people who slacked off in world class courses, and I know people who Did The Work at a no-name university, and I know who I would hire.
Honestly all of that is irrelevant. What I was actually trying to get at was at the time I was minorly irked (probably just like the guy in this story) due to a perceived unfairness against me due to gender. I've since come to the conclusion that reverse discrimination really is as huge as it seemed then, but that companies are making such big efforts because there is an even larger but less visible bias against women that simply isn't obvious to college kids or even most industry professionals.
The friend's position is totally understandable given the totally different levels of visibility of the two directions of discrimination; that doesn't make him correct.
Let's think about your "female friend" who has lousy technical chops and a 2.5 gpa at a mediocre state university. Is every woman with a 2.5 GPA at a lousy state university getting an interview at all three companies? No? Hmm. I suspect there's something much more to her resume than what you're telling her. These companies are not all simultaneously saying, hey, let's go interview this one woman who happens to have a 2.5 gpa at a crappy school. You're just seeing it that way because you think reverse discrimination is an issue.
Fortunately, this has been studied. And guess what? Equally qualified women have a harder time having their resume selected for technical positions. A similar study was done for black people vs. white people (or, technically, black-sounding names vs. white-sounding names).
It turns out that the conscious thought people have of wanting to hire more women is secondary to their more subconscious bias.
You seem to be attaching an argument to my statement that I did not intend to convey; I don't think that reverse discrimination is an issue. I think it is extremely visible, and gives you really lousy visible situations like the ones I mentioned that are obvious errors, that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.
You can take just about any conceivable trend and anecdotally "confirm" its existence based on a small enough sample size or the right anecdote. That doesn't mean it is statistically relevant.
edit: Also, there are statistics of overall populations and statistics of subpopulations. Sometimes the smaller sample sizes (the subpopulations) are more relevant.
I was just pointing out that the two anecdotes you presented are merely that. Anecdotes. I see a lot of people on HN making statements like "that claim makes sense to me because [anecdote]," without regard for how representative the sample size is. This is called cherry-picking and is a great way to (unintentionally) reinforce a flawed world view.
It might be true that reverse discrimination in CS is commonly practiced, but your initial statement did nothing in the way of proving or disproving it.
On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me.
My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows more about electricity than most electrical engineers. I tried to convince him to join the IEEE; with his experience and knowledge they'd probably bump him up to Senior Member grade quick smart.
Nope. Not good enough.
This can actually be quite crippling -- he used to give away his services rather than charging for them. "Too simple a job, I couldn't possibly charge for it". He was not a successful small businessman, thinking like that.
It takes most of my willpower to ask people for money. Because surely, I'm not that good. Surely.
Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to man -- radio, microwave, telephone, fibre optic -- and throughout South East Asia and Russia.
So which position did he apply for?
The junior communications officer.
One of the things about my father that I most admire is his inviolable integrity. He felt that he couldn't morally charge for a lot of what he did and no force on earth, even my mother, could change his decision.
He was wrong, in my opinion. But that's how it was.
I read something recently that suggested using language like "You really earnt that [whatever]" when complimenting people. That is, you define the merit in terms of the person's effort which, hopefully, the recipient of the compliment is less able to deny. We often deserve nice things, but when we think we earnt them it's a more concrete achievement that's harder to wave away with impostor syndrome.
> The point is to praise children's efforts, not their intelligence, she said.
Long story short, I'm used to being dismissed or looked over by my male peers - often in CS, but also in the hobbies I've taken up over the years. I found the only way to be listened to or respected was that I had to prove myself very quickly to anyone I had to work with. I got my interview after talking to a Microsoft dev doing recruitment for 10 minutes about a project I worked on after identifying he had a personal interest in that field. He didn't even look at my resume, but I saw him star it when I gave it at the end of our chat.
I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't used to being over-looked. I can signal that I'm competent and easily discuss projects or tech interests within a couple minutes of meeting someone because in the past few years, I've learned that when I neglect to do that, I'm going to get ignored. Because of that, I have an incredibly advantage in that many of my male peers CAN'T do that, simply because they've never had to until it came time to search for a job.
FWIW, one of the biggest reasons I'm returning to Microsoft is that it's one of the few places I've ever felt like I was respected off the bat regardless of age or gender. I couldn't imagine working with most of my peers back in school because of the lack of respect. There are bad apples everywhere, and certain teams are definitely geared towards older folk - but there are highschool kids doing internships there, in some very coveted areas. The guy was out of line, but he's definitely the exception and not the norm.
But, I also think it's important not to fall prey to what I think is the opposite problem: the narrative fallacy. It's easy to feel that you were "fated" for many positions. Or, if not some form of predestination, then some notion that things were "bound" to happen. I know that there was an enormous amount of luck in how I ended up where I am today. While your abilities may have enabled you to be in an elite pool of candidates, there may still be some random chance that landed you the position instead of one of your fellow elite candidates. I can think of three instances that afforded me opportunities that have made enormous impact on my career that were essentially luck.
What you can control is that when you are lucky, make sure you make the most of it. When fellow grad students would ask me for advice on finding jobs, the best I could do was reply, "Be lucky and be good."
I'm not sure that's true in the long run, but in some very important situations it certainly can be.
So don't feel guilty about how or why you got an opportunity. You came by it honestly, and whether Microsoft feels their benefit from you is due to your ability or your gender, the fact is you are benefiting them or they wouldn't give you the opportunity. Enjoy it and use the chance to improve yourself as much as possible.
Particularly, as a grown-up with a family, I appreciate the salutory effect that women have on subduing frat-house atmospheres. You probably find fewer women who think of themselves as rockstar ninja pirate hackers, but I'm pretty sure that's not a bad or uneconomic thing.
> “Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern.
Yes - but what if you had been in one of those programs? That is the problem with explicitly preferring some group over another, not based on their skill level, when the people you select want to only be selected for their skill and nothing else.
I'm not saying that sexism in the industry isn't a problem, but the solution is more difficult than "just hire more women"
This is true, but one of the biggest steps you can take toward fixing the various forms of explicit and implicit sexism in the industry is to hire more women. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary. Moreover, the existence of such programs can be beneficial in the short term, as well. They really only skew significantly problematic if they are willing to compromise on standards in order to meet the goal of hiring more from underrepresented groups but we have no reason to think they are.
That is, think of it another way: the programs exist to provide more opportunities than would otherwise exist but getting in doesn't imply you only got in because you were of a given demographic. You're still being selected for your skill above all else.