How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year

If I ask questions at difficulty levels 1-7, and you flunk 7, I know you are a 6. If I stop at 4, all I know is that you are >=4.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that asking harder and harder questions must mean I am trying to deflate your ego. I am trying to hire people who are smarter than me, and know more than me, and can bring something I am lacking to the team. I need to ask harder and harder questions to find those people.

Say that you have two types of widgets, widget A and widget B. Both have tolerances that fall along the same normal distribution but with different means. The mean for widget A is off by 0.1mm, and the mean for widget B is off by 0.2 mm.

Now, say that you measure each widget before accepting it, using a perfect measuring function. In this case, it doesn't matter whether you use widget A or widget B.

However, in the real world, you have an imperfect measuring function. Say that it gives you an answer along a normal distribution with some standard deviation.

Does this make the case for widget A or widget B different? Yes, you'll have more widgets fall within tolerances if you only use widget A.

To further improve the model, you would want to know the rejection cost of using an incorrectly sized widget and the supply-demand costs involved in only using widgets of type A. The results of the optimization problem would tell you how much of widget A versus widget B to use.

Gloria Steinem always argued that gender equality would only be achieved when society believed women could do what men could do, and men could do what women could. The latter half of that statement offers zero political advantages for the women's studies faculty members which make up the cornerstone of the gender equality movement of this country, and therefore Gloria's full vision is ignored.

Girls have lower scores on math than boys. Explanation: There is something wrong wtih the way math is being taught.

Boys have lower scores on writing than girls. Explanation: Boys are naturally biologically inferior when it comes to processing language.

Boys have lower grades overall than girls. Explanation: Boys aren't as well behaved or attentive as girls.

If the situation were reversed, there would be conversations about how to redesign the school day to erase the overall grade gap between female and male students. But because the group in question isn't a classically oppressed category, the cause of failure is immediately considered to be an internal factor.

See my point? Within some of the social sciences, there is a very potent politically motivated push to search for only external, rather than internal, causes for issues within any group which is considered socially disadvantaged. Nobody has any doubt that Saudi Arabia's Wahabi influenced culture has major internal influences on undermining their economy, but if the same analysis is conducted on any disadvantaged cultural groups within a Western nation, the group conducting said analysis is shamed as being bigoted.

I read somewhere (I'm pretty sure it was the WSJ) that Woman doing the same job with the same experience level are paid, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts. This is while militant feminists are still screaming about the average or median wage gap of around 20% without taking into considering that woman don't typically do the same jobs as men nor work as many years.

If you really want an effort to balance the demographic, do it at school level. Open a few female only CS schools / degrees, let them have it and lets see if they really compete with men both in numbers and in skill. It may be they just need a better environment to learn, but I also wouldn't be surprised if in general woman simply aren't interested in the subject for the same reasons boys play with cars and girls play with dolls.

In reality woman often have better life choices than men. Many of them have life plans which consist of landing a man and choosing not to work. Others can choose to work in a male dominated field and will likely get preferential treatment with regards to education, recruitment and renumeration. There is no such efforts to even out historically woman centric jobs that I know of, so they likely win there too. That however doesn't mean there aren't problems with sexism in sausage factories and that it should be allowed but I know if I was running a company, my ethos on hiring would be to get the best person I can for the role and the rest of it hopefully wouldn't factor in.

I think most people have this figured out though and most people are reasonable enough not to listen to the nut cases on either side. For those who do, I'd rather not work with them anyway.

Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination.

Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination.

This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'

ETA: Just saw jbattle's post - guess that's not what he meant! Sorry to have spoken for you :)

Second, people here talk about that too. In an article that you should have read just recently: "hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities. Consider Harvard’s graduating computer science class: forty-one percent of the students are women, and an inability to hire talented females will start to significantly impact your ability to recruit altogether."

Then you're just not reading those news sources. Here's one from yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2013/feb/05/rac...

"The NHS thrives on equality and diversity. In some specialties, such as general practice, we know that almost a third of the emerging workforce are overseas-qualified. Without these immigrant workers the NHS would come to a standstill.

Despite this, many international medical graduates (IMGs) who have been the workhorses of the NHS, are over-represented in the lowest paid, least glamorous specialties in the least popular parts of the country. Some of them have faced racism, less recognition for awards and slow promotion in their working life."

I'd see it like this: 20 years ago, being a geek was Not Cool. Being a female geek was Very Not Cool, and it's still not something that society feels able to celebrate in the way that, say, being a female lawyer or doctor or CEO is regarded as good.

20 years ago, the average man would have been given shit by people for being a software developer, and some of these stereotypes still linger. Now things are different. Software developers are now highly paid, influential and respected. We've removed a lot of the stigma from being geeks, and this is a good thing, but the program is not complete yet. Being a proud, successful geek is still hard for women, in a similar way to how it used to be for men.

What people are trying to do here is not harm the interests of men in favour of the interests of women, but advance the interest of geeks against those who think that being a geek is something bad, and that being a female geek is unacceptable according to their idea of what women should be like.

As far as the profession is concerned, there are probably a lot of women with the potential to become good programmers and it would be a shame to exclude them. So there is an argument from both sides. What changed is the status part of the question.