Hacker News Reader

Comment by cantastoria | Hacker News Reader

Fogcreek and Google's interview process both seem to yield a far larger number of male employees than females yes?

David, Dylan and Jamie are all men yes?

If any piece of evidence from the above points to an organization that values quotas over excellence in interns and the work expected of them, well please raise the alarm.

No one is accusing you of using quotas and no is saying you do not value excellence in interns. What's being asked is why was there such a steep increase in the number of female interns accepted? Were there more female applicants? Were interview questions changed? How did this result come about?

View on HN

One thing Fog Creek did was we hunted harder for qualified women applicants, which meant we actually had to go to female tech recruiting events.

The problem is that there are few female developers to start with, and they are all heavily recruited by large software companies (Google, Microsoft, etc) already. The larger companies have big budgets to devote to this and encourage the very small number of women developers to go work there.

If you just sit back and wait for more women to apply, they are going to get picked up by the bigger companies before you even get a chance to interview them.

It's also difficult to attract that small group of women devs to apply to work at your company when there are no women developers there currently. The larger companies already have a bunch of women developers, so it can suggest to future candidates that these companies are great places for them to work (i.e. they won't be discriminated against at these companies). It may be that your small company is also a great place, it's just that you don't have any women to vouch for that.

So in Fog Creek's case, we increased the number of women applicants by making it our goal to get more women to apply. That's the only thing we changed. Our interview process stayed exactly the same.

And that's fine but did you get a 2 to 1 f/m ratio after you increased your female recruitment? That's what I'm trying to get to the bottom of.

Why does an investigation need to be launched?

Having worked with Kamens, including interviewing the same candidates, I can't even entertain the idea that the interviews were rigged in some way, which is you abhorrent implication.

We see 2:1 male to female ratios all the time, and no one bats an eye. But when it gets flipped we need to figure out why?

Regardless of how it came to be, this is a win for our industry, as it sets an example that the numbers don't need to be so heavily skewed towards men.

We see 2:1 male to female ratios all the time, and no one bats an eye. But when it gets flipped we need to figure out why?

Simple probability. A 2:1 male environment is completely reasonable in a gender neutral process, whereas a 2:1 female environment is exceedingly unlikely to occur under such a process.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5233153

And what I'm asking you is: can you come up with any possible explanations for an increase in women devs over time that should be celebrated, especially at an organization that values equal education for everyone, without first wondering if our interview questions have changed?

Can you come up with any possible explanation period? You're dodging my question.

Why is an explanation required? Any developer worth his or her salt knows that, statistically, something like this is bound to happen over enough companies and enough years, even if the trend is so heavily skewed the other way.

Is this a 3 sigma deviation? Maybe. Or could it be that, on average, women might be drawn to educational software more than other types? Doesn't sound unreasonable.

Regardless, your insistence on an explanation shows that you're still stuck in the bad old days.

An increase in women in tech majors and a company mission that strongly appeals to both women and men.

I'm pretty sure most universities have a company mission that appeals to both men and women and they haven't suddenly seen a 2:1 f/m ratio in CS majors. What makes Khan so different?

He might have a point in that a lot of women seem to aspire to be teachers. For example when I got my maths degree, 99% (estimated) of the women sitting in the lectures with me were studying to become teachers. Perhaps working for Khan Academy somehow seems close enough to teaching.

What % of the applicant pool was women?

Some hard numbers would help this discussion.

I don't think you have to feel attacked, isn't it natural to ask what is going on if you produce an outlier? It could be genuine curiosity.

In the same vein it is interesting to ask why most companies receive more male applications. Without asking these questions, how can there ever be an improvement (except for random luck)?

As a hiring manager for over a decade, I can't recall the last time I received a resume from a qualified female applicant for a full-time software position.

Internships tend to be a bit less one-sided, but the skew is still quite high.

This sucks. I want to receive those resumes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I don't ever receive them.

Given that, I can't help but wonder whether:

1) You have a completely different applicant pool

2) You somehow changed your application process in a way that resulted in a 2:1 female:male ratio.

I don't think those are terrible questions to have. The answers could be enlightening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com