How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
fastcolabs.com
fastcolabs.com
At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been arbitraged away, but it took decades to get to this point.
At the time, people gave many reasons sexism couldn't possibly exist in finance; naturally, more men went into finance because women just didn't like finance, and more men had senior positions because simply didn't want senior positions, and so on and so forth (oddly enough, those same reasons are given today, in discussions of sexism in CS and engineering).
In 1987, Townsend-Greenspan shut down, after thirty successful years, because Greenspan became chairman of the Fed. Now, twenty-six years later, the gender gap among MBAs is much smaller than it used to be, but it hasn't disappeared. I hope it doesn't take fifty-six years from the founding of Etsy for someone to be able to make a comment like this about programmers.
I'm afraid it might be a while, though. In discussions about the topic here on HN, the top comment is often something along the lines of how there obviously isn't any sexism in the field, or if there is any, it's rare, and certainly not a systematic problem, and how it's simply impossible that the highly skewed male:female ratio in the field is due to sexism. That's usually followed by a paragraph on how any attempts to address the issue are an insidious cause of reverse sexism.
The top comment in the previous thread on this topic was a comment about how everything Etsy is doing applies equally to all people, not just women, despite a large body of research indicating that, on average, women are treated differently in the workplace [1], and how some simple changes can neutralize many serious problems [2].
[1] Perhaps someone else can supply a reference to a well-known study that I can't seem to look up. When men react with anger, or act authoritatively, that's seen neutrally or positively, but when women do the same, it's seen negatively.
In Silicon Valley today it's not possible to hire more women simply by recruiting them. Good engineers today have their pick of jobs, and good female engineers are being stalked like the last antelope on the African veldt.
Etsy's solution doesn't seem to be to stop sexism, Etsy's solution appears to be train more engineers, take a risk on junior women engineers out of Hacker School, and let their risk taking and boots on the ground approach serve as a signal to senior women engineers.
None of this is evidence of sexism in CS and engineering, it was a winning strategy to defeat scarcity.
I also would like an update on the results in 5 years.
Your other question doesn't make sense since it's factually incorrect (hackers school was free before) and puts weight on only one factor. The incentive Etsy made for women to join hacker school was of course offsetting some other factors. I'm saying that sexism or something devolved from sexism is one of those other factors.
Hacker school amended their policy with "no subtle sexism", the CTO of Etsy said that it was harder to hire great women because they tend to have a history of bad experience and one of the attendees, which was later hired by Etsy, specifically pointed out sexism as a problem within the tech community.
This of course also make me think that sexism or, like I said, something devolved from sexism actually is a factor for women. It was at least definitely part of the experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4LExVkv4Pw http://firstround.com/article/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-... http://marthakelly.github.com/blog/2013/03/10/an-open-letter...
In any case that doesn't matter since what you actually said that sexism wasn't one of the factors and I've shown that is was. We haven't even begun talking about how large a factor it was since you haven't been providing any real perspective on the matter. At this point I seriously doubt your ability to provide any value in this conversation and are therefor going to stop participating in it.
But it is important to note there are plenty of industries today with high female representation, such as law and medicine, that in the recent past were bastions of male dominance. A female relative of mine went through law school in the 1950s and can tell tales of male chauvinism more extreme than you'd find anywhere today in tech or finance. But somehow, women went to law school more and more, and today represent ~50% of law classes. Something must be different about these fields, but I'm not sure what.
Software engineering doesn't have that (yet?)
All my friends, even those with a similar (or more advanced) aptitude and interest in computers, chose different paths. Chemistry. Theoretical Physics. History. Politics. Economics.
Nobody wanted to be doing computing professionally. Men were/are afforded to be outcasts or underdogs, socially; there's some romanticism to it. I'm not sure the same has applied for women, but maybe that's changing.
Sure, there are religious, geographical, and socio-economic holdouts, but I think that this is one of the three big factors.
The second is that men tend to drop out to get jobs. If you can make $150k out of school with a BS EECS, why go to law or med school? Again, using my wife and her circle of female attorneys as examples, women seem to be more interested in personal satisfaction and are willing to pay a price for it, whether it's working in a rough environment (Kabul, Kosovo, Department of Homeland Security) or postponing that satisfaction by spending more time in school.
The third is that med and law school are great careers with a lot of opportunities for women who want to have children. Sure, there's partner track that will not necessarily be an option, but again, they don't always have the same "must be alpha" drive that men do. They can take a year off, maybe start back in a step behind, maybe work part time, but know that they can do the job they like, with variety in cases, until they decide to retire.
Of course, there are a bunch of contributory factors that I didn't cover and don't know how universal they are, but on the "sexist" side, it's still more acceptable for a woman to take time off and be supported by her husband than the other way around. You have exceptions, like ESR, so I don't think it's as influential.
Finally, they still put up with a lot of sexism, but they know it's wrong and that it is not a reflection on them, but on the morons trying to put them down. Not that it doesn't hurt, but sometimes hurt is a good motivator to succeed in spite of others.
[1] For want of a better word. [2] Just as I am better at feats of strength than my wife, who works out 1-2x/daily, but she is better at doing the type of research necessary to be one of the best litigators most attorneys have seen.
Edit: probably more telling is that both law and medicine are heavily involved in a sense of social responsibility, something that women are traditionally socialised for. Engineering not so much.
And if you SE is hard try being a woman in Civil engineering - a place I worked at (an Arab Civil engineers) had to arrange a swap with an Italian Consulting engineers. All our work was in the middle east so she was unable to get the required boots on the ground experience on our projects to progress to chartered status.
I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles.
Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circles as engineer-centric and something of a dude-fest
So the fact that eighty percent of Etsy users were women despite having an all-male engineering team apparently means that you have to hire more women engineers to attract female users? Again I'd love to see evidence that once a core of female engineers were hired significant changes where made to the site that could only have come from a "woman's intuition" (natch). It seems to me that having a female dominated user base in spite of an all male engineering team disproves the assertion that you need hire women to achieve "cognitive diversity".
It's fine and good that companies want to hire more female engineers. But this article is lame, which you should have picked up on when the author used the word "rockstar"
Which is, again, not sexist or racist at all. *-ism implies institutional bias of a society, not an individual instance of discrimination.
It is _discriminatory_ against men, for sure. But not 'sexist.'
Sexism/racism et al. can exist outside of institutions no? "Hate crimes" for instance clearly do not involve any recognizable institutions yet clearly involve an -ism of some kind. Nor do -isms only exist at the society level. For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal biases.
Only in the sense that they 'reproduce' the broader -ism. The individual act is one of discrimination, the sum of all acts collectively is an *-ism.
> For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal biases.
Studies and discussion on this topic are scoped specifically at the societal level for a reason.
In that case, I find developers and product managers (including myself) are sometimes way too bias to give valuable feedback to product decisions. On the other hand, the big advantage I could see would be if the developers are constantly having conversations with their friends about the usability and design of the site. In this case, I could see an advantage.
You are absolutely right that essentialism is not generally accepted any more, but you're mistaking essentialism a bit. Essentialism is not 'women do things differently than men,' essentialism is 'Women are x.'
As an example, certain feminists don't believe that trans women are women, because they are not born with sexual organs that are the essence of 'woman.'
In contrast, population thinking would assert some number of a portion of a population has some trait, but it's not required, or 'essential.' Saying that 'many women have vaginas' is not an essentialist statement, it's a population-ist one.
Therefore, "many women approach problems differently than many men" is not essentialst. "All women _must_ approach problems differently than men" is essentialist.
For example, in the previous sentence, I said 'people' and not 'most people.' Especially in the social sciences, people assume you're discussing populations, and words like 'most' impede clarity more than aid it.
That said, I don't know the author, and they may be a gender essentialist; they do still exist.
I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and
women approach engineering problems differently
(i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence
of this?
That's not incompatible with rejecting the belief that one gender/race/whatever is "better" at something.
It's not really a question of believing one gender/etc... is better at something here it seems to be a question of not believing it as the author seems to think "cognitive diversity" can be achieved simply by adding women to your dev team.
Etsy needed women because their customers were women. They needed engineers that would help them understand or uncover the point of views of their customers. At the end of the day you are serving people, not machines, and it makes more sense to optimize for the needs of customer, instead of assuming every programmer with git experience make a good engineer for Etsy.
I would think it's controversial when applied to
engineering. This implies that the basic tools of
software development are somehow viewed/used
differently by people of various genders/ethnicities/etc
I understand software engineering to encompass much more than just using "the basic tools of software development." Within that scope, you're definitely right: I don't think one gender can use Eclipse (or vim, or whatever) better.
I'm thinking of a broader definition of software engineering that involves understanding problems and choosing from many viable solutions, each with their own trade-offs in terms of implementation difficulty and end-user experience. There are a lot of people who feel that process, and our industry as a whole, would benefit from having a greater variety of perspectives.
the author seems to think "cognitive diversity" can be achieved
simply by adding women to your dev team.
Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math and engineering disciplines, perhaps we should be talking to the ones who are already there? It seems to me that if we've really had to jump over extra hurdles and deal with lower wages, there has to be something very compelling that keeps us here.
We think these answers are obvious. Maybe they aren't?
ETA: I interviewed with Etsy in 2010 or 2011. It seemed as if I did very well, but it wasn't a career move that warranted relocating the home to Brooklyn. At the time, I thought they were just excited by me, as a professional. I'm feeling a bit sad that it might have just been a "hire more women" drive instead. Bleh.
I have no personal examples of being paid less, because I've more or less felt I was being paid enough to make it not worth asking anyone else what they were being paid. From what I understand, that is a big no-no. The examples I have of women being paid less are from other women in tech, a couple of these for which there is direct proof.
The question was, "I can hear your kids in the background. Are you sure you're okay with working 40 hours a week?" From a female recruiter for a previous employer when I specifically inquired about FTE. Her boss (also female) certainly didn't think it was fair to ask.
It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given job is based on competence is substituted with one of diversity. Ie that in any group of size n, the personal qualities (gender,race,sexual orientation) of N+1 person joining the group is just as (or more important) that his/her core qualifications.
For example - why does company have to have engineers that mimic its customer base? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to have people whose job it is to figure out what customers want and then tell engineers to code it up?
Now - I am not saying that diversity is bad, rather that it's presented as a given, with no numerical justification.
I'd actually posit that in majority of cases (ie all enterprise software), programmers actually have much less of clue as to what they are working on than in the case of consumer site like this.
When programmers lack domain knowledge, they're likely to make bad assumptions that will hurt them later. Of course you have to know intended use when you're writing software, it can help you design it properly. A very simple hypothetical: Designing a database to efficiently receive some data set. What if Etsy's users aren't interested in that data? And they care more about something else, which would merit designing it differently? Maybe having a female voice to bring that up would be helpful. Obviously, it's purely conjecture, but I think it's a reasonable scenario.
Presumably because it panders to female sexism and they're targeting their product at females?
Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).
The reverse of this situation would be a company that sells largely to men but is comprised of 3 male engineers and 47 female engineers making an effort to recruit or train new male engineers, while women continue to make up 70% of their new engineering hires.
If you have to specifically hire female people, it says their quality is lower (otherwise you would just always hire the best person female or male), which is not something I am sure I can support. Women are just as capable of being the best. It seems like an insult to give anyone special treatment just because of gender. Isn't that what we are trying to stop?
It seems simply that Etsy is trying to fill a female niche and add female perspective. It's not like they're hiring random ladies off the street, their hires have gone to hacker school and are clearly capable given the opportunity. Software isn't written is silos where you don't talk to other people about what/how/why you are going what you're doing.
If you can justify hiring for "female perspective", what about the companies who only want "male perspective"?
Etsy is obviously not starting to hire only women or even mostly women.
I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the near term.
I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female product boo-boos, like the time Microsoft offered "bitch" as the equivalent to "male" in a Windows XP Spanish localization.
[1] The DRAE, considered the "dictionary of record" in Spain, says that female animal is definition 1, and female human is definition 2. http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=hembra
The same goes with the male equivalent: "macho", which now is only used for animals and not people. (Macho can be also used in a similar way as in english, but that's a different acception and context usage)
> Doesn't this seem a little sexist?
If we were using startup lingo, we'd be saying that Etsy is disrupting the traditional labor market by finding a supply of software engineers where one didn't (or didn't seem to) exist before. We wouldn't assume that the labor supply remained exactly the same size, and that every software engineer position staffed by a woman meant one less software engineer position staffed by a man.
Training up female engineers is also positive as the main complaint about 'diversity in tech' is putting less competent female engineers before more competent male engineers to meet ratio targets. (I'm not saying that females are less competent, but female engineers are harder to find.) By training up female engineers first before giving them the jobs, they are hopefully making sure that their female engineers are just as competent as their male engineers.
Basically it's a win all around, and is much better than just hiring any female engineer regardless of skill to make quota.
"Less headhunters, more hacker school" - Good call, good call.
The problem for employers is that trainees and interns are a risk; you need to screen them beforehand, and then you take a gamble about whether they'll get up to the required skill level in six months or a year to be up to par to the rest of the company's team.
I heard about a major consultancy company's success in attracting interns as potential future engineers (Ordina iirc), they said the success rate was about 1 in 20. Which, for smaller companies (<100 people) is simply not enough.
The article itself states they hired eight people from Hacker School, which is daring and commendable. I'm curious as to how those people will develop themselves in the coming year.
The fact that there were 600 valid applications (the women applying had code examples to show), basically busts the "programmer shortage" myth.
There are a whole lot of people who can program computers, and who could, with some investment, become valuable assets.
Does the little gain of prestige make up for the huge potential loss of opportunity?
And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour?
On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men, I'd say you may have doubled the chances of having a harasser on your staff.
I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up.
In a very simple model, going from 0 women to 1 woman should increase the number of harassment suits, right? Then going from 1 woman to 2 women should have a similar effect, because all naturally occurring functions are differentiable :-) Intuitively it seems to me that the amount of reported harassment should be proportional to how many opportunities for harassment exist, or (under a different theory) how many opportunities for false claims exist, which is the same number by another name.
So it's a little strange to hear you say that anyone who disagrees with you must believe in nasty things like "harassment is made up by women". Do you know how hard it is to figure out causality from observational data? For any possible trend you could find in the data, like "reported harassment scales as the number of women times the square root of the number of men", one could probably make up a just-so story that blames men, and a different just-so story that blames women.
I wasn't born yesterday. If someone makes a claim without a shred of evidence, it's perfectly legitimate to say, "Well, here's another alternate explanation that's just as unproven, so clearly yours has nothing special going for it." I gave you a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you're telling me that intuitively, God has a long white beard, not a saucer.
I'm perfectly ok with your saying that you choose to believe something without a shred of evidence, to take it as faith.
But that won't change the fact that simply making shit up, asking if it's "wrong," and then saying that you'll stick to it unless someone else proves your unsubstantiated prejudices are mistaken is bunkum.
That thinking isn't thinking.
It really does not help discussions like this to simply assume and accuse those you disagree with are prejudiced and unthinking.
Again, without even the barest attempt to go out and gather some empirical data. That kind of talk belongs amongst consultants pedalling methodology snake-oil. And yes I am being dismissive of your so-called arguments.
Around here we regularly make fun of the "social sciences" for their lack of rigor. Except, it appears, when we want to throw our prejudices around. Shame on you all for treating Hacker News like it's Reddit.
I made three assumptions. One was social distance (a harasser will harass only one of the K < N people he has met). The other was your assumption that a harasser always harasses. The third was your assumption that all harassment allegations are true.
I assume that the social distance assumption is the one you believe to be prejudiced?
I'm also curious why you believe your post is any different. You also posited a mathematical model (exactly like mine, except without the social distance), and hinted that those you disagree with must be sexist. Is it merely the existence of an ad-hominem attack that makes your post more valid?
Your statement essentially assumes linearity, when such certainly isn't the case. Look at other industries, harassment lawsuits do not rise in tandem with number of women. This is obvious, one can grow the number of women in an industry far more quickly than harassers. Since these harassers cannot well parallelize their activity, the strongest explanatory variable will be the number of potential harassers. Raganwald's point. We are taking it as a given that most men will not provoke things till disciplinary actions are required and most women are not lying about them.
Your post is also highly simplifying - assumes trivial reducibility, homogeneity and ignores the effect of interactions to create emergent modalities. Observe that Not all women will escalate to lawsuits or even disciplinary action first. Lawsuits are a sign of an endemic problem, lack of support - symptom of horrible rot. With more women the support structures would be such that these problems could be nipped in the bud early. Indeed it's very possible that beyond a certain threshold, the number of women in an organization shifts company culture.
These two points show why it is not a simple matter of 500% more lawsuits.
Reported cases of harassment are up, because of:
1. it is no longer socially acceptable to harass? 2. we have removed barriers to reporting harassment?
Maybe there are more women in the workforce because we made it safer for them to work and we removed their dependence on a husband for sustenance.
Let's do a little thinking about this. I feel like I'm listening to a conservative call-in show.
He might not harass all women. He might only harass women in his general vicinity, either a social, work related or geographic.
Lets consider only correct accusations, and further suppose a given individual only interacts with K coworkers (for K < N, with N the company size). Harassment will occur if one of the K coworkers a given harasser H interacts with is a woman (assuming he always harasses). The probability of that not occurring is (1-P(coworker is woman))^K. The number of harassers is beta x (1-P(coworker is woman)) x N, with beta the probability of an individual man being a harasser. So the probability of a no correct harassment accusations is (1-P(woman))^(K x beta x (1-P(woman)) x N).
Provided P(coworker is woman) is small (as is the case in most tech companies), this number decreases as P(woman) increases. I.e., more women raises the probability of a harassment lawsuit.
And this is all in a model which assumes women never ever make this stuff up.
There's nothing wrong with that kind of talk, provided it is followed by, "And here's how we would go out and discover what the actual truth is." That is Science. Stopping with "might" is fine, provided you don't call it anything other than speculation.
I'm not calling what I said anything other than speculation. I put it there to show that if you're going to make stuff up, you can arrive at any conclusion you like. So I needn't defend my suggestion. I agree it is indefensible, just as the one you're supporting is indefensible.
It all comes down to either saying "I don't know and that's fine with me because I have faith," or "I don't know, and I'm going to find out what is actually true."
Take your pick, but start with "I don't know."
I guess it all comes down to whether you walk around thinking that women cause sexual harassment lawsuits or men cause sexual harassment lawsuits. I think it's the men doing the harassing, but whoo-boy are there a lot of apologists out there who believe that women are making this stuff up.
I took a model very similar to yours, in which women never make stuff up. The only factor I added was a (in my opinion quite reasonable) assumption that you can't harass the people in the company you've never met.
I.e., I showed one can disagree with you even while believing that women never ever make stuff up.
If you want to call all beliefs based on mathematical models rather than some frequentist statistical estimate "faith", fine. I don't agree that mathematical models are useless, I think they can give us excellent guesses about the world and we should use them until we have something better (particularly when a variety of different models give similar conclusions). But I suppose we just have radically different views on epistemiology.
But in that case, why are you claiming that kudzu_bob's claim is "probably incorrect"? How could you possibly know this? Absent some frequentist study proving this is the case, why would you believe that "it's men doing the harassing"?
How about this for a crazy idea: Let's build a culture where men don't think it's ok to sexually harass women, at work or anywhere else!
(Oh, and you're using a straw man argument to do it.)
And it is definitely possible to change our culture so that sexual harassment is not ok.