Dropbox’s hiring practices explain its disappointing lack of female employees | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox’s hiring practices explain its disappointing lack of female employees

washingtonpost.com

19 pointsraganwald13 comments

    "Subtle cues in the physical environment of companies such 
    as Star Trek posters and video games lead to women being 
    less interested in being a part of an organization when 
    compared to a neutral office environment."

It also self selects for women who dig video games and Star Trek. Liking those things are geek things, not guy things and contrary to popular belief, women that like those things do exist. Furthermore, I'm certain that if you ask any male geek about the gender disparity in geek culture, I'm certain that near 100% of them lament about the lack of female geeks.

Women who show up in such an environment that don't relate with the culture aren't not relating because of their gender but because of their interests.

At some point in the founding of those companies the people there decided that they want their work environment to be as pleasant and fun as their home environment, after all you are spending 40-60 hours of your week there. That's a lot of your life. If that culture isn't your idea of fun, then you chose the wrong company to work for and should go work somewhere that does share your attitudes and beliefs or some soulless place that doesn't encourage employees to express themselves at work for fear of alienating anyone.

Dropbox is a desirable place to work at because of and not despite this culture. It's also desirable because there are a lot of smart people that are going to be successful in their careers. It's natural that many people, that despite their personal disinterest in the former (culture), might want to work at Dropbox because of the latter reason (success). Unfortunately, you don't get to pick and choose what parts of a company to accept. It was doing its thing before you arrive and no one has a right to establish their career at Dropbox without accepting most of the culture. Once there, you're welcome to try to change it, but doing so comes at the risk of being ejected from that culture because those working their may not like the changes you introduce.

Seriously, what give employee number 150 the right to reject and neutralize parts of the company culture that attracted the first 149 employees to work there in the first place? Don't like that? Boo-fucking-hoo. Start your own company or show up at a company early enough to influence the culture to be more to your liking.

I'm going to guess that those employees that left, complaining about the culture were not among the first 20 employees. If you're not among the first 10-40 employees at a large successful venture, you have no right to complain about culture because culture is always set by those that came before you. Don't like it? Then show up earlier.

Your entire comment seems to be based on the premise that either companies have a strong insider/outsider culture or they are soulless places to work. When in reality, there are many, many companies that have strong company cultures without somehow alienating a large number of otherwise qualified prospective employees.

Speaking as a person with a fair chunk of experience managing software development, I find it difficult to believe that management's only choices are frat-boy culture or soul-sucking bland corporation.

I'll speak very frankly. When a company has a half dozen or a dozen employees, when a company is scrambling for traction, it can be a great motivator to have a strong insider culture. Steve Jobs hung a pirate flag up at the Macintosh offices for a reason.

But companies grow, and part of growing is, well, growing. You need to select from a larger pool of prospective employees. You need to bring in some new DNA instead of doubling up on the DNA you already have.

I can't speak to this specific company, but as a general principle, successful companies become less exclusive and possible--I am not speaking about Dropbox--less discriminatory as they grow.

If you want an example, look at Apple. It's hyper-successful, and famous for how hard they work at inclusiveness and tolerance.

You're reading my post as a false dichotomy, however that was not my intent.

The culture of companies can and do change over time and will in response to wanting to be more inclusive if that is how it needs to change in order to be more competitive. Every single employee that joins a company, joins it knowing what it is and leaves their imprint on the company's culture as they spend more time there and become part of the group. No company's culture is static.

What I was getting at is that you shouldn't complain about the culture you willingly joined. Don't like everything you see, gain acceptance and be the change you want to see in the company. If you do things right, the company culture will become a little bit more inclusive without becoming soulless.

Complaining is what leads to soulless places to work at where everyone is quietly in fear of offending anyone else.

Of course, correlation does not equal causation. If there is something about their "culture" that is off-putting to women, you can't "fix" it by changing the hiring practices. You fix the culture and the hiring practices follow suit organically.

I suspect that the title is wrong, and that the thesis of the article is that there is something strongly biased about Dropbox's culture and the experiences recounted about interviewing there are one symptom of many.

I'm speaking to what I read in the article, of course. I'm not a woman and I don't work at Dropbox.

I was busy writing a comment while you cranked this out, so I'll just reply underneath yours since we more or less agree.

The premise of the article is a valid one but the arguments underneath are incredibly weak.

Perhaps a question on how Dropbox might be used to solve income inequality or the unaffordability of housing in San Francisco would reveal as much about someone’s creativity—and more about their character—than questions about superheroes

Certainly a refined hiring protocol that asks targeted and direct questions that allows the candidate to express and communicate their competence may perhaps improve the metrics of gender-diverse hiring. Suggesting such a radical change like asking for an opine on economic disparity at a Cloud Services Provider however I think is going a bit too far just to step back and claim progress; Post hoc ergo propter hoc .

The author here seem to stumble across, and then walk right by a much more interesting story in the use of demonstrably masculine conference room names in which to conduct interviews. All we got out of that was one paragraph.

I see why the name "The Bromance Room" is a demonstrably masculine name, but not why "The Break-up Room" is.

The article said:

    "‘The Break-up Room,’ by a male"

... what if this woman had been interviewed in that exact same room by a female? Would that have changed things? What if a male later on were interviewed in the same room by a female? I dunno about you, but "The break-up room" is pretty gender-neutral to me and that any gender-bias that person felt is entirely in their own head, due mainly to the fact that her interviewer was may (a statistical likelihood in this industry).

the male dominated frat-boy culture that Silicon Valley is increasingly being criticized for

I don't know if frat boys are different now than when I was in school but all I know is you never saw them in the Computer Science building.

Things have changed a fair bit since I was in college (1994-1998).

A lot more of computer programming is higher-status, more marketing-driven and more about money.

You're seeing proportionally more frat guys interested now.

Holy crap. An article with the words "cites research", with a hyperlink which actually goes to a PDF of the actual research being cited!

Would love to see HN rise to the occasion by discussing actual facts and data, rather than spouting opinion and speculation. (A popular pastime, to be sure, but it's always nice to do something different for a change.)

To really make this point, the author should have explained why these questions are biased toward men. It's not immediately obvious.

I agree with the author that asking questions about superheroes is going to weed out qualified people (unless the project involves superheroes). When I interview someone, I do my best not to ask questions irrelevant to the job. I don't know why someone would ask a question biased against people from different cultures, etc.

As for whether Dropbox should change its culture to be more attractive to women, that's their choice. They should be aware that their decor might turn off some otherwise qualified people, whether or not they choose to act on that information.

I've worked for and interviewed for Google for about ten years, and our training includes not asking irrelevant and/or culturally biased questions.

It appears that using the example of a super successful SV company that doesn't seem to give a toss about diversity hurts the author's premise - that it actually makes an iota of difference.

He might want to start with actually making that case.

"Her advice to Dropbox? “Founders are looking for ‘objective’ measures such as school ranking, GPAs, SAT scores, but fail to recognize that these are biased. Dropbox and other start-ups should pioneer new ways to identify people who can succeed on the core set of job responsibilities."

Yes, they're biased towards girls, who excel in school over boys from a young age.

"Indeed, the trend is getting worse. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were women. By 2011 this proportion had dropped to 18 percent."

In 1985, the gender ratio in colleges was 1:1. Today, it is 3:2 in favor of women. So that means that not only did the percentage get chopped in half, but it did so completely against the larger trend.

The actual explanation can be found in the Norwegian Gender Paradox: the more men and women are free to choose their occupation, the more they choose stereotypical gender occupations. When men and women actually choose what they want to do, they don't choose equally.

To the great chagrin of feminists.

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