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Comment by mynameisasdf | Hacker News Reader

Who says tech companies do better when there are more women?

I can't tell if you're being serious, so I'll assume that you are. One google search led me to this study: "gender diversity generates significant gains in high-tech/ knowledge intensive sectors".

http://ftp.iza.org/dp7350.pdf

I have a hard time imagining that there are many companies who benefit from a monoculture. Diversity equals truth, or more accurately, increases the likelihood of finding truth.

If your business makes any decisions, like "how do we capture this market," or "what sort of features should we add," or "how should this thing work," then you are embarking on a truth-seeking endeavor.

Unless your product aims to solve a problem that only affects white guys in the city (which, to be fair, is certainly a non-negligible number of products), then you're going to have a hard time expanding your base beyond white guys in the city if your team consists of only white guys in the city.

I don't think that is necessarily true; it implies that we cannot empathize with people that do not share at least racial and location characteristics with us.

I think a white man can make a product for black women, and I think a black woman can make products for white men. For me, it's more about acknowledging that the world exists outside of white men in the city and less about making sure your team is made up of every racial and socio-economic variable you aim to market to.

I do not disagree with that at all, and clearly, we've seen monocultures succeed at doing exactly that. I wasn't attempting to decry the methodology of every company with a monoculture, as much as to point out that it's just easier with actual diversity.

As Vezzy-Fnord points out, a single individual is able to empathize with other types of people, but that empathy is finite, and also, empathy does not equal understanding.

My main problem with the way many people handle the diversity issue has been exactly this: their major insistence on phenotypes as the pinnacle of diversity.

It turns out that "white guys" are not a homogenous group. In fact, chances are that white guys from (e.g.) Finland, Serbia and Nebraska will have little in common besides their skin color and sex. Their opinions and worldviews will differ greatly.

Diversity of opinion is just as important, if not more so. Sure, on the outside everyone looks like a pasty-faced white dude, but jumping to conclusions based solely on that, is... misguided, to put it euphemistically.

I'm not saying we can't benefit from having a wide variety of phenotypes as well, after all different phenotypes equal different experiences. But not every white guy is a Bay Area caricature.

This was only made for us to feel guilty about the status quo. People need to stop focusing intra-industry and look at the larger symptoms: this is a societal problem. This is how families at large are raising their children. If we want more women developers/entrepreneurs, we need to take a serious look at the gender roles we're setting up for girls as early as preschool. We need to stop the incessant "We need to fix the software industry blah blah blah" crap.

You aren't wrong, but this viewpoint is incomplete. That approach does nothing to stem the well-documented repelling forces that exist in the industry today and the anecdotal yet overwhelming accounts of women who are interested in these things feeling unwelcome and leaving. Asking someone who feels unwelcome to suck it up instead of introspecting on how we can do better now is ridiculous and morally questionable.

Except even feminist societies are finding that the women and men prefer the gender roles.

Maybe "we" should feel guilty about socially engineering something that is proven to make people unhappy. Ironically, the happiness index in women is down in Western societies whereas the same measure for men, is up! And we can hardly argue that women are treated as less equal than they were in the 70s.

People have a knee jerk reaction and say "oh yeah, that's because women have to do even more work now" where that isn't actually the case. Married women with traditional gender roles are actually happier than their married and equal counterparts.

Now, I know I'm not providing any statistics or references but I would urge you to be on the lookout. They show up quite regularly and are easy to find once you are open to the concept. One good place to start is "Brainwash", a "documentary" by a comedian that actually resulted in a loss of funds to a gender studies institute.

All this being said, I do not think a single one of us would say that a woman should not be encouraged to be a programmer. But to deny the joy that a woman can get from being a "traditional" mother as well as a programmer is unfair to an entire gender and unfairly creates a generation of latchkey children. I do not know a single mother or father who says "Yeah, I wish I spent less time with my kids."

Exactly. This is stupid. There was some bogus Gallup "study" that says that companies performed 15% better when there were more women, and I call bullshit on this. They didn't say which companies, and in which fields these companies activate in.

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