Hire More Women In Tech | Hacker News Reader

Hire More Women In Tech

hiremorewomenintech.com

54 pointskgunette133 comments

> "Only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26% of all American coders." - Wired

and

> Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires.

> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal

> *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system.

This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split.

Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard.

If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.

Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant?

The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified.

The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix.

Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.

Because there are places that will loosen qualifications to attract people of a specific race or gender because they can't find enough qualified candidates of that race.

One of the universities I attended had a lower set of requirements and scholarships for those that identified as "black". (The region was 96% white at the time so not really a surprise. Diversity was lacking and the admissions department was desperate.)

The education situation is not symmetric and should not be treated as such.

Some commentators like Thomas Sowell, who is himself black, believe that "affirmative action" is in fact bigoted because it basically says that a certain group of people are not capable of getting a job or an education unless they are given special help.

More nastily, it leads to the actually competent people of that group being forced to "prove" themselves.

Additionally, it leads to increased failure rates of people who get into the program / position. Advocates like to think that it's just these racist old meanies in admissions and hiring positions who are dictating unfair requirements, and it's bullshit. Often, requirements, especially very selective ones, are well-founded. Saying, "If they get in, they'll succeed" is a bad idea.

Looks like advocates of identity politics aren't going to stop until they bring back discrimination based on race and not merit:

March 2014

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230380210...

"In 1996, California voters approved Prop. 209 to block public institutions, notably state universities, from discriminating by race. Asian-American freshman enrollment at the University of California's 10-flagship universities has since climbed to 40.2% from 36.6% and to 47% from 39.7% at Berkeley."

Prop. 209's ban on racial preferences has helped Asian Americans by forcing admissions officers to focus on such academic qualifications as high-school grades and test scores.

Liberals argue that race-based admissions are necessary to increase black and Hispanic representation, but minority enrollment has increased since 1996 at the University of California. Hispanics now make up 28.1% of the UC system's freshman class, up from 13.8% in 1996, while black enrollment has ticked up to 4% from 3.8%."

...the U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on Michigan's Prop. 2, which is based on Prop. 209, and liberals hope this will provide grounds for a new lawsuit to overturn California's ban on racial preferences.

...Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris and Governor Jerry Brown have both argued for its repeal."

Exactly. And if you're actively seeking out more candidates who are women you're likely to get a better gender ratio than companies who aren't as proactive.

> Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant?

Let us say someone does what you and the OP suggest.

We have a pool of 76 men and 24 women [using the original percentages here from the OP].

The end result is a 50/50 [20 men, 20 women] ratio in Company X.

Company Y & Z have a pool of 56 men and 4 women to choose from. Let us say they both put the "normal" level of effort into the process.

Company Y ends up with 28 men and 2 women. Company Z ends up with 28 men and 2 women.

How is pushing down the ratio of women in less progressive companies a good solution?

To me, that seems like a significantly worse situation for the women who end up in the less progressive companies.

The situation with women speakers in conferences is completely different. The ratio of speakers to audience allows you to do that. If you have 10 people in the audience [seems reasonable for a minimum] at a talk, you only need 10% of people in the field to be women to fulfill demand for conference speakers on a 50/50 basis.

Your implicit assumption is that supply is inelastic. But why should that be the case? Better benefits and working conditions result in more women being attracted to tech. To assume otherwise means that you don't think women respond to incentives. (Admittedly, there will be a lag here since reputations take a while to change.)

Sure, the "less progressive" companies are going to have to compete with that, but I don't see the downside in companies competing to treat their employees better.

> Your implicit assumption is that supply is inelastic. But why should that be the case?

I don't think a large percentage of women completely 100% refuse to enter tech because it isn't using more gender neutral wording and companies don't aim for a 50/50 ratio of applicants and/or hires.

You even admit that it is mostly inelastic and unlikely to change except in a span of years.

Things like pay equality and directly encouraging women to enter Tech [rather than targeting employers hiring practices] makes more sense to me.

> Better benefits and working conditions result in more women being attracted to tech. (Admittedly, there will be a lag here since reputations take a while to change.)

Except, the OP seeks to create those at the expense of women who work in less progressive companies. This leads to a pool of women of whose lives are improved and a separate pool whose lives are negatively impacted. I'm not seeing that as an improvement.

Pay equality and more education would be more productive.

> Sure, the "less progressive" companies are going to have to compete with that, but I don't see the downside in companies competing to treat their employees better.

They actually wouldn't have to even try to compete. They'd simply hire more men because it requires 0 effort on their part. The supply of men isn't going to magically change just because you encourage women. If everything is equal [pay, benefits, etc], they'd be interchangeable regardless of gender.

> This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women.

They are Department of Labor statistics which, I believe you will find, measure not the people qualified to be employed in a particular role, but the people currently employed in that role.

So, contrary to your position, if the current numbers on that are 74/26, it is not a logical contradiction that every company in the industry could get closer to 50/50, without either reducing the total number of employed programmers or convincing anyone who doesn't already prefer to work as a programmer to "enter the field".

You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.

(I'm not saying that the latter population, without changes earlier in the pipeline, would necessarily support a 50/50 split either, I'm saying you can't draw conclusions about it from the former population.)

> You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.

http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...

If between 11 and 14% of CS graduates are women, I think its a pretty reasonable number to work with 26% are available to be employed as programmers and that unemployment is roughly equal between genders.

Maybe you are right and the real number is 30% or whatever. It certainly isn't 50% which leads to the same mathematical limitation. I also highly suspect given the ratio is heavily lopsided in university education that it is pretty close to 26%. I can see how people might disagree, I'm just voicing my opinion which is backed up by the available facts [ratio of CS majors, ratio of those currently employed, etc].

To me, it seems to make more sense to concentrate effort on:

1) Pay equality.

2) Encouraging women to enter the field via education.

Those two are solvable problems. Trying to encourage 50/50 ratios in "progressive companies" and leaving the women unlucky enough to end up in "other companies" is simply going to make the situation worse, not better.

How would you feel if you were the only gay/female/black/[insert minority person here] in a relatively conservative workplace?

I highly suspect the answer to that question is some combination of "isolated" and "vulnerable".

Tbh, the only way I'd accept your argument as valid is if you could show the population of female programmers is significantly underemployed compare to the population of male programmers. Even then, it'd have to be a truly noticeable and significant gap.

> Tbh, the only way I'd accept your argument as valid

You entire post seems premised on a strawman argument -- the only argument I made is that the logical contradiction you posited in the argument made in your previous post was not supported by the statistics cited to justify it.

Okay. I guess I just assumed you meant there was some statistical evidence showing it was fundamentally wrong rather than the fact I didn't prove it was exactly 26%.

For purposes of my disagreeing with the OP, being 100% accurate on whether its 26% or 28% doesn't really matter to me. The basic principle applies that its going to create a worse problem than it solves imo.

The pay equality gap is a misdirection. Gender is not a big factor in determining your pay... until you get married or have kids, when men focus more on providing while women focus more on being with their families. Look up the US Dept of Labour's numbers. In fact, unmarried, childless women have out-earned their male peers since the 70s, but don't tell the feminists that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/the-pay-gap-is-beca...

Eh. The pay gap is 12%. Please provide evidence this isn't real that is verifiable and not vague "look at the statistics". Which statistics?

As I said, gender is not the most important factor overall, their family status is. So if you slice only along gender lines, you will see a gap that is meaningless, because you are comparing apples and oranges.

Here's an article that cites several different studies. Granted, I cited the higher end, it could be lower, by all means make up your own mind. They also add the caveat here that it only applies to metropolitan areas, but this is the vast majority of the population nowadays.

>... in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

> As for the somewhat depressing caveat that the findings held true only for women who were childless and single: it's not their marital status that puts the squeeze on their income. Rather, highly educated women tend to marry and have children later. Thus the women who earn the most in their 20s are usually single and childless.

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...

Once again: women and men who want families make different choices.

Jev, that is a bold move but it isn't going to pay off for you.

We read that article and came to two completely different conclusions. That may be due to having different contexts about approaching this conversation. This is a tech site, the OP was about tech, and I was talking about software/tech salaries.

"The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully."

I interpret this as basically admitting its a problem in male dominated industries [which happens to be the case in tech and engineering in general].

"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do."

You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. The reversal that is raising women's average wage is due to an education gap b/t men & women. It is not due to equal pay for equal experience/position/etc. that is the basis of the gap in the article I cited.

The pay gap I'm talking about is when a female software engineer is paid 12% less than when a male software engineer with roughly the same experience, education, ability, and position.

You are comparing your apples [overall pay equality across all industries and disciplines] to my oranges [pay equality by experience, education, ability, and position].

Do you now understand why I disagree with you, even reading the same articles? I understand where you are coming from but there shouldn't be a pay gap for the same job title.

>If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.

It's not mathematically impossible. You'll just have the "excess" 48% of the population working in fields that have the opposite gender balance. (Whether or not this is desirable is an exercise left to the reader.)

That isn't how a hiring process works. You don't get to arbitrarily redistribute labor across industries & fields with a magic wand.

The biggest thing that I feel like these initiatives always miss is that the onus on fixing the problem of gender equality in tech shouldn't be on the companies at this point in the game (not to say that won't change), but on getting more women interested in tech in the first place. Overwhelmingly women don't seem to care about the technology field. We need to focus less on bending over backwards to find appropriate female candidates from such a small pool, and focus more on what organizations like Girls who Code[0] who are trying to get more young women interested in technology. Once there is actually a sizable amount of women involved in the field, then maybe the conversation over discrimination or lack of diversity may be worth having. But until then I cant just make female engineers poof into the interview room like magic and thats not for lack of trying.

[0] http://girlswhocode.com/

Exactly. It is anectodal but, every women who works in our office (and mostly on other offices I see) is either business related, or semi-techie (QA Engineer). We just can't find any women coders that can actually pass a basic competency challenge for more than two years.

Then you're incompetent with regards to recruiting.

This is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, so you can't narrow your focus, but instead approach it from multiple angles. Women aren't encouraged to get involved in tech because they can't find good role models, and there are no good role models because women aren't being encouraged to get involved with tech. It's important to have initatives like this to get more role models so we can encourage more women and get more role models to encourage more women ...

Citation needed. If I was going to go out on a limb, I'd say a large part of the reason women aren't drawn to tech at a young age is because it requires you sit alone in front of a computer talking to it for long stretches of time instead of interacting with other people, but I have as much evidence as you do that it has to do with a lack of role models. (I got into programming well before I knew any famous programmers.)

Surely both of these are factors. I would suggest:

1. That at an early age, programming role models in particular aren't as important as STEM role models in general. It's certainly anecdotal, but I moved towards programming as a practical job that somewhat satisfied my broader interest in science and engineering.

2. It might be beneficial to girls and boys alike if technology was taught more socially. Certainly tinkering and reading alone is important, but maker clubs and the like are an extraordinary way to get young people involved. As a bonus, they help with teamwork which is another big issue for (many) tech companies.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you should stop going out on a limb, as you're clearly very poorly informed when it comes to these matters. But here's a citation for you: http://economixcomix.com/2014/04/20/neil-degrasse-tyson-on-g...

I clicked on that expecting some kind of study to refute my random theory, which I'd find interesting, but it's a high level vague theory from Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the evidence of bias in society. (Something we should give approximately the same weight as any theory based on anecdotes and personal experience.)

He'd be the last person to tell you his observations and this anecdote should be seriously used as a citation to lend yourself weight in an argument about the source of gender bias in tech.

You are correct that that is another large contributing factor. There are a few other ones too, such as the lack of real-world application of what they learn, stereotypes, a terrible culture towards women in CS, and a few other massive problems. They all work against the on-going efforts.

As for the Role Model aspect in particular... It's actually difficult to provide citations, because it's so commonly accepted in the community. I attended Grace Hopper '13 last year, and it's just recognized as a given. When I go through research papers from the past 5-10 years, they start off by just recognizing that its a known problem and then move onto subproblems or their new solution. Unfortunately, I don't really have the time to go mining the work that led to this problem being recognized. Still, I can recommend a book, "Unlocking the Clubhouse" http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse which should cover this!

I don't thing I completely agree with the "role-model" effect you are describing. There are women like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limor_Fried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

And many more. If these women aren't role models enough, how is me investing multitudes more of effort and hiring one or two female engineers at a small startup going to create role-models.

I believe in investing in the egg as you call it, by getting women interested in tech at a young age, we can have more candidates to choose from and then not have to jump through all the efforts and hoops this website want's me to do. I see no practical reason to reword all my job postings and hire a female-centric recruiter when I can just hop on angellist for an hour.

The best role-models are not far away or long-dead, they are nearby and immediate. You can see their life and interact with them. Of course, there's also the problem of how many potential role models for women in computing don't really provide the level of support that their students expect (they got there without role models, so why should they hold their students hands?).

It's actually difficult to provide citations for the obvious problem of lack-of-role-models, because it's so commonly accepted in the community. I attended Grace Hopper '13 last year, and it's just recognized as a given. When I go through research papers from the past 5-10 years, they start off by just recognizing that its a known problem and then move onto subproblems or their new solution. Unfortunately, I don't really have the time to go mining the work that led to this problem being recognized. Still, I can recommend a book, "Unlocking the Clubhouse" http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse which should cover this!

Obsessing over the pipeline is a handwave that doesn't address the outsize attrition afflicting actual women in current technical roles.

To say nothing of how hostile the industry leadership can be to women (cf Richards/SendGrid, GitHub, Tinder, Urban Airship).

One of the major things that discourage women from entering tech is a lack of role models. So companies can have a big impact right now by hiring more women.

I can't speak for women, but I would have to think hard if companies put out calls for gay applicants. Do I want to be "the diversity hire?" I don't know if anyone inside or outside the company would take me seriously. Women might have a similar thought process when these kinds of initiatives happen.

"Etsy’s seen the most success when there’s either zero or two women engineers on a team. If there’s only one, she’s a woman engineer as opposed to just an engineer." http://firstround.com/article/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-...

> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."

This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1]

As for the job description rewrites such as:

"We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately." "Sensitive to clients’ needs,"

Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop.

I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job.

As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line."

[1]http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...

> This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control.

The advice is from a CEO, presumably to CEOs (whose set of concerns include longer range strategic goals, and whose tools are broader, than those who are merely "hiring managers".)

> For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.

People who are qualified to work as computer programmers are not exclusively graduates in computer science and computer engineering. I'd be surprised if even the majority of working programmers had degrees in one of those fields.

“I can't believe that any woman” — stop right here. Whenever anyone on HN ever says this, they're really showing themselves to:

1) lack imagination 2) lack empathy (egregiously so) 3) generally be wrong about whatever follows next

What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same. This is IDIOTIC and you're revealing yourself to seeing women as "a demographic" rather than as 3.6 billion unique individuals who each have their own unique personality, interests, etc.

Also, you're revealing your massively shortsighted perspective and utter inability to educate yourself a little on the matter before chiming in with your assertions, but let me help you improve perspective and learn something new:

Study: Women Do Not Apply To ‘Male-Sounding’ Jobs http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sound...

You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...

> A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.

So, your assertion that it's "ridiculous goop" has actually been proven (repeatedly) by scientific studies, and is a tremendously stupid assertion to begin with (it hinges on the assumption that all women are exactly the same).

Perhaps next time, before opening your mouth, assess whether you actually have any fucking knowledge of what you're about to assert.

Wow, calm down political correctness police.

Firstly, he didn't assert shit. He said he believed things to be a certain way - at no point did he state any of his -opinion- was fact.

Secondly. What he had to say was really not that sensationalist. If you strip away your political correctness glasses you will see that he was just saying that he thinks women would prefer to be hired (and attracted to a position) by their ability, not some specially crafted touchy-feely job description.

Whether you agree or not is another thing entirely but seriously back of the the PC Police attitude, it doesn't do you any favours.

The "you clearly know jack shit" assertion is just outright offensive though and doesn't belong anywhere let alone here.

Do you have a hard time reading?

"Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop." <- this is about as explicit and concrete an assertion of his opinion stated as fact as you can get.

Also, you should really stop with the multiple cases of whining about "political correctness". It doesn't make you look like a decent person at all, because what you're really saying is that you think not being a fucking self-entitled shmuck who ignores evidence but makes massively sexist sweeping statements equates to "political correctness".

(PRO TIP: http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/43087620460/i-was-reading... )

The status quo is clearly failing our industry and our community. Any argument made against changes or even just _suggested_ changes, especially those backed up with mountains of scientific research and evidence, is a toxic argument in favor of more status quo, and cultivates the upholding of deeply misogynistic and racist systems of oppression.

> Do you have a hard time reading?

Personal attacks are not allowed here. Please don't.

> Wow, calm down political correctness police.

Personal attacks are not allowed here. Please don't.

Please explain how it is a personal attack to imply their tone needs work. Or is this just tumblr-style rage against "tone policing"?

"Calm down" is patronizing; "political correctness police" is pejorative. This is language one uses not when trying to have a civil, substantive discussion, but when trying to skewer an adversary.

I called it a personal attack because it's needlessly personal: it implies that the other person is an overwrought ("calm down") fanatical ("political correctness") bully ("police"). If that doesn't meet your definition of "personal attack", I'm happy not to quibble. Either way, though, it doesn't meet Hacker News' definition of civil, substantive discussion, and therefore is inappropriate here.

>What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same

No, I asserted the opposite by specifically qualifying the women I was targeting with the clause "of substance". That's the part of my quote you left out to make it look like I was lumping "all" women together.

I just showed those supposedly better job descriptions to a female coworker I would categorize as a "woman of substance" and she just rolled her eyes at it. The word "intimate" is groan-inducing and out of place.

I don't personally know Marissa Mayer (ex Google, now CEO Yahoo) or Carol Bartz (ex AutoDesk) but I don't believe women of such caliber require baby talk. In my opinion, it would be quite insulting to them.

>Study: Women Do Not Apply To ‘Male-Sounding’ Jobs

I never asserted that a text can't be overtly (even offensively) male gendered. That part I agree with. However, the over-zealous post-modernism rewrite does not always make the end result gender-neutral. On the contrary, the article shows that the end result looks silly and idiotic. (EDIT TO ADD: the article's author recently commented in this thread and she herself conceded[1] that the wording in those "improved" job descriptions could use some work so I'm not totally off base in my criticism.)

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020992

>I never asserted that a text can't be overtly (even offensively) male gendered. That part I agree with. However, the over-zealous post-modernism rewrite does not always make the end result gender-neutral. On the contrary, the article shows that the end result looks silly and idiotic.

You didn't read the study, did you?

I did. I contend you're reading too much into the study by American Psychological Association by the authors Gaucher, Friesen, & Kay called, “Evidence That Gendered Wording in Job Advertisements Exists and Sustains Gender Inequality.”

They polled 96 random women.

The study in its limited form did not (or even try to) differentiate the characteristics of any women who would find terms such as "intimate" in an engineering post as patronizing and incongruous.

I'd prefer not to alienate those type of women. To do so would run counter to the objectives the article is trying to promote!

Great TIME link KuraFire, added to the resources section of the site - thanks.

>The premise of “We Only Hire The Best Candidates.” >The idea is not to hire women just because they're women. Hire women that are amazing at their jobs.

Okay, so should you pick a female candidate who is estimated to be 1% worse than a male candidate? That answer just sidesteps the whole question.

I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.

EDIT: >"You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio."

That's seems sexist. Since the majority of tech students and tech graduates still are male, the non-biased ratio shouldn't be 50/50.

Let's assume that the best candidate should always be chosen.

How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate that it can distinguish people within 1%? I would love to see a writeup of your methodology, and how you confirm those numbers.

It's just a thought experiment. If the accuracy is -+n%, then lets say "2*n% worse".

Sure, hire the best. But first you have to recognize that N is probably larger (and less replicable!) than you think. Also, that there is more than one "N". Job interviewing is not a 100-yard dash with only one metric.

The metric should be composed of several factors.

It doesn't matter.

You choose the candidate that your process deems the best.

If it's inaccurate, so be it, it's the best measure you've (currently) got.

So, let's say we have a company full of awesome coders. They are all guys. This new guy would fit right in. This woman is also highly qualified. Based on our past process, by default we hire the man...I think it may warrant some adjustment to the hiring process. Many people perceive a risk in doing something different, and yet change is called for here.

There is evidence that women are less likely to blow smoke up your ass about how great they are during an interview process. Interviewing inherently favors people with certain traits that say little about their actual abilities or work ethic, and smart interviewers adjust their process based on this. Unfortunately many smaller groups do not dedicate the time or resources to squashing these biases and really hiring the best candidates.

I personally find the whole situation rather disheartening. When I started on this career path years ago I did not envision myself working solely with ego-maniacal, immature...boys, but that seems to be at the core of the developer culture in many places, and it's not just a gender thing. Don't get me wrong, in many ways I still fit this stereotype, but it's like there's nothing there as a counterweight. I've gone to a lot of interviews over the last year and at place after place, it's just dudes, dudes, and more dudes.

On the other hand, our company recently went through a hiring spree and we were actively trying to get more women candidates. There were not many that applied and none of them were even close to being marginally qualified for the position. I don't know if others have this problem too, it could be that female coders are actually in high demand by companies that appreciate some diversity, and the good ones are not on the market that often.

I was going to answer in kind. But if you truly believe there is not a problem, that everything is just fine, then I can't help you. "So be it" has led us to the situation we have now: dogmatic, unexamined assumptions and reverence for "the process".

I said "your process." You can make meaningful measures in whatever way suit your company. It's not some mandate handed down from the stone age.

You've taken "so be it" totally out of context, as well. My point was if your evaluations determine a best candidate, you should take that candidate.

If you are not hiring the best candidate, the evaluations need a revamping.

You operate your business like a sexist byproduct of a sexist society.

If it's a toxic misogynist culture that makes women feel unwelcome, so be it, it's the best measure you've (currently) got.

(Except for, y'know, all these suggestions, methods and proven approaches that are fantastic alternatives to being a dick.)

If you read my comment in context, nothing you're saying is relevant.

The context is a reply to this comment:

> Let's assume that the best candidate should always be chosen. > How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate...

If you have decent information on the reliability of your process, there is some argument that, if candidates are close enough in the results under that process that there is a very small probability that the differences are meaningful, a random selection among the candidates might be a better choice than consistently choosing the highest score -- this avoids privileging any systematic bias in the system when the differences are unlikely to be meaningful in what you are using the system as a proxy measure for.

Of course, most places don't actually have much meaningful insight into the reliability of their process so as to enable determining whether and when its outputs are actually meaningful in the first place, they adopt processes that subjectively seem right to the people adopting them, and don't do anything to validate them.

> I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair.

I'm not saying that companies shouldn't hire the "best" candidate, where "best" has some vague, unclear and subjective definition. But whatever best may mean, I doubt it is "fair" unless inherited wealth and traits also fits into your definition of "fair". Question of "fair" totally sidesteps the bigger problems. I think what this post states is that not having a monoculture may have a greater benefit than hiring a subjectively "best" engineer.

As an anecdote as an example of larger issues of fair being a weird thing to think about, I have an example. I have a 6 year old daughter in chess class. All last semester she's been too shy to raise her hand to answer chess questions from the male chess teacher. He's a great teacher, great with kids but I noticed he predominately encourages the boys to answer his questions, and sure enough when I finally convinced my daughter to raise her hand on the last day of class he totally never picked her.

She was raising her hand for almost every question and this teacher sometimes even ignores the hands up and asks the same boy he's been asking all day, even though that kid didn't have his hands up, and even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this. My daughter was so dejected by this experience, of raising her hand, finally being ready to answer a chess class and this guy totally doesn't even see her. She was crushed, and I was too. We're still going to go to this chess class, but if this teacher doesn't change I'm going to talk to him. This is an example of why "best" and "fair" are hard. A few generation of teacher tracking encouraging boys over girls makes me sceptical that the produced "best" was fair in the first place.

If you factor out all 'external factors', then everyone is equal and all hires should be random. I wouldn't personally go to a randomly chosen doctor, though.

A child doesn't get picked once, and that's evidence of institutionalized bias?

As I said, it's simply an anecdote of teacher tracking, and you've mischaracterized what I've said. I've noticed all semester long he's been ignoring girls trying to participate, and on the last day my daughter raised her hand the entire class, not just once. Still, as I said, it's an anecdote, not statistically significant, but if you want statistical evidence, teacher tracking is a real and widely known problem with lots of studies and policy discussions.

A child doesn't get picked for an entire class and loses out to a student that doesn't have his hand raised. Sounds like bias to me.

What bellerocky described is institutionalized bias. It only takes one incident like that to discourage someone.

>What bellerocky described is institutionalized bias.

No, it's confirmation bias, not to mention sampling, and entitlement complexes.

Entitlement, sure. But the boy's entitlement was confirmed while the girl's wasn't.

The parent's entitlement.

I thought about this, and because I worried of coming across as an entitled parent I didn't say anything to the teacher. If I keep seeing it, whether it is my child or any of the other girls I will say something though.

I felt exactly the same as your daughter as a kid, and I'm a guy. The cause was the shyness, not gender.

>even though this kid sometimes yells out answers without raising his hands even when the teacher says not to do this

Seems like the problem there is extroversion vs introversion. Less sensitive vs sensitive. Something I can totally relate to.

Well I've suggested to my daughter to start yelling out answers too even though it's not allowed to start getting attention if she doesn't get picked and if she gets in trouble she should say she never gets picked.

The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline. Hiring in tech is the end of pipe-line, if people do not enter the queue i.e. get some form formal or semi-formal techEd they are not going to make it to the other end.

Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative.

Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share.

So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions.

Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).

"The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline."

Oh yeah? Then how come with blacks taking 10% of CS degrees and Latinos taking 8%, their representation at Google and Facebook is only 1% and 2%?

Meritocracy?

Google and Facebook are kind of extreme cases - I would not be hired by Google in spite of my Master's degree - in most of these companies one may have to look at the CS degrees from Elite Universities. An A.S degree from Collin County Community College or BS from TAMU-Commerce is not same as Stanford or UT-Austin.

You can cherry pick the data all you want, are there biases - apparently not White Engineer Bias for sure, if there is. I do not know all the variables, but I prefer uneven organic growth over over-curated even growth that sucks resources and energies from vital parts of the company.

Note that the job descriptions the site labels as "better", and which it presents as neutral, are those that are explicitly labeled as "feminine" in the source it quotes. If you want to recruit an even ratio of men to women, use actually neutral job descriptions. The original source [1] notes that the experiment only tested female aversion to the masculine job descriptions, and not the other way around. Treat these examples as the ends of a spectrum and shoot for somewhere in the middle.

Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do.

[1] http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...

i did edit from "masculine" and "feminine" to "average" and "better" as i found masculine/feminine ultimately problematic. this reference is simply a few examples of what a change in language can do. they still describe the exact same job and functions.

I always feel slightly bitter about stuff like this. As a male, I don't ever recall being encouraged to work in tech. Any geeky pursuit made me the subject of ridicule. There was always a battle with my mother as a child to even be allowed access to a computer. Bleh.

Not to mention the mocking most of us had to endure from the cool kids. I was systematically bullied, because of being a geek, who loved tech.

And yet... we still did it. Is it simply a matter of having enough aggression, or something, such that we continued anyway?

In which case, it would certainly be nice to see more sensitive people of either gender encouraged to take up the subjects they are truly interested in. There's a pervasive culture of social shaming of people who don't fit the norm. Will it ever go away as a whole, or is it a unchangeable component of society?

Sadly, I doubt it will go away anytime soon, people just dislike the different, which isn't a bad thing in every case. Sometimes it fuels constructive criticism and discourse on a topic.

There is a reason why less women than men are going into tech, but I don't want to elaborate on that, since I am going to be downvoted into oblivion(and no, it's not intelligence).

I'm really impressed with this post in general. I understand that these concepts are beyond the scope of this page, but I hope to hear more from OP about getting more women prepared as candidates for engineering/software jobs. I agree that there is a gender bias in hiring practices, but I think it's a symptom of the more systemic problem driving women away from STEM fields.

I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.

fair enough re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions. nothing on the site is original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters.

I'm going to have to contest the complaint on "gendered wording". Ironically, this is coming from the same people who will often berate you for "tone policing" them, judging by the ideological dispositions of several of the linked resources in the footer.

I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator.

Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days.

But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves.

So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.

I'm not going to change the wording of my job postings to "make women more comfortable". That's bullshit. Women are adults too, we should not do them the disservice of coddling them. It is much better to let them rise to the challenge. Many do, and many do very well. As noted in the article, and something I agree with, companies do better with women in management. However, this is not due to babying them.

I think the point of the job postings was to point out how those postings can be seen as biased even when they weren't intended to be.

I object to the part about gender coding the language. I think people should be able to speak and write the way it comes naturally to them. It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men. Apart from that, the "better" descriptions were vague and unclear as to what the focus was. "understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.

I'm a man, I support having more women in tech (thought I don't agree it is the companies responsibilities for this) but I can honestly say, her rewritten job descriptions would make me NOT want to apply (maybe that is the goal?).

1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients'

2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients'

First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.

The problem is that social activists have discovered computing. Now they are trying to force their world view into the tech domain because they have failed to impart change in the real world.

Hence the faux moral outrage over gendered words.

Hence the hounding of Brendan Eich for his personal views which had no bearing on his technical competency.

Hence the Gnome foundation running out of money because they diverted all their funds to a women's outreach program instead of focusing on software development.

Right now, in the real world, scantily-clad women in bikins are draped across magazine covers, sporting events segregate the sexes, and in many Islamic countries women are treated like slaves... yet somehow “The tech industry may have a problem with women"?

The process has to start somewhere. People in tech like to call themselves egalitarian and progressive, so they should be open to encouraging more people from different backgrounds to enter the pipeline.

i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.

I'm not trolling and I actually hoping for a positive discussion, but when you put those excerpts on a site you made (even if taken from ERE) promoting more women in tech and editorialise them (the ERE sites mentions Masculine and Feminine descriptions, you wrote Average and Better), it does make people feel queasy (affirmative action queasy). If you state the feminine descriptions are 'better', you will be alienating the men, which in many cases are the decision makers on hiring.

If I was in part of the hiring process, and someone told me I had to write in a job description 'We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.' to attract more women, I think I would be biased against women in my process, both consciously (I don't want 'intimacy' of any kind at a place of business) and probably unconsciously as well.

nobody is telling you you "have" to write things that alienate men, and i guarantee that some of the overly "masculine/average" descriptions repel many men from these positions as well. if you feel you would be biased against women in your hiring process, you should probably remove yourself from said hiring process. if you don't like the ERE descriptions, that's cool, simply write better ones (i don't think ERE is the authority here) - the aim is to be more conscious of the difference language makes.

>"understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.

This particular language was for describing the company as a whole, rather than a position.

To me, this phrasing sounds like the firm differentiates itself based on having a better understanding of its customers, which is a useful thing for consultancies.

You are right, I read it and went back and took a quote from the wrong place after getting a bad impression from the entire section. Consider this though,

Proficient oral and written communications skills. Collaborates well in a team environment. Sensitive to clients’ needs, can develop warm client relationships

Does that sound like a qualification for an engineer? I suppose it could but I am used to engineering qualifications being specifically about engineering, if I had to guess, I would assume this was a sales job or sales oriented and would not apply.

I still hold that I shouldn't have to filter all the language I use to be nontoxic to women. I am not a woman, so I cannot judge what is toxic to them and would prefer to function as normal.

> It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men.

This is a good point. If you get to the point where people are scared of expressing their thoughts for fear of offending someone who took them the wrong way, you have a serious problem. Most people are not going to put in the effort; they're just going to keep their mouths closed and dodge the confrontation entirely. This leads to bad ideas winning.

Sure, it's one thing about posting a job description. But if you're going to apply that mindset to your job description, you're probably going to apply it to everything from water cooler conversation to official meetings to emails.

And yes, it's important that people are respectful and make your environment a great place to work. But it's a really bad idea to go over the top in welcoming 10% of your workforce and alienating the other 90%.

Boy, I hope I never get hired in a company because they needed to hire more Indians.

Boy, I hope tired horseshit like yours goes away someday.

Seriously. The OP took the time to make a reasoned, step-by-step argument for hiring more women in order to build a better company. Grow up.

You are implying that because I don't wanna be hired just because the company needed more Indians, that means I am completely against building a better company.

Sorry to break it to you, but you don't build a better company by hiring a minority just for the sake of hiring a minority.

From the article: > Fortune 500 companies with at least three female directors have seen their return on invested capital increase by at least 66%, return on sales increase by 42%, and return on equity increase by at least 53%.

You may not realize this, but this actually shits over the accomplishment of those women.

Imagine if my employer who hugely benefitted from my work for them goes out and says "Hire more Indians, we hired an Indian and our sales went up by 43%", I would walk out of it so fast. Mostly because they need me as an individual(and wouldn't just replace me with another Indian guy) but they don't treat me as an individual.

Using fake outrage at a hypothetical situation as an excuse to maintain the status quo is not a valid response.

A woman, asking companies to look at how they hire and giving specific examples of how their hiring is biased is not shitting over the accomplishments of women.

Hell, you're more likely to be rejected with today's policies.

As a husband to a female minority executive in aerospace and a brother to an engineer/executive in green tech, I have to say this is focused on the wrong issues. From what I have seen, qualified women get hired and get promoted. The biggest problem that remains is one of conduct by male employees on the job.

Also, for the life of me, I just can't understand why people want to take a census and say ok, our population is 50%/50% male/female, 50%/20%/15%/5% white/black/hispanic/asian, 80%/9%/9%/2% straight/gay/lesbian/transgender, so let's make sure those magic ratios are equal across all home makers, software developers, the rich, the poor, etc... There is no end to it and it's folly.

> Wealthy white women are not the most disprivileged class <

If we are considering equality. A native american man is way more disprivileged then a caucasian univerity educated woman. I mean name one VC backed start up with a Native American CEO?

I am Metis (Native American) and frankly the low employment on reserves could be mitigated by remote work. Having more coders and startup from reserves/communities could be an amazing way to help many of the cripling social issues.

We could have a Native American Steve Jobs... and then have him played in a film by Johnny Depp :)

TL:DR > It is not really fair to almost exclusively focus on the most privilidged dispriviledge class.

PS > Also those are some big numbers for ROI with no sourcing. Sceptical me is skeptic.

PS. there's absolutely sourcing for those ROI numbers. Here are a few of the sources for the studies linked to directly below the ROI metrics (Anita Borg Institute), and pages 11-12 of that report detail all of the sources and studies. Here it is, in case you missed it on the site ---> http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for...

Those metrics are based on studies by: Cristian Dezsö at the University of Maryland, and David Ross at Columbia University Business School; Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Cindy Padnos, founder of Illuminate Ventures, who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship; The London Business School report, Innovative Potential: Men and Women in Teams; the September 2013 research report, Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth by The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI); Professor Anita Woolley, an economist at Carnegie Mellon; Cumulative Gallup Workplace Studies; and McKinsey & Company's annual series "Women Matter."

Maybe I'm just more drawn to the average descriptions cause I'm male, but some of the language feels off in the "better" descriptions.

> We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately.

Intimately sounds wrong here to me. Intimacy is something I would associate with things of romantic nature.

> Strong communication and influencing skills. vs > Proficient oral and written communications skills.

They sound like descriptions for different jobs. One sounds like a job where you need to be able to close deals or lead people the other sounds like a generic soft-skill that everyone says they have.

Turning "Direct" to "Support" also gives a different meaning.

The descriptions feel like the position is more entry-level or wishy-washy. I'd imagine the "better" descriptions would approachable to both genders, as they don't seem they demand as much or need people to be assertive/confident.

Maybe this works out well in practice, as maybe you lose a lot of suitable candidates to effects like impostor syndrome. They just feel like they are advertising two different jobs.

Every time this comes up I'm dismayed at the responses on HN. No wonder some women don't feel encouraged to enter the tech. world.

People who belong in tech don't need to be spoon fed. The barriers to entry are some of the lowest for any professional field in history.

I think you could say train more women in tech and you would have a better staring point. The 80s and 90s were graduating more females.

From Wikipedia:

In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

I graduated with an Information Systems degree and we probably had something like 30% - 35% females that I walked with.

I don't understand what makes those average wordings gendered and the 'better' wording not gendered.

From my readings of Dr. Deborah Tannen, (who writes books on the topic of the differences in male and female communication styles, and their possible cultutral origins) they both seem like they are gendered, with the 'average' wording being an example of masciline-ish speech (my interpretation, not hers) and the 'better' wording being more feminine-ish.

I'm happy to learn how I've misinterpreted it, but I'm not seeing it. Can somebody please enlighten me?

it's tricky, and agreed - simply an example (by ERE) of how changing language may increase the pool of people interested in the job posting.

I see that, but the examples were introduced as examples of removing gendered speech. I was expecting the bad examples to be the kind of jobs that are posted to the techcompaniesthatonlyhiremen tumblr, pepperd with 'he', 'him', and 'goto guy' kinds of language.

Given that they weren't, I think that calling them 'gendered', but not explaining the specific connotation of 'gendered' in that context is what caused my confusion.

> It’s tough to prove gender bias.

followed by

> Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings"

I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.

The wording changes in job descriptions strike me as treating a symptom rather than a cause.

Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?

I am confused with the section about job descriptions. A firm must not have gender biased descriptions is the OP assertion yet the ere article that was cited specifically states the "BETTER" descriptions are feminine.

So to solve the issue of low representation of woman in tech the industry must introduce a bias towards men?

I'd vote in favor of removing gendered language altogether. The descriptions listed are vague and kind of meaningless.

For example, in the "masculine" company description, the words "dominant" and "boasts" are just fluff. Plus, who cares if you "are determined to stand apart from the competition"? Isn't everyone? And the "feminine" description is so passive and unclear that it makes me think the company could be an engineering support group and not an actual engineering firm.

I would suggestion something like, "We are a leading engineering firm with clients including X, Y, and Z." It's short and to-the-point. This way, it is clear that the company is an engineering firm, and hopefully clients X, Y, and Z are illustrious enough that they speak to the firm's capability/status.

what a bunch of bullshit, you'll never hear feminists lobbying for hiring more women in dangerous fields like off shore oil drilling (pay is great btw) or campaigning for equal pay for male pornstars

"We want equality! But only in x,y,z you can keep a,b,c lol"

You know, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

That's because men are not systematically discriminated against in the way women are. These "won't someone please think of the men?!" arguments are tired and not good.

Nice strawman.

>Pay gap

>Women are just as capable

choose one, otherwise companies would pay the lowest price for labor. The "problem" (not even sure why a difference in what fields people like to go into is a problem) is reflected in open source statistics; women just don't like to code as much as men do.

While I agree with your larger point, invoking a systematic trend to support a specific issue in a specific context is a logical fallacy [1].

The parent's comment, while crudely phrased, did actually highlight some legitimate counterexamples to the "only women are discriminated against" narrative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division

Unless you consider, homelessness, suicides, social stigma regarding being sexually assulted, mancession, acceptance of physical abuse in public.

I mean no one is advocating we get the sucide rate to 50%. If you want parity, you can't cherry pick and that means recalibrating society as a whole.

Which means questioning bad ideas like an equal. There are way to many people intresting in thought stopping for the sake of PR.

Try teaching to kids or nursing.

I read a claim at one point (I believe it was in responce to a comment similar to yours, Wherin the person who corresponds to you in the analogy gave the specific example of coal mining as a dangerous field)

And the claim was that women HAVE had harder times entering coal mining jobs, and for some time in some places were forebidden from doing so. (and that recently at the time of the claim in a certain area they were allowed to have that job.

However, I don't have a source for this, only a vague memory of what someone else said. As such, my memory may be faulty, and what they said might not have been entirely true. I don't know.

This is just something I thought could be potentially relevant.

This argument is ridiculous. Who wants a dangerous job if they can have a cushy 9-5 office job instead? Gender has nothing to do with this.

I'm disappointed by the reworded job descriptions. Many times in the examples the entire meaning was changed rather than just being painted in a more gender neutral light.

There's a huge difference between "Direct a team" and "Support a team".

"A diverse workplace is proven to get better results" citation needed

it's actually linked in the point below:http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028227/here-are-all-the-quantifi...

http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for...

While the study does point out that successful companies have more women it fails to provide causality. Do successful companies hire more women or does hiring more women cause you to be more successful?

MIT students are 45% female. But they have a pool of 12 applicants for very seat. (fewer than that for female and minority)

This is the person that made the site: https://twitter.com/kgunette

Karen Schoellkopf

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