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I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

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Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#91
post #39

She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against? This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women e…

> She has very valid points about what should be fought against, like subliminal biases against women in tech. But then she's like 'we had to fire our women tech workers because they lacked the energy'. Isn't that something that's easily taken out of context and fuels exactly what she advocates against?

> This feels to me that it's the kind of articles that causes engineer bros to say things like: 'see, even good women engineers think women suck at it'.

She stated literally what happened. No need for her to editorialize.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#92
I'm going to illustrate why I think the points brought up by this post have at minimum some level of validity with a toy example, that takes sex out of the equation completely.

Lets say you took a population of candidates with some distribution of individual programming skills, and assigned them randomly into two categories, with a 90-10 split between A and B. E(skill of a candidate in A) = E(skill of a candidate in B)

Now you rank all the candidates in A and B respectively from best to worst, and you pick the top N candidates from A, and top N candidates from B. Taking that set, E(skill of picked candidates from A) > E(skill of picked candidates from B)

There is no prejudice here! A and B are randomly assigned, if you pick any one individual from A, they are exactly the same on average as an individual from B. But conditioning on the constraint that you need to pick the same number from A and B, where A and B have different population size, then you will get the result that A is on average better than B.

In a hypothetical world where sexism does not exist, given the current ratio of men to women in tech we would expect to see a skill disparity in the average if we enforced hiring equal numbers of both men and women.

Edited to add some further points:

1) Note that the above does not hold true if the individual programming skills are constant after some threshold, so the top N from A and top N from B all have the same level of skill. I don't think this is true in my personal experience, but I have seen people make this argument.

2) The above also does not hold true if the ranking mechanism (interviewing process) does not actually rank the programming skills of A and B successfully. I've also seen people make this argument, but note that as long as some correlation exists between [interview result] and [programming skill] then the above still holds true. It seems highly unlikely that there is zero correlation.

3) I don't necessarily agree with the author that this is a bad thing - I think in the long run to get equal numbers of women and men in candidate pools, having equal numbers of female and male programmers at places like Google can only help. While theoretically there may be an average skill difference, I'm not sure that you can really notice it on an individual level because of the sheer number of qualified candidates that apply to a place like google.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#93
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So quotas are terrible, yes. But what if there are still biases in hiring? That someone sees a woman and assumes this or that about her based on gender alone? My own experience as a transgender person is that there are people who, as my gender presentation has shifted, really seem to view me as less competent. Not in a "girl's can't code" way, but like steadily viewing me as more junior, needing more hand holding, gi…

I believe that treating everyone as individuals, rather than as stereotypical groups, is the only way forward. It's the only truly fair approach. What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit? If biases are really that big of an issue (are there studies that show this is true in tech?) then what is wrong with "blind-hir…

You don't have to get to know someone's personality at a deep level to make a hiring decision, you need to know their skill level and aptitude.

I agree, but how do you estimate their aptitude in an unbiased way? That mostly rules out face-to-face conversations, which is what most companies use.

Aptitude tests? I feel like those have a bad reputation, at least in Bay Area tech companies. Are there good tests we should be using? How do you customize the test to fit your own company? To the extent that "cultural fit" is important for effective teams (and isn't simply a way of excluding women, black people, etc) how do you test for that?

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#94
post #19

And your contribution is.. Mansplaining?

Mansplaining is one of those words like libtard or freetard that indicates that the user is unlikely to say anything insightful or deep.

And the reception to the use of those words indicates the likelihood that the forum can support insightful or deep discussion.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#95
People are still trying to make weak links between biology and interest in a subject, as if there are some mysterious laws of nature that link work to body chemistry. There's no overwhelming scientific evidence proving this.

Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the barriers they'll face when they get there.

A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work) could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach parity in tech employment, they would actually have to want to reach parity, and fight for it.

Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the system to account for a perceived natural imbalance.

In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy, and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed.

What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today? Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc. Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!

Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats.

To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers.

Can someone please tell me why a woman would want to work in tech in the first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in tech?

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#96
post #2

Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…

Compared to her anecdote about her kids, she spends more space recounting how she tried to hire and retain women with no appreciable success. EDIT: Also she recommends these at the bottom of her piece: """ Start a mentoring program. If you are a manager, make sure women who work for you are properly treated and recognized. Educate men and women about how to detect and correct subliminal biases. Find men who are willi…

>the mentoring program could be for girls and young women //

How is that fair for boys/men if they're excluded from mentoring opportunities (eg in a company that hires them) simply because they're male.

This is "fine" if your objective is "hire more women". As someone who supports equality of opportunity I don't see how compounding more sexism will ever lead to less sexism.

In the UK, overall, young men get poorer school results, are less represented at university, receive lower wages than women (up to the ages when people choose to start families) ... how does this sort of sexist mentoring policy fit in here? Is it really enough to say "well if we look only at this industry segment"?

What's wrong with equality?

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how would you counteract that stereotype/bias? Author would suggest lowering the bar [for women] would only reinforce such stereotypes, do you agree or disagree?

I keep thinking about orchestras, where simply auditioning performers behind a curtain completely fixes the bias problem. Of course the trick is that you don't need to see the candidates or talk to them, just listen to their playing. In software, we would need to find some similarly effective way to measure anonymized performance. In fact, completely aside from fixing gender and racial biases, that's something we cou…

I believe interviewing.io did something with voice-pitch-adjusting (to make girls sound like guys, or vice-versa) in phone interviews to try to study exactly this effect.

I think their results were confusing and uncertain, but the methodology seemed brilliant and I think should be the gold-standard for tech interviews. If we keep it phone it would remove other subliminal biases (attractiveness, physical disabilities) as an additional benefit.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#98
post #2

Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…

Didn't we have a point where there was close to gender parity in college in computer science at a lot of colleges in the 80's/90's? My off the wall hypothesis from the gender pay disparity data is that the lack of women is more related to people making the judgement that the amount of time at work (versus time with family) in relationship to the value of the work itself means women choose not to work/continue a caree…

This is special pleading. Software developers like to believe they're workaholics, but a job as a biglaw associate or a medical resident will eat your life in ways we'd find difficult to imagine, and it's hard to believe that the kind of work a law associate does (kowtowing to partners to gather more scut-work to get done for faceless corporate clients) is more meaningful than the work a developer does. That, and the fact that our supposed 80 hour work weeks consist of huge amounts of fucking around, and unlike an associate or a resident, we can almost always spend at least 30 of those "hours" WFH, and unlike either of those alternatives, if we roll into the office at 10:30 we're probably in the early bird cohort.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#99
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see where the author's reasoning is weak. A female tech lead / founder tried the standard way to get better representation of women at Google: try to hire more women, and found out there weren't enough highly qualified candidates to significantly move the numbers in the desired direction. Then as a founder herself, she tried to hire a higher percentage of women, and found there weren't enough candidates. She…

Again: everyone knows the candidate pool is overwhelmingly comprised of men. There's no real dispute anywhere about this fact. It's not part of the debate; there is no debate about it. Nobody can reasonably believe it's realistic to expect parity in hiring in the immediacy, and all the available evidence suggests --- like you'd expect! --- that Google doesn't expect that either. That makes that part of the argument i…

Doesn't that kind of point to an alternate solution, that the entire interview by interrogation coding process is the problem (if the input pool is 98% men of course they are going to get 98% men out) and they should be doing the mentor approach/internship for all junior programmers instead of the rigid pass/fail requirement. One of the problems with their current approach is similar to the college hazing ritual, all the upperclassmen went through it, so they're going to make everyone else suffer through it as well.

Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

#100
An interesting point in the post is about the Google interview itself, and how she had to appeal in order to hire candidates who then turned out to each have a big impact. Google calls this the false negative problem but it seems to be a big problem. Google itself has already have shown that GPA and academic credentials do not correlate with job performance.
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