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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

#111

Post by klipt »

criddell wrote: post #89
orclev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the core of the article was pointing out that setting arbitrary quotas for female hires and then sacrificing your standards in order to meet those quotas does more harm than good. Fundamentally there are two issues that need addressing, firstly trying to get more qualified female applicants which is why she recommends focusing on early education and college STEM programs. Secondly there's the issue of how to addr…

One aspect I haven't read much about are the incentives that the big tech companies are offering women candidates. You mention wage gaps but if the pool of qualified engineers is mostly men and Google (and other tech companies) want to hire women, it seems that salaries for women should be far, far higher than it is for men. The fact that they are close to equal might be part of the problem.

Openly offering different salaries based on gender is incredibly illegal.

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

#112

Post by gthtjtkt »

tptacek wrote: 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…

> Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix.

I think you're underestimating the importance of one of her main points, specifically the fact that lowering the bar for diversity hires only perpetuates negative stereotypes about those groups and breeds resentment in all the others. It's increasing the divide rather than doing the opposite.

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

#114

Post by ben_jones »

tptacek wrote: 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…

"We should focus on all stages of the pipeline"

Yes we should. But if we have College intermediate Computer Science courses with 85% men (which was my anecdotal experience at a large University) this is clearly a massive (if not the largest) bottle neck and should be focused on.

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

#115

Post by Danihan »

iainmerrick wrote: post #108

This seems to be another version of: "the pipeline of potential talent from colleges has very few women, so if we go out of our way to hire extra women, we'll reduce our overall hiring quality. The college pipeline needs to be fixed first." Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often: hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix the college pipeline in future…

That a big maybe, it's completely unproven. Maybe hiring slightly less qualified people just because of their demographic group will cause all sorts of strange resentments across the board. That seems to be what our current hiring protocols are doing now.

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

#116

Post by falcolas »

The most unfortunate thing about this article is how often the author has to say "I'm not a traitor" in different ways.

Regardless of the diversity issue, do we really value a culture where we branding people with opinions in tech as traitors? Sure, she's preempting name calling that may never occur - but that means we're in a culture of discussion where being called a "trator" for expressing an opinion is even a possibility in the first place!

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

#117

Post by Zyst »

iainmerrick wrote: post #93
Danihan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about an artificially anonymized process. HR does know, or assumes, your gender from receiving your CV. But from that point onward your identity is anonymous.

For instance, HR creates a throw away email which will be used during the hiring process to coordinate the rest of the tasks. The coding interviews could use one of the many platforms we have for shared/same space coding with an added chat box for talking your way through the problem so to say.

And so hiring decisions are done by interviewers without knowing the gender or how the candidate looks.

I think this would allow for a good level of blind testing, but would provide some downsides in the side of cultural fit screening. It's a lot easier to pretend you're not an asshole in asynchronous text-only communications.

I guess everything carries a trade off.

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

#118

Post by fapjacks »

iainmerrick wrote: post #83
alexandercrohde wrote: post #56

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…

There appear to be problems with this approach that wouldn't be acceptable to the people driving the diversity effort [0]. To summarize the linked example: ElectronConf tried a gender-blind selection process for speakers, and when they lifted the veil on their selections, discovered they had only selected men to speak, so they canceled the conference.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868

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

#119

Post by arkitaip »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #76
j45 wrote: post #32

Is diversity only defined as gender diversity?

I was having a conversation about this yesterday with my girlfriend. What minorities need protection and rebalancing? We rarely talking about supporting the Jewish, for example, or Mexicans, or gays representation in engineering. What is the philosohpy at play here? And what if someday women became the majority, would you then fight to bring men back up to parity? She didn't have answers, which to me just made me won…

Diversity is intersectional and people who actually fight for diversity absolutely talk about and work so that Mexicans, Asians, latinos, the disabled, gay people, trans people, etc, etc are given equal opportunities and treatment in the workplace. There are literally thousands of organizations in just the US advocating for workplace diversity for pretty much any and every minority you can imagine. I suspect the problem is your "we" has little to no contact with minorities and a even poorer understanding of their everyday struggles.

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

#120

Post by peoplewindow »

aianus wrote: post #102
peoplewindow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost 100% sure that isn't the case. Maybe you're told it is, but Google liked to tell its employees the same thing. If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally. When your company says "the goal is to match the pipeline" yet still has…

Not necessarily. If 20% of college grads are women and all your competitors have an "aggressive diversity programme" you'll be hard-pressed to get 20% female hires without an "aggressive diversity programme" of your own. They would be out-marketing you for female candidates.

If you assume women pick companies based on diversity programmes and not the usual reasons people pick companies like needing a job, finding the problem interesting, good compensation, etc then yeah.

But unless that "aggressive programme" is illegally benefiting women with something concrete, like more pay, easier interviews or special privileges unavailable to men, it's like that the programme will be focused on trying to attract women into the profession who aren't already developers. So it'd make no difference to this hypothetical new college grad.

And if it did, then why would you want an employee whose primary reason for joining your startup over a competitor was the existence of a diversity programme? They'll just seem low energy compared to the men who joined because they love online discussions or whatever it is your firm does. Better pass and keep looking.

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