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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

Zyst wrote: post #117
iainmerrick wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by stevenwoo »

tptacek wrote: post #98
stevenwoo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be right about the work load/work type on average/median/most cases? but I still think there is a difference in social status for the fields/titles. To go slightly off topic, can you speculate as to why is there more gender parity in those fields that are harder to get into (in terms of specific schooling) in the first place?

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

#123

Post by humanrebar »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #96
humanrebar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

I didn't comment on any of her suggestions other than to say I've seen them in place already. So if we're not happy with the current proportion of women in tech, the industry should explain why, say, current mentoring efforts aren't working.

The answer could be "it works, but there's not enough of it" I guess.

I mostly brought it up because tptacek wrote, "It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline..." and I thought the recommendations for helping already-in-engineering women pointed to a more complex position. Though perhaps that position wasn't communicated, at least not clearly enough.

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

#124

Post by Frondo »

reitanqild wrote: post #110
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way are social justice causes authoritarian?

Not in itself. I'll even sometimes step up myself and at some point managed to get my boss to hire the girl who cleaned our offices since she was qualified only hadn't been considered since she was Polish. The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences (wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.

I'm going to push back on the critique of shaming. It's literally the only consequence groups without any (economic/political) power have. It bears no force of law. It creates no consequence directly except for a little discomfort on the part of the recipient.

Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with?

The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.

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

#125

Post by Infinitesimus »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #86
Infinitesimus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, her credentials (top tech first, high rank, woman ) will lend her more legitimacy in what she's said. It's not a novel idea, but the reality is that someone who is convinced all men are out to discriminate against women is more likely to listen to her than to a man writing the same post. So if for nothing at all, her voice matters in that it strengthens the argument that pipeline is a big part of…

>Plus, it's still relevant to remind people that equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same I see this trope trotted out again and again. Where exactly are we drawing the line between opportunity and outcome? When a 22 year old (woman or otherwise) gets hired at google that's no more an outcome than an opportunity. It's not like they're going to be sitting on their deathbed thinking of the way their life tu…

The phrase typically refers to what happens before the hiring stage.

Think kids that don't have role models of their gender/ethnicity. Think kids that are placed in gendered roles without respect for their own interests ("oh you're a buy, let me get you the trucks and computer programing skills. I'll get your sister the art books instead").

It extends to school programs, funding, etc. and is certainly a complex issue. It is more about giving people similar access and motivation to enter careers/areas of study/careers.

I agree that many events (hiring, etc.) can be seen as outcome or opportunity, it's about where you draw the line. The phrase comes up because the common conversation about diversity is focused on 50-50 splits in hires and that is dangerous if we do not accept that there isn't a 50-50 split in qualified supply in the first place.

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

#126

Post by danans »

> Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did.

This seems like false reasoning. She is using an intentionally biased sample (the candidate pipeline in a narrow subspecialty of software engineering) to draw conclusions about the larger software engineering candidate pipeline, which actually has a higher representation of women - not high overall - but higher than both her subspecialty and more importantly, higher than the current representation of women at tech companies.

> If we increase the inflow of women into tech education, we will automatically increase diversity in hiring.

This is not enough. She would have us believe that companies are automata that will just adapt to the changing composition of the pipeline with no other action needed. It's an absolution of corporate responsibility for diversity (that perhaps reflects her self interest as a founder/executive). But companies are not automata, they are entities with their own inertial biases, and in the case of large companies, these biases often are often rooted in the communities from which the companies sprang.

Companies, especially major tech companies, are major cultural influencers - their businesses are based in part on the power of their cultural influence, and with that comes disproportionate responsibility to act, especially when society at large has not been successful enough at solving the pipeline problem.

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

#127

Post by iainmerrick »

peoplewindow wrote: post #84
whyaduck wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Google, but I work for a large SV company with an aggressive diversity program, and the goal is to hire to match the demographics of the pipeline of qualified candidates, not the population at large.

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…

it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency

You still have to make sure you're doing that in an unbiased way. For example, if you ask interviewers to determine if a candidate is a good "cultural fit," you might accidentally end up with 95/5 men instead of 90/10.

Some kind of diversity program to make sure you're not undershooting the diversity of your job applicants is an absolute minimum requirement, I'd say.

Should you aim to overshoot? Maybe! That's a discussion worth having.

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

#128

Post by arkitaip »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #113
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way are social justice causes authoritarian?

Why is this question downvoted?

HN has a terrible bias towards white dudes and now that it's their privilege that's being questioned - as opposed to that of blur collar workers, conservatives, hillbillies etc - they are in full panic mode. Can't even discuss or take in another POV - just downvote.

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

#129

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Danihan wrote: post #68
JimboOmega wrote: post #46

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…

>What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement?

A few people didn't have the self control to pull it off, hired a bunch of white dudes, fired a bunch of "diverse" people and basically showed favoritism to people like themselves (i.e. mostly white men) which increased the disparity. After awhile this pattern became obvious and HR departments instituted quantitative policies because doing it poorly in a legally defensible way is better than trying to do it well at a risk of doing it poorly enough to get sued.

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

#130

Post by davehtaylor »

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…

> If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.

Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?

On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.

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