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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

#171

Post by wutbrodo »

pnathan wrote: post #161
wutbrodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 yrs, including those internally and externally at Google. You're correct that expecting emplo…

> You're clearly entirely unaware of the context of any of the diversity conversations that have gone on in tech in the last 5-10 tptacek is, uh, not someone those words apply to. He's been involved in these discussions for the last half decade on HN , one of the key industry forums. He's run part of hiring programs at a previous employer, and founded a startup oriented on improving engineering hiring. Politely, sir,…

Thanks for the context.

I wasn't saying this just as a throwaway insult. It's just that calling something a strawman (as he does downthread) depends on confidently asserting that nobody could ever _possibly_ support such a ridiculous claim. That very much doesn't fit with the experience of many of the people here,including those of us who have worked for Google now or in the past.

> Politely, sir, take a deep breath.

Haha, thanks, but I'm not sure where the assumption that I'm worked up about this comes from. The only thing in my comment that approaches impoliteness is assuming that he's not familiar enough with the conversations around tech hiring at big companies, which seemed like the only plausible explanation for thinking that no one could possibly be making the argument he calls a "strawman".

I'm honestly still not sure what an alternative explanation would be.

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

#172

Post by philwelch »

stevenwoo wrote: post #88
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…

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…

I saw an interesting argument about this. In the 80's, programming wasn't a high status occupation and the CS community was more accepting of women than other professions. Over time, as the rest of society became less sexist, women had more options and gravitated away from CS towards law, medicine, and other fields.

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

#173

Post by unit91 »

Can anyone provide insight as to how transgendered people count in the "women in tech" discussion? As I see it, there's now a quadrant of biological (fe)males and psychological (fe)males. Would a woman in tech mean only biologically and psychologically female, or also biologically female, also psychologically female, depends on who's counting?

I ask only because I see this already hyper-sensitive topic very soon becoming nearly impossible to discuss without somebody taking offense due to the combined effects of the biological and psychological gender sensitivities.

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

#174

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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…

Uhg. Another post that asserts increasing diversity inevitably means lowering the bar. I don't think that's the case at all.

Rhetoric like this is toxic and erodes the presumption of competence people should have in their colleagues. I know great developers of every gender, but it's always only the women that have to justify that their presence isn't the result of some "diversity charity".

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

#175

Post by arkitaip »

cylinder wrote: post #143

Is anyone aware of how many female engineers come out of Iran? This has everything to do with education quality. Our math education is an absolute joke in the US, even mine and I went to a supposedly amazing public school. Add in cultural biases such as parents and teachers pushing bright girls to "girly" fields instead of math and you end up like this. Then in typical American fashion we try to impose quotas or othe…

I dislike the blog post for being poorly written but one of the author's points is that it's too late to attack diversity during recruiting because your pool of women applicants will already be tiny due to attrition. She is advocating approaching women in college but at you point out, even that's way too late. You can't have a society that instills shitty values into people from their first breath and then expect to undo all those years of mindfuckery because you work at a progressive place and are really passionate about diversity.

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

#176

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

nodamage wrote: post #158
cargo8 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that her "infinite loop" theory was her perception of the anecdote around hiring at her own startup. It does seem conceivable, but yeah obviously data is light here. Good point on how the whole interview process is a crapshoot anyway. Hadn't really thought about that aspect, but obviously is a huge opportunity for subliminal bias since it is how it is.

Even in her anecdote she doesn't actually come out and say they lowered their standards until they ended up hiring women who "couldn't do the work", at least in terms of technical ability. Her only description of these women is: "But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team." What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women u…

Besides that, a manager/leader/founder needs to take ownership of their team's motivation (within reasonable limits).

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

#178

Post by pbhjpbhj »

qub1t wrote: post #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…

Re 3) it mightn't make an appreciable difference to the skill set as a whole, but it's sexist.

Why do something sexist that didn't have a benefit.

How is it OK to respond to a candidate for hiring "sorry you're the wrong sex" if they're otherwise the best candidate. That's completely wrong IMO.

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

#179

Post by ryanobjc »

turc1656 wrote: post #146

" In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech. " Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions.…

So, from the context of Google, you are implying that is not what Google does (hires only to the bar). However, that is exactly what Google does. To get hired you have to pass the 5-interview in-person panel. Period.

What the original memo author was railing about, incorrectly, is the perception that spending more time widening the recruiting funnel for "diversity candidates" was lowering the bar. That is not true.

The reason is simple, Google doesn't hire people to fill positions, we hire people who are awesome/pass the interview bar. If there are 10 awesome people, we hire them. If there are 11, we hire them. There are always more positions than qualified candidates.

If you want to talk about if the bar is the correct measurement, etc, that's a completely separate conversation and wasn't part of the little "anti-diversity memo".

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

#180

Post by humanrebar »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #151
humanrebar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They generally like to geek out, look weird, look smart or whatever. Playing off this, I think pop culture deserves more blame than it gets for the lack of women in tech. A software engineer is more likely to enjoy ComicCon than than the average person, but actually working in software is pretty normal. In the previous decade or two, some TV shows have been casting women as the "tech genius" quite a bit. That's goo…

Could you list some of the "tech genius" characters you have in mind? I don't watch that much TV, but Abby (sp?) from NCIS springs to mind, slightly quirky, but v. intelligent, commanding. The equivalent character in Alias, f.e., was (in early series at least) a one-dimensional dork.

Garcia from Criminal Minds, Chloe from 24 (more antisocial than specifically Hot Topic), Jenna Simmons from Agents of Shield, one of the clones from Orphan Black (IIRC... didn't watch this much).

Basically anyone in Big Bang Theory, Bones (herself). They're certainly STEM, but maybe not "tech" depending on what people mean by that.

I don't necessarily think the equivalent male characters are treated comparably well, for what it's worth. But if you want to encourage teenage girls to look at tech, showing them that it's also for normal people would help a lot.

I will say that Silicon Valley does a decent job subverting the trend with a handful of minor female characters.

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