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

To everyone agreeing with this post, I will ask you a question: Will YOU join a company with 40% females or 10% females with everything same. If the answer is former, there is a real value in hiring more females.

One thing that's becoming increasingly clear to me is that lumping everything under a single "diversity" label is becoming counterproductive. There are many types of diversity that we should be striving for and most have their own causes, concerns and there's limited overlap between the two. And, more importantly, the actions we need to take to address them are different.

Racial diversity is mostly inter-tribal. All jokes about the "I have black friends" protestations aside, the percentage of people who socialize primarily within their own race is high. It's very easy for people to go through life without making a deep connection with someone from a different race.

Gender diversity is very much intra-tribal. Most men still have very close relationships with women and vice versa. Whether it's mothers/fathers, brothers/sisters, girlfriends/boyfriends, wives/husbands or just close acquaintances, it's very difficult to go through life without caring deeply for someone of the opposite gender.

At my last company, we didn't have any explicit diversity quotas, but we tried harder to hire women and minorities because we felt it would add a diversity of perspectives that would make our products appeal to more people. Trying harder meant things like giving phone screens to candidates we might have otherwise rejected based solely on the resume or trying to arrange an interview panel that we felt would appeal to the candidate and, should they pass the interview, make them choose us over other companies. We never "lowered our bar" and accepted minority/female candidates that were unqualified.

But we started to notice an interesting phenomenon with how we composed our interview panels. When we had minority employees interview minority candidates, the results were good. Candidates tended to choose us more often, tended to be more comfortable in interviews and it was meaningful to our interviewers that we were making an effort and, in a way, validating their value to the company. The same cannot be said for when we had our female employees interview female candidates. They almost always found fault with and opposed hiring the candidate. It got so ridiculous that the male interviewers would often get on IM before the post-interview decision meeting so we could have our decision made before letting the women on the panel weigh in. Otherwise (and somewhat ironically), without providing that unified front and appearance of certainty, the women on our interview panels felt less heard and didn't feel like their input was appreciated. When we equivocated in that meeting, they'd notice and their opposition would be all the more sure.

And that's just one example of a concern that's different when considering the two most-scrutinized forms of diversity. There are many other forms of diversity that we should be striving for too...age diversity, socio-economic diversity, language diversity (related to, but not the same as racial diversity...a Russian speaker is still considered to be white)...even something as rarely-considered as diversity of physical attractiveness will lead to a team that's more resilient and has diversity of insight on the various subjects the business needs to consider to succeed. And each of these forms of diversity requires specific considerations be made during the hiring and review processes. Too many of the discussions on diversity lack the nuance necessary to improve the situation. We need to drop the generic "diversity" label and start discussing specifics of each kind of diversity.

Wait...this didn't make it easy at all. When you said "women are women" were you speaking in terms of gender or sex? After that you said "trans women", so I take it you mean gender only? If so, does that mean a biological female who identifies as a male does not count as a woman in tech?

When was the tech industry deliberately excluding people based on race and gender? The 50s? 60s?

I don't believe any specific action needs to be taken to promote diversity. As far as I can tell, people can work wherever they will, as long as they can pass the interview.

>arbitrarily exclusionary practices

Please name these.

> Before quotas and social justice warriors, were you thinking about fairness and equality when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender?

I was not thinking about that. And when I started being exposed to it, my immediate reaction was like you described: seeing political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism as a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

It took a while, but I now realize how silly that reaction was. I felt somewhat attacked by these 'social justice warriors and quotas'. And my reaction was in self defense to this perceived attack. I spent so much time reading about it on the internet. There were so many smart people applying logic and engineering skills to these social problems. I identified with these people and I agreed with most of it. They made it sound like these are all easy problems to solve and if everyone had read the same scientific studies as them and applied the same logical thinking then we would have a solution.

My view wasn't changed until I had much more experience in the real world. All these women that are being talked about as statistics are real people. They're become my friends and coworkers. I've learned to sympathize with them. I've learned that it's not us vs them. We are working together is this. I've learned that political correctness and reverse-racism/sexism are definitely not a greater problem than sexism and racism themselves.

I think the human aspect of all this is sorely missing on HN. At least it was for me.