Bravo! Every point here is spot on!
I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
261–270 of 449 posts
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#262Some 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…
Completely agree, and I was about to comment on the same thing that the author was drawing some dangerous conclusions from the anecdote about her kids, the same sort of conclusions I see a lot of other parents with young children making as well.
I'm female. When I was 7/8 years old I literally cried about having to do multiplication and addition flash cards. I was failing math. My dad said "Listen, you're not going to be a mathematician, but you have to learn multiplication!" Hated hated hated it.
Things started to turn around in middle school. My teachers kept pushing me, I kept taking math, I started to enjoy it. By 16 I was cross-registering at a local community college to take calculus and was in differential equations my senior year. I have a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in software engineering.
The preferences of seven year olds are almost meaningless, and their career aspirations are definitely meaningless. When I was seven I wanted to be either a baker or a manicurist or president of the United States. I haven't been interested in the culinary arts, cosmetology, or politics since. My sister was an avid artist, now she's an actuary who doesn't even do art as a hobby.
Almost every parent (especially parents of mixed-gendered children) I have this discussion with ends up saying something along the lines of "Just wait until you have kids -- boys and girls are super different and my son likes trucks and machines and my daughter likes dolls!" Yeah, but what does that have to do with which classes they enjoy in middle school or high school? I don't know. Maybe I will change my mind, but this extrapolation of early childhood preferences into adulthood career paths bugs the heck out of me.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain why this post is disapearing from the frontpage as fast as it is? Even though it has the most votes in very little time. (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011458 )
Users are flagging it heavily, as they have been flagging most opinion pieces that have appeared during this tidal wave. People who feel strongly one way or the other typically want to see the articles they agree with stay on the front page and the ones they disagree with get flagged. But from a systemic point of view, it isn't in HN's interest to have the front page dominated by repetitive arguments (and certainly n…
I think maybe flagging needs to be reworked into:
- spam
- nsfw content
- breaks the rules
So people can flag "bad" stuff and don't remove topics based on their political/social views instead? Currently the system seems to be broken if this happens. This way you could easly penalize the users who try to manipulate by flagging "valid" topics.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring. This will possibly result in less women being hired. See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
Then there's either something wrong with how they introduced the trial, or there are just fewer qualified female candidates. Either way, I really didn't understand why they backed off on the trial. If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.
> If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.
Because it goes against the results they wanted to arrive at.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#265" 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.…
>"reverse sexism"
This phrase is itself a loaded non-thing, as it implies that all of this is taking place in a vacuum that was laboratory-generated by white-coated technicians.
But, instead, it's a grimy, imperfect world in which we know that women and other groups have been systematically disenfranchised and continue to be so. So, yeah, maybe someone else whose history does not bear that incredible burden will finally themselves miss out on an opportunity here or there. To those who complain of unfairness, I say "welcome to the world experienced for generations by the very people you now resent because you have to walk in their shoes for a few steps".
>the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions
"Best" by whose standard? People aren't binary or discrete. They exist on a continuum with different strengths and weaknesses. Divergent skillsets, experiences, and perspectives matter, as well as cultivating a culture that at least somewhat reflects your customer base and the wider society in which your business operates. There is actual value to diversity that goes beyond daily LOC output.
Yeah, that may sound cliche, but it is a.) true and b.) vastly underappreciated by many who frequently express their lack of appreciation with statements about "hiring the best person for the job" and the like.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#266Good article, but I was disappointed by her implying that "women lack energy". That's too broad a statement. The women she hired may have lacked energy but you can't generalize based on that small sample.
I agree that we need to fix the problem at the source, i.e., encourage more girls (actually, kids in general, why limit it to girls?) to be interested in tech while they are still in middle and high schools.
There is ample evidence that there is a cultural problem in the United States in this regard. The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe. So there is something in the US culture that makes American women not want to take up tech.
The diversity memo doesn't address the fact that more women take tech jobs when impediments are removed, as evidenced by the larger percentage of women in tech jobs in other countries.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#267People 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 ge…
There's no evidence linking, for example, testosterone levels to bone and muscle mass? Or progesterone levels to compassion and nurturing desires? I think you need to look a little harder. Of course more complex skills/desires/abilities are going to have more complex biological causation; though if you can prove otherwise, go ahead.
The only biological causation here is that people with penises oppress those without. You can't explain human behavior purely in biological terms because they aren't biological systems, they're social.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#268Great article. Sad that if this article had been written by a man, it would not be getting any attention and the comments would be calling the author "sexist".
Here are my 2 cents as a male (thus my opinion on the issue automatically doesn't carry any weight to most of you). Women chose to pursue tech less than men (just look at any open source project), and this starts way before college. I took CS in high school - not because anybody encouraged me, but because I taught myself how to code as a kid in order to make videogames and cheat at them - and there were very few women in that class.
That's why it boggles my mind when people act as if discrimination is the reason why women are underrepresented in tech. Girls are underrepresented in introductory CS courses in high school, meaning they're clearly not even choosing to pursue the field as much as men. You can't claim discrimination if they're not even signing up for the introductory classes. And anyone who's taken a CS course in college knows that at least half the students there have been coding since they were kids (I graduated a while ago so I'd imagine that's even more the case now) - again, not because anybody told them to, but because they sought that knowledge out themselves - which can be intimidating to newcomers who've never seen "Hello, World".
Videogames are probably the main reason why men pursue CS more than women. The naive feminist will say "videogames are targeted towards boys". Yes they are - but that's because videogame developers are predominantly male, and game developers are more likely to create games that they themselves would enjoy. Videogames being male-dominated is simply a reflection of gendered biological differences, not some conspiracy to exclude women.
Any sort of discrimination on the basis of gender/race is a problem, that's a given and nobody will dispute that. But it should not be considered a problem that women choose to pursue tech less than men, just like it's not considered a problem that men are less likely to pursue nursing, primary/secondary education, psychiatry, fashion, and yoga teaching. Men who like yoga don't give a fuck about the underrepresentation of men in yoga classes.
At the end of the day, this "diversity" debate gets way too much attention. There used to be a time when the focus was on the tech and doing cool things, not what people looked like.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#269I see some good points on both sides of the discussion here but one thing occurs to me about the current diversity-pushback that I'm seeing(I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful). We've surprisingly quickly moved from periods where it was common to simply refuse to even consider minorities or women in many fields to a time when m…
Speaking as a bitter cynic, I don't find anything surprising about it. As far as I would expect, the first defense is that they are incompetent for the task. The second is that you cannot do anything about it because that would be the same evil discrimination. (The apparent third, that they don't want to do it, did take me by surprise. Color me impressed.)
To address your actual post, I seem to have missed the whole thing. I spent much of my career in Austin as a fairly short term contractor, with the first positions I took having a rough balance. (This was the early '90s.) There was never a question about the women's competence (or interest). I can't speak to any questions of harassment, though; I rarely got close to my coworkers. Only the last contract job was a sausage fest. :-)
Then I spent two longer stretches at UT Austin and as a NASA contractor. Both environments were fairly equal, sex wise.
On the other hand, my mother worked for a bank for 40 years and never got higher than head teller, in spite of training several men who went on to be her supervisors. And my SO has several stories of being told that women can't major in mathematics.
Re: I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity
#270>"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."
And, why aren't these genuinely amazing women in tech otherwise being found?
How is it that things are so easily "f'd up" for them?