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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

#351

Post by leereeves »

Lon7 wrote: post #259
okreallywtf wrote: post #236

I 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…

> 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 themsel…

How many people here were alive "when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender?"

Preferences (quotas, lower standards, financial incentives, etc) for women and minorities in hiring and admissions have existed for a long time.

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

#352

Post by smokeyj »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #156
reitanqild wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case I think it was used to a particular effect. The irony here is tptacek (a man) is out to explain why this woman is wrong - in order to help women.

Which of course is impossible because the sex of the person who uses/states an argument is the most substantive part, nothing else matters. Thus dismissing a person's argument based only on their sex is just right. /s Calling someone's comment "mansplaining" is the mirror image of asking to see "the man in charge"; it's dismissal based on the sex of the person being addressed.

Here we have a straight white male telling a woman she's wrong about her experience. I don't subscribe to identity politics, but if you do - there's a fishy smell here.

Of course the logical thing is to evaluate all ideas for their merit. But that's not what we're doing here.

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

#353

Post by hackinthebochs »

KirinDave wrote: post #131

One of the reasons I push for very objective, fixed, and carefully selected technical interview techniques is precisely to avoid these issues. The goal is to reach a point where either you pass the technical, or you don't. But making a fair technical assessment for levels and roles in a company takes time and is very tempting (but, I argue, futile) to contract out. I think in a larger context: the "pipeline problem"…

>She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter... isn't interested.

And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?

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

#354

Post by Lon7 »

leereeves wrote: post #351
Lon7 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 themsel…

How many people here were alive "when the status quo potentially benefited you and excluded others not on their merit but race and gender?" Preferences (quotas, lower standards, financial incentives, etc) for women and minorities in hiring and admissions have existed for a long time.

I'm still pretty young yet I've experienced benefits solely from my gender.

My sister is smarter than me and better at math and physics than me. I was invited by my grade school to go to robotics camps over the summer, she wasn't. I was given special permission to take computer science courses not offered by our highschool, she wasn't. I was encouraged to to go into engineering by our guidance Councillor, she wasn't. My dad wanted me to go into engineering, he didn't really want her to. I didn't realize that any of this was happening at the time. It wasn't until years later that I was talking to my sister that she explained the countless opportunities and support that I had and she didn't. This all happened in a well off neighborhood in Canada.

So is it really any surprise that I'm the highly paid engineer while she is a school teacher barely scraping by? The status quo still benefits people based on race and gender.

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

#355

Post by euske »

I'm going to ask a practical advice here. As a male teacher, what can I do in a classroom to encourage more female students for math/logic/programming? I sometimes talk about how there are great female software developers out there and how gender shouldn't be hindering their talent, but that's about it. And when a female student isn't performing well and being bummed, I can't do much other than general vague-sounding encouragement. At the same time, I don't want to sound too pushy. I live in a very sexist country compared to the US (Japan) and there's not much advice on this kind of things from other educators. Is there anything else that I can do to help the cause?

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

#356

Post by tptacek »

smokeyj wrote: post #352
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of course is impossible because the sex of the person who uses/states an argument is the most substantive part, nothing else matters. Thus dismissing a person's argument based only on their sex is just right. /s Calling someone's comment "mansplaining" is the mirror image of asking to see "the man in charge"; it's dismissal based on the sex of the person being addressed.

Here we have a straight white male telling a woman she's wrong about her experience. I don't subscribe to identity politics, but if you do - there's a fishy smell here. Of course the logical thing is to evaluate all ideas for their merit. But that's not what we're doing here.

Yes. I am a straight white male. That is what I'm doing. I would say exactly the same set of things to her face as well. Next question?

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

#357

Post by TheLilHipster »

jeffrom wrote: post #335
m1el wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you said here is a counter argument to either the comment you replied to or the linked post. > All these women that are being talked about as statistics are real people. Nobody denies that. However, once you say that there's not enough "equality" of engineers, you invoke statistics. > I think the human aspect of all this is sorely missing on HN. Think of those poor talented engineers denied a place of work be…

Well it's not. Not objectively. Not in any sense. Only in abstract terms.

> Not in any sense.

Eh?

> Only in abstract terms.

You want something literal? Lets throw some reverse-VIOLENCE into the mix!

I'm going to bash my neighbors head in, because he's "definitely" a violent psychopath (It said so on the internet remember).

The heart of the issue is DISCRIMINATION. Doesn't matter if its positive or negative, you're EXCLUDING groups/individuals which is divisive and breeds discontent.

Someone posted below

> judged by the content and quality of their character rather than some of the variation of an attempt to combat discrimination through discrimination.

THAT is equality.

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

#358

Post by stevenwoo »

wizu wrote: post #148
criddell wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, you could let the market dictate their salaries, but then you run into the issue of paying one gender more money for the same amount of work, a practice outlawed under the Equality Pay Act of 1963.

This hasn't stopped Google according to the Labor Department lawsuit. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/technology/google-labor-depa...

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

#359

Post by dragonwriter »

stevenwoo wrote: post #358
wizu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, you could let the market dictate their salaries, but then you run into the issue of paying one gender more money for the same amount of work, a practice outlawed under the Equality Pay Act of 1963.

This hasn't stopped Google according to the Labor Department lawsuit. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/technology/google-labor-depa...

The lawsuit in that article is about a dispute over Google providing employee contact information to support a Labor Dept audit, not about alleged pay discrimination.

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

#360

Post by stevenwoo »

mcguire wrote: post #312
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: everyone knows the candidate pool is overwhelmingly comprised of men. There's no real dispute anywhere about this fact. It's not part of the debate; there is no debate about it. 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. That makes that part of the argument i…

Note: The percentage of women in computing is roughly 25%. I don't know how she got the 90% and 98% numbers.

My personal anecdote filtering candidates for three years in the 1990's for a video game studio was 100's of male candidates submitted their resume for programming positions versus three females at that stage. We interviewed two of the women (the third took a job in another industry before we had the chance to interview her) and made offers to the other two of them.
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