Hire remotely if you want diversity...
As a female engineer, I am not diversity
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#12>I don’t have physical or mental disabilities.
As a woman, you have a bit of both.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#13Interesting that this person does not mention diversity of political opinion, which seems to be lacking.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#14I get the point the author is making, but I'm not 100% sure I agree with how she expressed it. By limiting the definition of diversity/minority, we can probably identify a cohort for any individual where they are in the majority. Diversity measured across an entire company or large cohort doesn't really show the value of diversity in the first place. For me, the real power of diversity is at a micro-level. The author…
I think checklists get favored because they're easy to codify in the form of procedures and business processes. They're also easy to measure and report on. The broader, more complex concerns you point to are difficult to measure and thus perhaps more likely to be given short shrift.
All excellent points. It's definitely not press-release material, but (IMHO) highlights how things should be. Companies would naturally reach the desired levels of "diversity" if they simply practiced it at a micro level. Certainly some teams would look "unbalanced" by some of the traditional metrics, but I think everything would even out on the larger scale.
An interesting anecdote was that I led Engineering for a startup that was acquired by a large ($50-100 Billion) company. After we were acquired, several people commented on my collective team as being the "most diverse" in the company. That was nice to hear, but (for me) the most gratifying part was the team members taking stock and collectively thinking "oh yeah, I guess we are diverse!" It happened on purpose, but with the intention of using diversity as a source of strength not as a means of checking off a box.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#15Great article. Thanks for sharing this. I think perspectives like yours are what we need to move beyond what are often one-dimensional conversations about diversity. Aside: Please forgive the nitpick, but despite its widespread use I really don't think "extroverted introvert" is a thing. The problem is that these two things are opposite ends of a spectrum. I think what people really mean when they say "extroverted in…
I just finished "The personality brokers", fantastic book, which explores how EI entered popular culture via the Myers-Briggs test.
When the EI spectrum was subjected to more rigorous analysis it turned out it may just be a metric of "talkativeness" and not really related to the Jungian concept.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#16Interesting that this person does not mention diversity of political opinion, which seems to be lacking.
Touching display of political diversity from within Google https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/13/breitbart...
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#17In reference to the point she makes about people not assuming women are developers, I now make it a point to assume two things about most everyone (male and female identifying) that I meet in tech:
1) That they are competent and smart until they definitely prove otherwise to me.
2) That they are technical and interested in technology.
It's worked really well for me so far. In practice it means when I meet someone I say "You're a dev right?". Most people appreciate being assumed to be technical, and if they aren't we still get a great convo out of it. I admit it's kind of a silly thing, but so far in years of doing it I don't know of a time it's made anyone feel bad.
Edit - Also, if their answer to the dev question is that they are instead a product manager, UX, Designer, etc, I try and follow up with a funny compliment about their field. "Ah, so you make apps useable", etc. Again, just a simple conversational technique to make people feel valued.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#18Great article. Thanks for sharing this. I think perspectives like yours are what we need to move beyond what are often one-dimensional conversations about diversity. Aside: Please forgive the nitpick, but despite its widespread use I really don't think "extroverted introvert" is a thing. The problem is that these two things are opposite ends of a spectrum. I think what people really mean when they say "extroverted in…
I just finished "The personality brokers", fantastic book, which explores how E I entered popular culture via the Myers-Briggs test. When the E I spectrum was subjected to more rigorous analysis it turned out it may just be a metric of "talkativeness" and not really related to the Jungian concept.
Hmm.. Talkativeness seems way too narrow to me. The theory of deriving energy externally vs. internally makes the most sense to me personally. Though it would certainly correlate with talkativeness. But I'm not an expert on the matter :)
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think checklists get favored because they're easy to codify in the form of procedures and business processes. They're also easy to measure and report on. The broader, more complex concerns you point to are difficult to measure and thus perhaps more likely to be given short shrift.
All excellent points. It's definitely not press-release material, but (IMHO) highlights how things should be. Companies would naturally reach the desired levels of "diversity" if they simply practiced it at a micro level. Certainly some teams would look "unbalanced" by some of the traditional metrics, but I think everything would even out on the larger scale. An interesting anecdote was that I led Engineering for a s…
Thinking about this further, something else comes to mind.
One of the other things worth considering is that failing to comply with checklist-driven diversity can land you in court for supposed discrimination, where the traditional metrics matter quite a bit and other approaches matter not at all. Between liability and ease of implementation and measurement, it's definitely going to be privileged over other approaches.
Re: As a female engineer, I am not diversity
#20I do think that pointing at someone's physical body and saying, "They bring diversity because they're X!" is wrong.
However, I do think that gender and race have an influence on your thought processes because of who you tend to associate with.
In addition, she spent 15 years in China, which is definitely not very common here in the US. That alone means she's going to think somewhat differently than the average engineer.
And finally, a lack of diversity in a group (all white hetero males, for example) indicates an attempt to exclude diversity, though perhaps subconsciously.