We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in engineering hiring

1) Assume good faith until you have reason to assume otherwise. Try your best to NOT make assumptions about people's experiences or situations.

2) If someone, particularly a marginalized person, brings up an experience they have had but you have not had, your first impulse should be to hear them out, NOT to invalidate them.

3) Likewise, just because you personally may not have seen or experienced something in this group/in real life, it does not mean that said thing does not happen.

4) Above all, just be good to each other. It can often be difficult to discern tone and intent over the internet, but try not to pounce on each other too quickly.

If, as an manager at a FAANG, you say "it's a pipeline problem" you're probably saying that there aren't enough candidates because not enough women graduate from ST programs. If you're a program development person at a university you're probably saying not enough enroll. If you say it as a high school guidance counsellor you probably are saying there's not enough push for girls to do well in science and math classes and apply that to their higher education even if there is.

The point is that whatever stage of the pipeline you're at, if you want things to improve, you have to work with the tools at your disposal. You can't wait for universities to both increase enrollment and increase graduation (two separate problems as well). As this post points out you need to look for other ways to find talent that bypass that problem and recognize that the path to your job for a minority in your field will probably look drastically different to yours. It's just never going to be enough to wave your hand at the problem and blame the stage before you.

The post does get at this for sure, so I'm not really criticizing it for its conclusion, but the first couple of paragraphs build a strawman that I think is very unhelpful to understanding the nature of the problem.

Soon after the industry seriously stops doing this, the fancy name schools will quickly get female-dominated, and whatever the industry starts using as a signal of candidate quality that hadn't been male-dominated before, will start to be.

When proposing new policies, always solve for equilibrium, don't ignore second order effects, and never assume the world is steady state system.

I think the most damning metric I see constantly touted is percentage gender; "We aim to have 50% women in the workplace" is a prime example of this. If this is by sexual assignment then even if the value is reached the intent will not be (one could be a female by sex but a male by gender and thus from a diversity standpoint is largely contributing as a male). If this is by gender assignment not only is the metric focused on a fluid concept but it's also not a binary - in order to reach 50% women we'd only have 50% for the remaining non-women, which represents a broad range of gender expression and is not exclusively male.

I do respect that many companies (not just in tech) see diversity as an issue and are trying to do something about it. However, I do hope that they spend more time investigating the full range of the issue and begin by making small attempts at approaching the problem space before declaring metrics as objectives.