How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (> 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been arbitraged away, but it took decades to get to this point.

At the time, people gave many reasons sexism couldn't possibly exist in finance; naturally, more men went into finance because women just didn't like finance, and more men had senior positions because simply didn't want senior positions, and so on and so forth (oddly enough, those same reasons are given today, in discussions of sexism in CS and engineering).

In 1987, Townsend-Greenspan shut down, after thirty successful years, because Greenspan became chairman of the Fed. Now, twenty-six years later, the gender gap among MBAs is much smaller than it used to be, but it hasn't disappeared. I hope it doesn't take fifty-six years from the founding of Etsy for someone to be able to make a comment like this about programmers.

I'm afraid it might be a while, though. In discussions about the topic here on HN, the top comment is often something along the lines of how there obviously isn't any sexism in the field, or if there is any, it's rare, and certainly not a systematic problem, and how it's simply impossible that the highly skewed male:female ratio in the field is due to sexism. That's usually followed by a paragraph on how any attempts to address the issue are an insidious cause of reverse sexism.

The top comment in the previous thread on this topic was a comment about how everything Etsy is doing applies equally to all people, not just women, despite a large body of research indicating that, on average, women are treated differently in the workplace [1], and how some simple changes can neutralize many serious problems [2].

[1] Perhaps someone else can supply a reference to a well-known study that I can't seem to look up. When men react with anger, or act authoritatively, that's seen neutrally or positively, but when women do the same, it's seen negatively.

[2] http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511

In Silicon Valley today it's not possible to hire more women simply by recruiting them. Good engineers today have their pick of jobs, and good female engineers are being stalked like the last antelope on the African veldt.

Etsy's solution doesn't seem to be to stop sexism, Etsy's solution appears to be train more engineers, take a risk on junior women engineers out of Hacker School, and let their risk taking and boots on the ground approach serve as a signal to senior women engineers.

None of this is evidence of sexism in CS and engineering, it was a winning strategy to defeat scarcity.

It's fine and good that companies want to hire more female engineers. But this article is lame, which you should have picked up on when the author used the word "rockstar"

But it is important to note there are plenty of industries today with high female representation, such as law and medicine, that in the recent past were bastions of male dominance. A female relative of mine went through law school in the 1950s and can tell tales of male chauvinism more extreme than you'd find anywhere today in tech or finance. But somehow, women went to law school more and more, and today represent ~50% of law classes. Something must be different about these fields, but I'm not sure what.