How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#11

Post by RyanZAG » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:03 PM UTC

This is a really great plan for hiring top talent in a way that's not immediately obvious. There is a lot of talk of 'sexism' in the tech world, but from my experience, many top male engineers are going to prefer working in a team with a few more females. If the article is correct then this proves this further - they were able to hire some big names simply by having those extra female engineers.

Training up female engineers is also positive as the main complaint about 'diversity in tech' is putting less competent female engineers before more competent male engineers to meet ratio targets. (I'm not saying that females are less competent, but female engineers are harder to find.) By training up female engineers first before giving them the jobs, they are hopefully making sure that their female engineers are just as competent as their male engineers.

Basically it's a win all around, and is much better than just hiring any female engineer regardless of skill to make quota.

"Less headhunters, more hacker school" - Good call, good call.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#12

Post by subsystem » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:04 PM UTC

jerrya wrote: post #4

luu wrote: post #2

I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. 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…

The article doesn't describe sexism, the article describes scarcity and demand: 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…

The argument is that sexism is what creates the scarcity in the first place. So by creating an environment where sexism is less of a factor you attract more women.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#13

Post by duggan » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:20 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #10

luu wrote: post #2

I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. 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…

Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And I'm sure it discourages some women from entering. 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 extre…

Theory: the fields you mention, law and medicine, (historically and still) convey a higher social status on the member. There's also a relatively well trodden path through apprenticeship, successful practitioner, and eventual transition into other stable/respectable paths (politics, judiciary, hospital administration) as your career winds down.

Software engineering doesn't have that (yet?)

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#14

Post by SeanDav » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

erickhill wrote: post #3

Large previous thread on HN from 45 days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994

True but probably worth discussing again in light of "adriagate"

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#15

Post by jt2190 » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:35 PM UTC

Ellipsis753 wrote: post #9

Doesn't this seem a little sexist? I only hope they give men the equal opportunity to women and don't start "paving the way" to make it easier for women to get a job there than an equally good man. Avoiding sexism isn't about hiring an equal number of men as women. It's about hiring the best for the job regardless of their gender.

  > Doesn't this seem a little sexist?

Had the article been: "How Etsy Replaced 50% of our Male Engineers with Females" you might have cause for concern.

If we were using startup lingo, we'd be saying that Etsy is disrupting the traditional labor market by finding a supply of software engineers where one didn't (or didn't seem to) exist before. We wouldn't assume that the labor supply remained exactly the same size, and that every software engineer position staffed by a woman meant one less software engineer position staffed by a man.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#16

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:42 PM UTC

cantastoria wrote: post #5

Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists. I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circle…

Also consider the converse of this theory - should you avoid hiring women if your customer base is primarily male?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#17

Post by mbesto » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #16

cantastoria wrote: post #5

Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists. I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles. Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circle…

Also consider the converse of this theory - should you avoid hiring women if your customer base is primarily male?

This is all suggesting that developers have a say in product design. I assume developers at Etsy do...

In that case, I find developers and product managers (including myself) are sometimes way too bias to give valuable feedback to product decisions. On the other hand, the big advantage I could see would be if the developers are constantly having conversations with their friends about the usability and design of the site. In this case, I could see an advantage.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#18

Post by reeses » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 5:59 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #10

luu wrote: post #2

I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. 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…

Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And I'm sure it discourages some women from entering. 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 extre…

Supportive parents, significant others, and friends? The first wave of militant[1] feminists repeatedly reinforced that women were the equivalent of men in many ways and better in some[2]. Women today (under 40 or 50 years old) have had the benefit of hearing the same "you can do anything" message that parents have told their sons. Girls and women are supported socially when their MBA (which was the first professional non-library sciences, teaching, etc. that took off), JD, and MD. Mothers and Fathers are as proud of their daughters being excellent as they are of their sons.

Sure, there are religious, geographical, and socio-economic holdouts, but I think that this is one of the three big factors.

The second is that men tend to drop out to get jobs. If you can make $150k out of school with a BS EECS, why go to law or med school? Again, using my wife and her circle of female attorneys as examples, women seem to be more interested in personal satisfaction and are willing to pay a price for it, whether it's working in a rough environment (Kabul, Kosovo, Department of Homeland Security) or postponing that satisfaction by spending more time in school.

The third is that med and law school are great careers with a lot of opportunities for women who want to have children. Sure, there's partner track that will not necessarily be an option, but again, they don't always have the same "must be alpha" drive that men do. They can take a year off, maybe start back in a step behind, maybe work part time, but know that they can do the job they like, with variety in cases, until they decide to retire.

Of course, there are a bunch of contributory factors that I didn't cover and don't know how universal they are, but on the "sexist" side, it's still more acceptable for a woman to take time off and be supported by her husband than the other way around. You have exceptions, like ESR, so I don't think it's as influential.

Finally, they still put up with a lot of sexism, but they know it's wrong and that it is not a reflection on them, but on the morons trying to put them down. Not that it doesn't hurt, but sometimes hurt is a good motivator to succeed in spite of others.

[1] For want of a better word. [2] Just as I am better at feats of strength than my wife, who works out 1-2x/daily, but she is better at doing the type of research necessary to be one of the best litigators most attorneys have seen.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#19

Post by philwelch » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 6:03 PM UTC

duggan wrote: post #13

usaar333 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And I'm sure it discourages some women from entering. 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 extre…

Theory: the fields you mention, law and medicine, (historically and still) convey a higher social status on the member. There's also a relatively well trodden path through apprenticeship, successful practitioner, and eventual transition into other stable/respectable paths (politics, judiciary, hospital administration) as your career winds down. Software engineering doesn't have that (yet?)

People haven't aspired to become software engineers for generations. Only the past few years. In 1990, no one told their daughters that they could be software engineers. They told their daughters they could be lawyers and doctors, or maybe Senators, or business executives. Software engineering? Who wanted to do that?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#20

Post by Tichy » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #10

luu wrote: post #2

I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this. 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…

Of course, you can find plenty of sexism in both finance and engineering. And I'm sure it discourages some women from entering. 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 extre…

There are glamorous TV shows about law and medicine. None I am aware of for programming.