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How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

fastcolabs.com

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Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#41

Post by cousin_it »

raganwald wrote: post #38
yummyfajitas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this kind of thinking incorrect?

Probably incorrect. And I could just as easily posit the reverse. Say we have one woman and nine men. If we add a woman, does it really double the likelihood of a harassment suit? Why would it? Either one of the nine men harasses women, or he doesn't, why would adding a second women change his behaviour? On the other hand, if we halve the proportion of women by hiring ten more men, I'd say you may have doubled the ch…

I don't completely understand your argument here, on a purely intellectual level...

In a very simple model, going from 0 women to 1 woman should increase the number of harassment suits, right? Then going from 1 woman to 2 women should have a similar effect, because all naturally occurring functions are differentiable :-) Intuitively it seems to me that the amount of reported harassment should be proportional to how many opportunities for harassment exist, or (under a different theory) how many opportunities for false claims exist, which is the same number by another name.

So it's a little strange to hear you say that anyone who disagrees with you must believe in nasty things like "harassment is made up by women". Do you know how hard it is to figure out causality from observational data? For any possible trend you could find in the data, like "reported harassment scales as the number of women times the square root of the number of men", one could probably make up a just-so story that blames men, and a different just-so story that blames women.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#42

Post by Tichy »

enraged_camel wrote: post #27
subsystem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, exactly. By funding this training program Etsy signaled that they value women as much as they value men. As a result, a ton of women applied to the program and many of those ended up getting hired.

Or maybe it's just thast they paid for their education. Getting something for free could attract a lot of people.

I also would like an update on the results in 5 years.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#43

Post by kansface »

I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it?

Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#44

Post by Tichy »

subsystem wrote: post #12
jerrya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is nothing in that experiment supporting that theory, though. So why push it anyway? How does people flocking to free education prove anything?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#45

Post by Tichy »

elptacek wrote: post #24

Recently I watched a documentary in which a researcher told of how he was ridiculed for studying happiness, even though nobody saw anything wrong with studying depression. Then I saw a documentary where a handful of really skinny people were put on a ridiculous diet and their physiological changes were tracked. Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math and engineering disciplines, p…

Whast extra hurdles did you have to jump over? Are you sure your wages are lower? Those differences are not very obvious for office jobs, in fact the other day I linked to astudy showing women in tech earn more than men ( till age 30 anyway, have no data on otherrs).

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#46

Post by steveklabnik »

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…

> I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles.

You are absolutely right that essentialism is not generally accepted any more, but you're mistaking essentialism a bit. Essentialism is not 'women do things differently than men,' essentialism is 'Women are x.'

As an example, certain feminists don't believe that trans women are women, because they are not born with sexual organs that are the essence of 'woman.'

In contrast, population thinking would assert some number of a portion of a population has some trait, but it's not required, or 'essential.' Saying that 'many women have vaginas' is not an essentialist statement, it's a population-ist one.

Therefore, "many women approach problems differently than many men" is not essentialst. "All women _must_ approach problems differently than men" is essentialist.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#47

Post by JohnBooty »

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…

  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 don't think it's controversial to believe that one's best chance at achieving "cognitive diversity" comes from having a variety of genders/backgrounds/ages/etc/whatever on your team.

That's not incompatible with rejecting the belief that one gender/race/whatever is "better" at something.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#48

Post by steveklabnik »

readme wrote: post #6
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…

Unfortunately, when approaching an issue like this you cannot do so without adopting a sexist viewpoint yourself. To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist. 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"

> To begin to analyze workers in terms of sex or gender to begin with, itself is sexist, the same way that affirmative action is racist.

Which is, again, not sexist or racist at all. *-ism implies institutional bias of a society, not an individual instance of discrimination.

It is _discriminatory_ against men, for sure. But not 'sexist.'

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#49

Post by furyofantares »

kansface wrote: post #43

I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it? Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically…

> Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men?

The reverse of this situation would be a company that sells largely to men but is comprised of 3 male engineers and 47 female engineers making an effort to recruit or train new male engineers, while women continue to make up 70% of their new engineering hires.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#50

Post by randomdata »

kansface wrote: post #43

I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it? Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically…

I tend to agree. I thought the whole point of gender equality was to be blind, so to speak, of gender?

If you have to specifically hire female people, it says their quality is lower (otherwise you would just always hire the best person female or male), which is not something I am sure I can support. Women are just as capable of being the best. It seems like an insult to give anyone special treatment just because of gender. Isn't that what we are trying to stop?

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