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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

#61

Post by steveklabnik »

cantastoria wrote: post #56
steveklabnik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

But the author is stating that "woman are x" by stating they bring more "cognitive diversity" to a team. In order for this to be true, woman in fact "must" approach problems differently than men or there would be no diversity benefit (whatever that may be in this case).

If it's not a rigorous philosophical work, people will not be very precise with their qualifiers.

For example, in the previous sentence, I said 'people' and not 'most people.' Especially in the social sciences, people assume you're discussing populations, and words like 'most' impede clarity more than aid it.

That said, I don't know the author, and they may be a gender essentialist; they do still exist.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#62

Post by sprash »

Work, after all, is mostly about getting shit done. If there is a shortage of female engineers they are probably overvalued which also means I could hire equally good or better men for less money.

Does the little gain of prestige make up for the huge potential loss of opportunity?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#63

Post by steveklabnik »

cantastoria wrote: post #60
steveklabnik wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.'

-ism implies institutional bias of a society Sexism/racism et al. can exist outside of institutions no? "Hate crimes" for instance clearly do not involve any recognizable institutions yet clearly involve an -ism of some kind. Nor do -isms only exist at the society level. For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal…

> "Hate crimes" for instance clearly do not involve any recognizable institutions yet clearly involve an -ism of some kind.

Only in the sense that they 'reproduce' the broader -ism. The individual act is one of discrimination, the sum of all acts collectively is an *-ism.

> For instance it would be possible for a female owned company to not hire men (female hiring bias/sexism) which would run counter to larger societal biases.

Studies and discussion on this topic are scoped specifically at the societal level for a reason.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#64

Post by Dn_Ab »

cousin_it wrote: post #41
raganwald wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You wish to be clinical about this? Consider.

Your statement essentially assumes linearity, when such certainly isn't the case. Look at other industries, harassment lawsuits do not rise in tandem with number of women. This is obvious, one can grow the number of women in an industry far more quickly than harassers. Since these harassers cannot well parallelize their activity, the strongest explanatory variable will be the number of potential harassers. Raganwald's point. We are taking it as a given that most men will not provoke things till disciplinary actions are required and most women are not lying about them.

Your post is also highly simplifying - assumes trivial reducibility, homogeneity and ignores the effect of interactions to create emergent modalities. Observe that Not all women will escalate to lawsuits or even disciplinary action first. Lawsuits are a sign of an endemic problem, lack of support - symptom of horrible rot. With more women the support structures would be such that these problems could be nipped in the bud early. Indeed it's very possible that beyond a certain threshold, the number of women in an organization shifts company culture.

These two points show why it is not a simple matter of 500% more lawsuits.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#65

Post by walshemj »

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…

Law and Medicine both get more pay and have higher social status and have less ageism :-)

And if you SE is hard try being a woman in Civil engineering - a place I worked at (an Arab Civil engineers) had to arrange a swap with an Italian Consulting engineers. All our work was in the middle east so she was unable to get the required boots on the ground experience on our projects to progress to chartered status.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#67

Post by subsystem »

Tichy wrote: post #53
subsystem wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't see my point and want me to elaborate, ask like a normal civilized person and I might.

What didn't you like about the way I asked?

You're asking a rhetorical question that insults my character by implying that I would fabricate a theory and then "push it" although I knew it was false. I'm fine with not being right or people having a different opinion, but don't insult me in the process.

Your other question doesn't make sense since it's factually incorrect (hackers school was free before) and puts weight on only one factor. The incentive Etsy made for women to join hacker school was of course offsetting some other factors. I'm saying that sexism or something devolved from sexism is one of those other factors.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#68

Post by [deleted] »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #64
cousin_it wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You wish to be clinical about this? Consider. Your statement essentially assumes linearity, when such certainly isn't the case. Look at other industries, harassment lawsuits do not rise in tandem with number of women. This is obvious, one can grow the number of women in an industry far more quickly than harassers. Since these harassers cannot well parallelize their activity, the strongest explanatory variable will be…

[deleted]

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#69

Post by [deleted] »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #64
cousin_it wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You wish to be clinical about this? Consider. Your statement essentially assumes linearity, when such certainly isn't the case. Look at other industries, harassment lawsuits do not rise in tandem with number of women. This is obvious, one can grow the number of women in an industry far more quickly than harassers. Since these harassers cannot well parallelize their activity, the strongest explanatory variable will be…

[deleted]

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#70

Post by notahat »

Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #28

500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.

Wow. Did you really just argue that we shouldn't hire women because, when the men on the team harass them, they might sue?

How about this for a crazy idea: Let's build a culture where men don't think it's ok to sexually harass women, at work or anywhere else!

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