Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

fastcolabs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 117 posts

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#71

Post by pbhjpbhj »

omonra wrote: post #23

I'd like to see some numbers on how having 500% more female engineers made Etsy ship a better product - which is what I imagine customers ultimately care about. The idea that diversity is good for its own sake in every possible situation is taken as an axiom - which I'd like to see proven. It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given job is based on competence is substituted with one…

>how having 500% more female engineers made Etsy ship a better product //

Presumably because it panders to female sexism and they're targeting their product at females?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#72

Post by Kudzu_Bob »

notahat wrote: post #70
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!

Since human nature is so malleable, while we're at it, let's build a culture where men don't care about women's looks, women don't care about men's social status, parents love other people's children more than their own kids, and wearing stripes with plaid is the height of fashion. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#74

Post by OGC »

omonra wrote: post #23

I'd like to see some numbers on how having 500% more female engineers made Etsy ship a better product - which is what I imagine customers ultimately care about. The idea that diversity is good for its own sake in every possible situation is taken as an axiom - which I'd like to see proven. It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given job is based on competence is substituted with one…

How about we throw around "they have now 16 more female engineers" instead of "OMFG 500%"?

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#75

Post by Kudzu_Bob »

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…

Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, as the number of women in the workforce increases, so does the number of sexual harassment lawsuits.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#76

Post by lifebar »

jt2190 wrote: post #15
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, an…

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

But it's basically same. If they were hiring blindly (not in sexist/discriminatory way) they would have most likely would have hired few men in process. So basically they replaced few would be male employees with women (because according feminism word 'female' is offensive.)

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#77

Post by lifebar »

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.

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

You made 2 critical mistakes. 1. You posted this in white knight infested community 2. bad wording. It should be : "500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of false sexual harassment lawsuits. If that's not progress, I don't know what is."

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Tichy wrote: post #42
enraged_camel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#79

Post by MartinCron »

SeanDav wrote: post #14
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"

Especially because this is a fundamentally positive story. It's not all crusaders and combat out there.

Re: How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

#80

Post by nemothekid »

cantastoria wrote: post #54
JohnBooty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/whateve…

I would think it's controversial when applied to engineering. This implies that the basic tools of software development are somehow viewed/used differently by people of various genders/ethnicities/etc... solely because of this "diversity" which I think most people would disagree with. And if one were to argue that being asian/female/poor somehow effects how you develop software I would love to know how those differen…

While 2+2 will remain 4 under every gender, race and social status, it is important to realize that there are insights that aren't taught out of a textbook. If all you are doing is building objective software with the basic tools of software development, you are no better than a code monkey.

Etsy needed women because their customers were women. They needed engineers that would help them understand or uncover the point of views of their customers. At the end of the day you are serving people, not machines, and it makes more sense to optimize for the needs of customer, instead of assuming every programmer with git experience make a good engineer for Etsy.

Post reply on HN