[stale2002]

"How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants?"

Yeah, and do you know what the best and easiest way to make a workplace more attractive to women is?

It is to have other women in the workplace!

I know many women who are unwilling to even apply to a company if they know they would be the first or only woman on the team.

It is a chicken and egg problem. Until his company is able to get SOME women working there, it is going to be extremely difficult to attract them in the first place.

Because of this it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize hiring women if your team is extremely imbalanced.

[romanhn]

Agree with you up until the very last sentence. It does not make business sense to break the law (and gender discrimination is a real thing a company can get sued over). No matter how tempting, you can't magically wish the problem away and say "I'll hire 5 women, then 10 people of color, then a couple of LGBT folks, then I won't have any diversity problems". It doesn't work that way.

Yes, it is a chicken and egg problem. Yes, the first couple of hires will be difficult to make. But if you don't have the framework in place to actually support these women once they join the workplace, guess what, even if you luck out into making those hires, they won't be sticking around. It's not a one-time kind of thing.

[stale2002]

Ehh, there are effectively equivalent ways of ensuring that you hire X more women without discriminating against men in the interview process.

If you have X people interviewing at your company, you should hire the best person who interviews, no matter the gender.

The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage.

If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.

I am suggesting that you do this same but biased towards women referrals, instead of biasing it toward male referrals. You make specific, targeted efforts to get as many women as possible to apply, while not bothering with referral/reachout processes that are likely to receive male heavy applications, and THEN accept the best person who applies to the job, which will almost certainly be a woman, since instead of having a 20male-1female application ratio, you now have a 1male-20female ratio.

One way of ensuring that you get women referrals is to reach out to all of your female engineering friends, and ask THEM for referrals. Or when you are making your job postings, forward it along to the mailing list of all the women in tech meetups, facebook groups, email lists, ect.

I mean, thats what the tech industry is doing right now, but targeted at men, and they never get in trouble for it, even if it is "accidental" that the job postings only get sent to tech groups/meetups that have a 20-1 male to female ratio.

[vorotato]

>The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage. >If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.

God this hit me like a sack of bricks. It's exactly what I would do and I now realize, dudes gonna have dude friends, just like how ladies are gonna have lady friends.

[fdsaaf]

I'm sick of made-up and ever-more-implausible reasons for women not comprising 50% of the workforce. (Someone once mentioned that a company might be having trouble finding women because an employee had a model of the Millennium Falcon on his desk.)

The truth is that fewer women than men choose to enter this profession in the first place. You may or may not agree that this state of affairs represents a "problem". Even if it does, the hiring stage is far too late to "fix" it.