Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?
It's really hard to prove discrimination on a small scale, both majority male and majority female companies are probably recruiting from their employees friend network, so it is very possible that neither is discriminating on the basis of sex.
Meaning, they are hiring in proportions which are consistent with their applicant pools, those pools are just different because of friend networks.
People that study these things always take a macroscopic view and talk about sexism/racism in the industry in aggregate and rarely in any specific company.
>Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?
Nobody said that except you, which betrays your agenda.
Good engineering talent is in short supply and has been for two decades now. It certainly won't do any harm to explore alternate recruiting channels.
>Good engineering talent is in short supply and has been for two decades now. It certainly won't do any harm to explore alternate recruiting channels.
There is always an opportunity cost. Exploring alternative recruiting channels means not utilizing recruiting channels that have been optimized to find talent regardless of race/gender.
>Nobody said that except you, which betrays your agenda.
Articles that state that software engineering companies are sexist because they don't have a 50/50 gender split are very commonplace.
My agenda is not being discriminated based on my race or gender fyi.
I don't think companies are considered sexist based on the ratio of men/women. They're considered sexist when they _act_ sexist and don't work very hard to cultivate a good environment.
It is. Companies like Google are frequently hounded to find out 'what they are doing about their gender crisis' even though their numbers reflect graduation ratios.
I think there are a lot of groups that have an obligation to change things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad either. Google is big enough to actually affect the up stream numbers, I'm glad they're working at it.
Quotas aren't necessarily the best ideas, but if 90% of your applicants are men, and men and women have the same pass rates, what you have to work on is resume sourcing. This is especially true in companies that mostly hire referrals: You are mostly hiring people that are like the people you have, so you'll lose diversity on average.
You also have to look at differences in the middle of the pipeline. Imagine you only give a phone screen to 5% of female applicants, but 10% of male applicants. You have to think very hard about why that happens. Maybe your ways of rating resumes have a built in bias.
For instance, imagine that I only interviewed new grads that had at least two internships in large tech companies. A rubric like that looks neutral, but you'll discover that the demographics of CS graduates vs those that have those two internships are very different (far fewer women, and a lot more people that will identify themselves as asian).
> Quotas aren't necessarily the best ideas, but if 90% of your applicants are men, and men and women have the same pass rates, what you have to work on is resume sourcing.
I agree with your approach, but the gender is not the only diversity metric. If you push this toward ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, introversion, geekness level, you might end up in a difficult situation and your company will look like Noah's ark. Instead, what I would do is to specify the tasks that needs to be carried out and define metric to measure it, then do a blind hiring. Attributes like graduation or work experience is irrelevant if the candidate passed the test. During the probationary period, if the team doesn't like the new members or the other way round, you can let them go.
If you try to increase diversity by implementing a quota system you are doing it wrong.
The right way is to look for qualified candidates from multiple backgrounds. For example, plenty of companies recruit from MIT but how many recruit from Spelman College?
Sorry man, your post has now been sucked into the toxic pit of horrible people both male and female. Also known as twitter. I tried to set the record straight, but alas I have less followers. You are now a horrible person and your typo is forever enshrined.
Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate % considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?