[learc83]

I remember hearing that Etsy had an unusually large number of women working on the development team. I wonder how this layoff is going to affect that? Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury?

I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.

[geofft]

The first round of layoffs included the CEO and the CTO, both men. Anecdotally (as someone who received a job offer right before the layoffs, and asked around about what it affected) I heard that round included a lot of middle management; at the least they laid off my manager-to-be and his manager, both men, and did not lay off any individual contributors on the team I was interviewing for, which was roughly gender-balanced. I have no information about today's layoffs.

I would personally argue that it's a lot more common of a luxury to promote okay-but-not-great men into management instead of letting them go, and a company motivated by capitalist concerns should focus more on eliminating those sinecures than eliminating bootcamp grads, who often can't command a high salary anyway. But then again, Etsy did cancel their entire summer internship program with two weeks' notice, which can't have saved them much money at all, so I'm not sure how responsible/rational they're being in their capitalist motivations.

[LoSboccacc]

> Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury?

if they need to cut cost, they should start firing males, if anything, right?

[geofft]

Yes. This is economically rational, as Alan Greenspan pointed out in 1983:

> ... the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."

[zer00eyz]

I have a corollary to this:

Women who manage to stay in tech for a long time tend to have a level of passion that let them put up with the amount of bullshit that they have been given in the past (and present).

Find me a woman, who does engineering, who has been doing it for 10+ years (15 even better) and odds are you have someone who LOVES what they do! Odds are this is going to show up in quality of work product and better general understanding.

[pvg]

You might want to consider what effect the endless insistence work in tech requires some sort of religious levels of 'passion' has on women or beginners or really anyone from an atypical (for tech) background looking to enter the field.

[086421357909764]

By that statement though, you're implying that men and women aren't paid equally within Etsy. Which is against the whole of diversity and equal pay for equal work campaign isn't it?

[geofft]

Yes, in the absence of strong evidence I would assume both Etsy and every other salaried company that permits offers to be negotiated is paying men and women non-equally for equal work, primarily because (as Greenspan points out) the market value of men is higher: they are receiving competing offers from places that are more blatant about paying men more (or extending fewer offers to women, or whatever). Hopefully this difference is pretty small at Etsy, but it almost certainly exists, and even a small arbitrage opportunity is economically rational to capitalize on.

I'm using "equal work" in an informal sense. (In the legal sense, yes, equal pay for equal work is the law, but also in the legal sense, you can't give an immigrant worker a green-card-path visa unless you can't find anyone in the States to do the same job, and we all know how creatively "the same job" gets defined.)

[alexashka]

In the absence of strong evidence, you're making a bunch of assumptions you mean?

In the absence of strong evidence, I personally err on the side of caution.

I don't know what these mythical places are that vastly prefer men over women - every place I've ever worked at, everyone preferred people who are good at their job and are easy to get along with - mostly the easy to get along with part by the way.

[lazyasciiart]

Yes, culture fit, or 'getting along with each other' is important. When looking for people they will get along with, most people tend to prefer to be around others who seem like themselves. Given a team of all male engineers and two candidates of equal ability and with similar personalities, one male and one female, the male candidate is more 'like' the hiring engineers which makes him seem easier to get along with. And so a company which is just hiring people who 'are good at their job and are easy to get along with' can end up with a team of men.

[stale2002]

They could be paid equally, but the women will be better engineers. Because a man of the same skill level will command a more senior job.

[ralusek]

This is a ludicrously bold claim.

[throwaway2048]

how? this is the statistical norm in the IT industry

[ufo]

They might also be implying that they are paid equally but on average do equal or higher quality work. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing because companies don't typically micro-manage salaries (for a given job title) according to individual performance.

[alexashka]

There's no gender pay gap for same roles (adjusted pay gap in that link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

[rpazyaquian]

The diversity ratio is likely not going to be affected just by some people being laid off. I wouldn't expect it to change or to have been a factor in this.

[hinkley]

In times of stress, people tend to regress.

[stale2002]

From what I read, they aren't firing the engineering team. It is primary people in sales, marketing, and administration.

[alexashka]

Diversity happens naturally when you let people have some say. Meaning, don't think for a second that dev shops full of men wouldn't much rather have some women in the room. They have no say in the matter. Having no say in the matter is the actual problem.

As for Etsy, did they actually have 'diversity initiatives' within the company? What doe that even mean?