[geofft]

> Only if requiring a relevant degree is a sexist employment practice.

One, there's a difference between necessary and sufficient. You can get a degree with a 4.0; you can get a degree with a 2.0. It seems entirely plausible to believe that (especially if, as argued by James Damore, men are attracted to tech because it's a high-status field) the number of men who are good at their job is a small subset of those who have a CS degree.

Two, if we believe that the 80/20 ratio begins in college and is reflective of biases and not actual ability, then it's at least reasonable to argue that requiring a degree is a sexist practice. (It might not be, too, but I think it's not 100% clear that it isn't.)

Here's a report from HBR on why women interested in studying engineering in college leave: https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...

If there is a social effect from a sexist culture that discourages women who are struggling with their engineering classes from staying with their original choice of degree, but doesn't equally discourage men who are struggling with their engineering classes, we'd definitely expect to see the phenomenon I suggested above where more men receive engineering degrees than women, but that's not reflective of men being better at the work on average.

(Also, the HBR report points out that internships and job prospects have the effect of pushing apparent sexism back down the pipeline into college. People are smart enough to tell that they're better off picking a different field if they'll be unhappy in their current one. So causality can certainly be such that sexist practices in industry hiring create visible gender imbalance in college degrees.)

Three, plenty of tech companies have quite loudly proclaimed that a CS degree is not something you need to get into tech. Peter Thiel literally runs a fellowship encouraging people to drop out of college. Lots of famous founders are college dropouts. It makes little financial sense to go back and get a CS degree if you didn't make the decision to get one at 18; requiring one doesn't seem like a high-quality hiring practice, even leaving demographics and discrimination (in whatever direction) entirely out of the question. You'll have tons of false negatives.

[leereeves]

This is all quite irrelevant to the question at hand: an employer picking the best candidates for the job immediately available.

Whatever the reason women drop out of, or don't enter, the field, an employer looking for people to hire will find that 80% of the candidates are men.

[geofft]

No, it's very relevant.

I am claiming that if 80% of the candidates are men and 20% are women, that's quite likely to be because that pool has far more unqualified men than unqualified women. Maybe it's 5% qualified men and 5% qualified women. Maybe it's 20% qualified men and 10% qualified women, which is still only 33% women, but very different from the original pool.

There is zero reason to believe that a process that specifically looks for the most qualified applicants is going to look the same as a process that chooses blindly and randomly from the applicants!

The only reason you'd expect that outcome to be guaranteed is if your hiring process is literally broken and has been picking people at random -- which is a good reason to move to one that actually tries to hire the most qualified people -- which is literally what the employer said it was doing.

[leereeves]

Then you're making a sexist argument that ability is correlated with gender among the candidates.

That may be true but it's not a neutral assumption. You'll have to provide evidence.

[geofft]

> Then you're making a sexist argument that ability is correlated with gender among the candidates.

I don't know what you mean by "sexist argument," but yes, I am making an argument that because of pervasive industry-wide sexism, ability is not independent of gender in applicants to tech jobs.

I agree that I need to provide evidence for this (and I'm sort of intending to write up something arguing this, but I'm at a conference this week). But I Googled for 'average gpa men women computer science', and the first paper I found shows that retention rates in college are worse for women than men year-over-year, but GPAs are worse for men than women year-over-year, which matches the hypothesis I came up with earlier.

https://engineering.purdue.edu/MIDFIELD/Papers/2005-graduati...

[leereeves]

That same paper says women's graduation rates are much higher than men's, both in engineering and university-wide. Why aren't you protesting that inequality?

[geofft]

Good question! The primary reason is that I just learned that. It does seem like a problem!

The second reason is that I want to know more about what's happening. As mentioned up-thread, I'm not a huge fan of university degree credentialism. I myself gave up finishing my master's after determining that there was nothing that it would gain me; it would not open any opportunities in life that I cared about. Given the fact that the tech industry seems to celebrate people (usually men) dropping out of college and becoming rockstars in a startup, is it possible that men are leaving college because they determine that spending more tuition money won't help them, but fewer women are confident of that? If so, then that's definitely an inequality, but the direction of the inequality and the ways to solve it are quite different from a naive reading of the facts.

This hypothesis would also explain the GPA difference: if we believe that some fraction of men doing well in college drop out, but women doing equally well tend to finish their degree, that would explain why the average GPA tends to be lower among men as time goes on.

Again, to be clear, I have no information about this; as mentioned I didn't know this until you brought it up. I'm hypothesizing, that's all. Certainly another hypothesis is "men are being pushed out of college for some reason." We'd need more data, for instance, information on what those men who drop out end up doing.

The third reason is that my selfish motivation is raising the quality of my potential coworkers, and my energy to care about all possible injustices in the world is limited. If there's a phenomenon of, say, men dropping out of college and joining a tech firm and becoming a mediocre coworker, then I will care somewhat immediately. If there are men dropping out who would be stellar performers and excellent teammates had they only finished their degree, I will also care. If there are men dropping out and going to some other industry because they're not good enough for tech, well, I'm sad about that and I wish we could retain and train them (I do genuinely believe that training + willingness to learn is way more important than innate ability), but it's not the highest-priority problem.

But this is all off-topic; do you agree that I've provided some data to argue that my hypothesis (that an 80/20 applicant pool is likely not to have an 80/20 split in qualified applicants) is at least within the realm of possibility?