[throwaway19342]

> Women, of course, have clearly played a major role in their own successes in the field. But that is only half the story: They were also helped by early feminist men like Daniel Lehrman.

A few years ago, I started at company that had a tech department of 15, all male. I made the case to the department that it was in the interest of the company to have a diverse tech team, and my colleagues and management responded. Three years later, the department was 5 women and 11 men.

People who care can make a difference.

[ralusek]

People who care about, what, exactly? People who care about diversity of their technical team along arbitrary immutable characteristics which have no bearing whatsoever on the technical work are...capable of increasing their technical team's diversity along arbitrary immutable characteristics which have no bearing whatsoever on the technical work. I think that is to be expected, it's not exactly surprising.

Unless you felt as though you were specifically choosing your initial 15 employees because they were men, however, I fail to see where you had a problem to begin with.

I'm sorry for even participating in the beating of this dead horse, but this might just be an argument destined to endure indefinitely.

[dpc59]

Women bring different perspective on a vast variety of issues. It has obvious bearing on the technical work.

[whatshisface]

Can anyone be specific about what diversity, exactly, gender involves? Will the list sound like anything other than a list of stereotypes? Which perspective is it that one gender has but the other doesn't? I doubt anybody is thinking about tetrachromacy...

[bArray]

It's completely arbitrary.

(Generalization of the vocal people in this area.) Their line of thinking is: "only people from those specific backgrounds can cater for their own groups tastes". And there's evidence for this, you have these people getting mad that an actor playing a gay person isn't gay and a trans person not trans.

It's almost as if the narrative is that empathy is dead, no person could possibly ever think about anything other than themselves. Somebody who thinks this would appear to lack personal experience of empathy, draw your own conclusions.

[BadassFractal]

> It's almost as if the narrative is that empathy is dead, no person could possibly ever think about anything other than themselves. Somebody who thinks this would appear to lack personal experience of empathy, draw your own conclusions.

Probably an accurate reflection of the people who are proposing that world view.

[DoreenMichele]

The first female senator to give birth in office needed the rules changed so she could breastfeed her baby at work and still do her job. Historically, no family members were allowed on the Senate floor. Until a woman gave birth as a senator, this was not an issue.

Some years ago, a Jewish person on a professional forum told an anecdote about some group trying to do outreach to the Jewish community and scheduling their first meeting on the night of some really major Jewish holiday, a holiday so big he compared it to Christmas. Unsurprisingly, no Jews attended this meeting.

When I worked at Aflac, they always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." If you don't have any members of certain demographics on your team, there will be things that just never occur to you that you may never learn you needed to know if you wanted to genuinely serve such people.

[jbob2000]

As a developer, my requirements are handed down to me from business. I have a small amount of power to suggest improvements, but largely, the design of the system isn't handled by me; I just implement it.

I'd agree that having different perspectives in the idea phase is very important, but when it comes to implementation, diversity doesn't matter at all. Get the data from database, stick it in the views. It's pure technical ability at this phase.

[FiatLuxDave]

I used to work with an engineer who felt the same way. At one point, I was asked by management to help him out because a product release had fallen behind by nearly a year. He was working very diligently to implement a nearly impossible specification (300+ hour battery life with a standard 9V), and was trying all kinds of sleep modes and stuff. I asked him what was the need which was driving the 300 hour lifetime and making him do so much work. He said, "I'm an engineer. It's my job to make the design meet the requirements."

I went and talked to the customers and other stakeholders, and found out that 300 hours was actually a nice-to-have. 48 hours with some margin was absolutely necessary, and 100 hours was better than equivalent devices on the market. We got buy-in to change the requirements and released the next week with a 100 hour lifetime.

Just an idea what a different perspective can bring.

[kiliantics]

Non-men are treated very differently by society and therefore they have different experiences to men. These tend to lead to different perspectives, skills, etc.

[rosser]

For a great many products that technical teams make, women are on the order of half of their users.

I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.

[trgv]

I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement.

Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals?

I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female.

In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.

[rosser]

I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth.

The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's.

Then why say this?

> women are on the order of half of their users.

[repolfx]

The thread-parent didn't make that clear. Rather, he defined success as replacing men with women and then said he'd done that, therefore, it was a success.

His post tells us nothing at all about what impact that had on the quality of the resulting software.

[realusername]

Women are not automatically making you a better perspective on that, genders are not some kind of homogeneous religious group where everyone thinks the same. Companies should just hire competent workers, trying to fill quotas is a meaningless task.

[rosser]

The word "quota" appeared, until this comment was posted, all of once in this discussion: in your comment, and none in The Fine Article.

Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team?

[realusername]

> Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team?

"supporting diversity" means absolutely nothing, it's empty buzz-speak. Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means).

In a tech world where you have probably less than 10% women, trying to achieve a "diverse" (whatever that means again) team is just putting quotas in place to reject people not in the approved whitelist of "diversity".

[taneq]

The users of the product that my team makes are overwhelmingly male, in fact I don't know that I've ever had a female user. Should I refuse to hire women on that basis?

[throwaway19342]

No, but I think it would be odd and likely sub-optimal to have a team which was exclusively female build that product.

[mirko22]

So, if the most of that team just writes code and product manger lets say is male, how would that be sub/optimal?

Are you saying all female developer team could not write good code for a product that is used by males?

Cos that sounds totally crazy to me... Quality of someones work has nothing to do with their gender in general.

[repolfx]

You appear to be promoting a double standard.

You got rid of men in order to increase the number of women on your team. But when someone says they'd merely not hire women citing your own apparent justification, you disagree that it'd be OK and then respond to a strawman that nobody proposed.

[BadassFractal]

Very frequently that argument gets made for teams and organizations where that kind of representation is pointless.

Does your cloud ops team rolling out container clusters need 51% female representation to bring the female perspective to devops? How exactly is diversity going to help there?

Don't get me wrong, having an environment where women feel welcome, instead of a locker room boys-club, is quite sensible if you want to open the doors to that 10-20% pool of candidates that otherwise would not be enticed to join you. BUT, the argument that diversity of genitalia, melanin, and sexual orientations will somehow make Docker work better is nonsense.

There's plenty of evidence to show that super homogenous groups perform exceptionally well, and there are countless examples out there of teams that excel without any kind of "perceived" diversity among them. There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.

[castlecrasher2]

>There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.

I agree. In fact, Apple's former VP of diversity (or whatever they called it), a black woman, was probably forced to resign because she stated a room full of blond white men could be diverse. It's practically a cult at this point.

[BadassFractal]

It has, unfortunately, become a prominent moral issue, and a way to signal one's team affiliation. The label "diversity" evokes as emotional of a response as "gun control", "pro choice", "immigration", "Affirmative Action" etc. It's a tribal identifier, not a topic of conversation. You're either with us, or you're a hate monger with no human dignity to be acknowledged.

Just saying "Hey guys, I don't know if this it totally sensible, can we take a breather and investigate if this really makes sense?" immediately equates you to someone with a tiki torch or an Uncle Tom, if you don't happen to be caucasian.

Ironically, this self-consuming zeal is at its most fervent in the Bay Area, which is AS progressive and left leaning as you can imagine. Everybody's preaching to the choir. And because invoking moderation in the area is seen as a moral transgression, the region cannot but constantly radicalize itself even further, due to lack of opposing opinion.

And yes, the Apple case is amusing. You could have put together a room of white men of all sorts of social, cultural and financial backgrounds from the US, South Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America etc and regardless they would have all been immediately reduced to "cisgendered, privileged white men". I guess we have a word for that kind of treatment, but apparently it only applies in one direction.

[RA_Fisher]

Exactly! It's a good competitive business decision. When your team lacks diversity, you've got massive blind spots.

[refurb]

You’re making the assumption that women as a gender have different product needs then men do?

[ralusek]

You make two arguments that I fundamentally disagree with.

1.) Individual women inherently bring a perspective that individual men do not, and vice versa. And more importantly, the needs and perspectives of people in a given group can not be understood by those outside of it.

2.) A technical team necessarily benefits from diverse perspectives. What if they're building low level drivers for circuit boards? What if they're programming an application, but have no bearing whatsoever on the product decisions or design?

I find these ideas, particularly #1, to be diametrically opposed to liberal philosophies of universality and the focus on the individual. I legitimately find that line of reasoning to be abhorrent.

[throwaway19342]

Indeed, one of my arguments was the same one used at Etsy: our userbase happened to be disproportionately female.

To be honest, the atmosphere when I arrived was not that great -- a case could have been made that it was a hostile workplace environment. However, my colleagues saw themselves as loyal to the company, and they didn't see themselves as discriminators. To their great credit, they found ways to moderate both their their behaviors and their mindsets.

This approach won't always work. Some people are more entrenched in their attitudes and had there been someone like that there, maybe it would have been uglier and more difficult.

But sometimes, one at a time, people can change.

[scooble]

This argument also justifies not hiring women if you consider a female perspective (whatever that is) to be less valuable.

I would rather reject the premise that someone's perspective is a function of their gender. Not least because it would concern me to find myself sharing a premise with sexists.

Furthermore, if you want to hire someone with a particular perspective, using gender as a proxy for it rather than testing if the candidate has that perspective directly looks like poor hiring practice.

[toomanybeersies]

From a social perspective, I'm happier working in a more diverse workplace. And if I'm a happier worker I'm going to be a more effective worker.

I'd think that most people would be in the same boat. We aren't robots that get fed requirements and magically churn out a product at the other end.

I spend 40 hours a week in the office, a good part of that is taken up with meetings and interacting with my colleagues. I don't want to spend all those hours feeling like I'm talking to a clone of myself.

Obviously, on a whole, you shouldn't hire inferior workers all in the name of diversity, but there two people that you'd be happy to hire and one of them would increase diversity in the team, I'd be inclined to pick that one.

[mirko22]

How often does you last point happen?

[jacobmoe]

The horse is very much alive, despite the beatings it constantly takes from people who are incapable of seeing the value of a diverse workplace.

[cam_l]

Life is not magically sperate from work. I find that people who do not care about diversity at work, do not care about it in the rest of their life.

Lack of diversity is another way of describing a history of denied opportunities due to the idea that because someone is different from you, they are somehow lesser. Increasing diversity in the workplace just means increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with. If you reflexively don't like this idea, it is probably because somewhere deep down you realise you are going to come up short.

[ralusek]

You fundamentally misunderstand what diversity hiring means. It means the exact opposite of "increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with." The counterargument to diversity hiring is a blind meritocracy: you do not discriminate on any characteristic that is not directly related to the skillset that you require. This maximizes the talent pool to literally be everybody and everything that meets the skillset criteria.

Diversity hiring does the opposite, which is that you explicitly discriminate according to an arbitrary quota, on characteristics NOT directly related to the skillset you're hiring for. This heavily restricts your hiring pool.

Let's say I want to hire 20 diverse engineers. In a blind meritocracy, if I've hired 10 engineers that happen to have been white/Asian men, I still have the entire remaining population as potential candidates. In a diversity-quota-based system, I now have to automatically turn away white/Asian male applicants, as the remaining 10 slots are reserved for different demographics.

You are saying that you believe the counterargument to diversity hiring is "the turning away of people believed to be lesser," but that is simply not true. The counterargument is "I don't care if you're white or black, male or female, human or goose, I'm hiring someone who knows how to build a jet engine. If there are more male applicants than female applicants, I'm not going to be bothered by this or go out of my way to hire equally as many female applicants, because being male or female has nothing to do with knowing how to build jet engines."

[cam_l]

Not so sure I do misunderstand, in fact I pretty clearly think the reverse. It seems what you are talking about is quotas rather than diversity hiring. Diversity is really more of a lets hire this experienced person from this pool of applicants even though there is a middle class white guy who is just as good. If no-one applies or makes it through your selection process that is not white, straight and middle class, that is a big, red, fucking flag that the issue is probably you. This might take a bit of forward planning and a bit of self examination to avoid bias.

In fact, you may even find that often there are actually quite a lot of people who may not look or talk or think like you, but that are more than capable. How many time have you heard people on HN complain that they were not given a chance with tech xyz, even though they had directly transferable skills in abc?

Anyways, as was the point of my post. People who don't care about diversity at work don't care about it in life. If you think it is not worth your time to be 'bothered' to go out of your way to find (ways of attracting or identifying) a diverse group of people to your endeavour. It is probably just because you fucking love the echo chamber.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

The parent made no claim that it would be a technical improvement.

That isn’t the only consideration.

Edit: removed duplicate words

[jwilliams]

If you reduce your argument to the merits of each unique individual hire, then you're going to miss what is a very big and complex system.

If your argument is that all 15 of these employees gained employment on their attributes completely independent of gender -- and that gender plays no part -- then it should strike you as statistically improbable that all 15 would be men.

To me that seems outlandish to ignore. Clearly there must be some biases that lead to such a bifurcated outcome.

OR your argument is that men and women are different for some reason, which led to this situation. If that's your argument then you should make that argument.

[panda88888]

Have all 15 male engineers is not THAT improbable. Assumed 80% male applicant, each hiring is independent event of others, and equal chance of hiring for both gender, it comes out to 3.5%. Or 1 out of every 30 companies with 15 engineers to have all male teams.

[jwilliams]

Well that's a different way of saying a similar thing.

In that case you're assuming that 80% of engineers should be male - which is a different argument than what was put forward.

[panda88888]

The 80% assumption is based on historical gender ratio of CS degree earned. Quick Googling shows historical percent at roughly 18% CS degree earned by women in 2014.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-aren...

https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

https://www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/articles/2016-10-20/st...

[taneq]

Would you be willing to share how the team is different now compared to at the start? What areas have changed for better or worse ('areas' in the sense of 'overall technical competence', 'ability to meet customer needs', 'team morale', not just 'diversity', I mean.)

[throwaway19342]

We hired -- and kept -- a couple of outstanding people who would probably not have worked there for long in the previous, less welcoming environment.

We built bridges to other departments, providing some technical training and helping them to interact with us more confidently and more effectively, and I made sure that everyone received a strong outreach effort (regardless of gender). Those efforts were of course not gender specific, but the non-tech personnel in the company happened to be disproportionately female. The improved cooperation had an impact on both operations and morale.

And lastly, I would say that my male colleagues felt a sense of contentment -- they had always seen themselves as good people, and the change in our department, which they saw as positive, brought them more in line with that self-image.

[taneq]

Thanks for the extra insight! It's not an academic question for me (I'll need to start building a team soon) and it sounds like you've made it a healthier environment for all of your staff. Good job!

[repolfx]

Your story is extremely dubious.

You say the team was basically the same size at the end of this process as at the beginning. Therefore you clearly replaced a third of the men with women for no better reason than because they were men.

Moreover, you say that you replaced a these technical men with people drawn from the non-tech personnel in the company. So your tech team became one third non-technical. You claim you provided "some technical training" but what kind of tech department is this? If the tech work is so trivial that you could train anyone to do it why bother hiring technical people to begin with, and presumably pay the higher wages that went along with it?

You also say that your outreach was "of course not gender specific" despite admitting right from the start that your entire goal was to have lots more women, and that you targeted your outreach specifically to the rest of the company knowing they were "disproportionately female". So of course your outreach was gender specific. You admit right up front that was the entire purpose of it.

Finally, you assert that your male colleagues felt "contentment" at these changes because they "thought of themselves as good people" and your morally superior gender heroics allowed them to, in your eyes, be less bad.

Frankly I find your entire story absurd and unbelievable. I have never once met a group of technical men who would be "content" with having a third of their presumably competent colleagues replaced with complete newbies who had clearly never worked in their field before, for specifically sexist reasons. Moreover your narration is clearly unreliable because you claim your outreach wasn't gender specific, despite the rest of your story being entirely about why it was gender specific.

I suspect you are projecting. You believe replacing men with women is "good" and not doing so is "bad" and so you assumed everyone else would feel exactly the same way you do.

[taneq]

Erm, did they say elsewhere that they hired from the nontechnical staff? I read 'outreach' as meaning 'the tech department making an effort to talk to everyone else in the company to solve problems and offer assistance'.

[throwaway19342]

Hi taneq,

repolfx's reply is grotesquely uncharitable and I was planning to just let people judge it for themselves. To clarify this one point, though, there was a semi-technical data-cleanup department from which we routinely made cross-departmental hires. My recollection is that one of the women who was hired into a junior engineering position came from there. So did the guy who's now a Googler.

If it would be helpful for you to hear more, let me know if you're also `taneq` on reddit and I'll pm you.

[narrator]

Political correctness is the practice of pretending and acting as if the reality we actually want actually exists and then hoping it stops being a pretend reality by acting as if it was actually the case.

In this case, the pretend reality that we are acting as if it is actually the case is that engineering aptitude and interest is evenly spread amongst all peoples regardless of gender,race,sexual orientation, gender identity, and whatever they come up with next.

All the statistics in the world that show that the pipeline is not even close to getting filled because of lack of aptitude or interest by certain classes is just handwaved away because it is not the pretend reality that will soon become real if only everyone would just believe in it....

[krzat]

Cool, but how diverse was your applicant pool? I imagine you had to hire like 50% female applicants and 5% male applicants.