[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.