In reference to the point she makes about people not assuming women are developers, I now make it a point to assume two things about most everyone (male and female identifying) that I meet in tech:
1) That they are competent and smart until they definitely prove otherwise to me.
2) That they are technical and interested in technology.
It's worked really well for me so far. In practice it means when I meet someone I say "You're a dev right?". Most people appreciate being assumed to be technical, and if they aren't we still get a great convo out of it. I admit it's kind of a silly thing, but so far in years of doing it I don't know of a time it's made anyone feel bad.
Edit - Also, if their answer to the dev question is that they are instead a product manager, UX, Designer, etc, I try and follow up with a funny compliment about their field. "Ah, so you make apps useable", etc. Again, just a simple conversational technique to make people feel valued.
I try to do the same, and I share your experience.
That said, sometimes it gets awkward in funny ways. A few months ago I was at a conference/event selling our product (booth and everything), talking to two young Polish girls who were running a tech startup. I don't recall the details by heart, but it was some marketplace I think. Our product is relatively technical, so your approach, "You're a dev, right?" usually pays off. But these founders giggled, rolled their eyes, and said "Do we look like developers to you?"
I can see that getting awkward! But, you might also have been able to save the moment with a confident "Yes. You look like you'd make awesome developers."
I try to live by "It's only awkward if you let it be awkward" to get through those situations.
They probably, rightly, assumed that certain personality types gravitate toward programming work. They also probably felt that their manner and choice in clothing style helped to convey their personality type. For example, in their minds a programmer might choose to dress more like the girl in "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" or interact socially in a way that's either more intense (excitable nerd stereotype) or more withdrawn (shy nerd stereotype) than is the norm.
I know that despite my gender people will change their expectations about my career based on how I dress. When I had an undercut and wore around hoodies more often people were much more likely to assume I was technical. Now that I've gotten a little older and my fashion sense has become more conservative people tend to assume I'm a manager or in some other sort of administrative/people oriented role.
It doesn't take much experience in the world to notice that personality type, fashion sense, and career choice are correlated with one another.
It takes a lot of experience on the other hand to learn that you are supposed to ignore such things for the sake of politeness.
Along those lines, I don't automatically assume a project manager, sales person, or designer is automatically a moron either, and hopefully they'll do the same for me along those dimensions.
Defaulting to a minimal level of respect is a good strategy and goes both ways.
Great article. Thanks for sharing this. I think perspectives like yours are what we need to move beyond what are often one-dimensional conversations about diversity.
Aside: Please forgive the nitpick, but despite its widespread use I really don't think "extroverted introvert" is a thing. The problem is that these two things are opposite ends of a spectrum. I think what people really mean when they say "extroverted introvert" is one of two things:
1) Ambivert : "a person whose personality has a balance of extrovert and introvert features"
2) Introvert, but not shy : It is a common misconception that introverts are inherently shy. The two are correlated, but not the same thing. You can be introverted and not be shy, either inherently or by learning to overcome shyness. Extra/introversion has more to do with your preferences and where you derive energy from. Shyness is more fear-based, and fear can be overcome.
Anyway that's not really a critical part of your article but I've sort of unintentionally become a Myers-Briggs nerd over the years and enjoy discussing stuff like that :)
I just finished "The personality brokers", fantastic book, which explores how E<>I entered popular culture via the Myers-Briggs test.
When the E<>I spectrum was subjected to more rigorous analysis it turned out it may just be a metric of "talkativeness" and not really related to the Jungian concept.
Hmm.. Talkativeness seems way too narrow to me. The theory of deriving energy externally vs. internally makes the most sense to me personally. Though it would certainly correlate with talkativeness. But I'm not an expert on the matter :)
Agreed the term "extroverted introvert" is not most clear. What I tried to express in this post is "even though social interactions can be draining to me, I'm comfortable being outspoken and actively participating in discussions, which gives me an advantage in the work setting," so most similar to (2) in your description above.
If a specific term in a narrow context has a meaning different from the one in common use, choosing to misread one for the other isn't a nitpick, it's just...misreading
Thanks, just realized that is me. I prefer to be alone most of the time, but am able to enjoy the occasional party, and even give a speech/talk when needed without issue.
"Ambiverts" are never called this. Extroverts complain about the ambivert's introversion, and introverts praise the ambivert's extroversion. Thus, at least some of the confusion is understandable.
I just hope this diversity drama never comes to my country.
I already work in a very diverse workplace. Both genders and multiple nationalities are represented, and I really don't see what that brigs to the table. I mean, why is diversity good per se?
I don't see any correlation between any demographic variable and being a good coworker.
On an individual level, it doesn't improve being a good coworker.
On an institutional level, you get a broader set of ideas when you have a more diverse workforce, giving you a better chance at a black swan idea. And frankly, better odds of preventing disaster (Chevy wouldn't have tried to sell a car called the "Nova" in Mexico if they'd had a spanish speaker on the team. No Va means No Go).
I'm sorry but I'm still failing to see it. My experience in my company does not support that hypothesis (and it's really a large one) and the link you provided the only thing that is really proving is that more executive women is correlated with more profitability, which could perfectly be (and probably be) the consequence of other institutional factors.
We do have locals in every market we play, but that's pretty common sense, you have to know the language and cultural references.
But again, I'm not in the US nor I work for a US company. Maybe that has something to do, IDK.
Do you need to go out of your way to employ a Spanish speaker as a permanent employee, on the off chance of a "black swan" idea, rather than o a one of consult with a consultant?
wrt your link: "It is important to note, however, that correlation does not demonstrate causality, which would be challenging to demonstrate". I think a more interesting metric would be diversity relative to the local norm.
I add that the only thing that I've seen bringing something to the table, aside from any individual variable is economic class.
I really enjoy when we hire people that didn't had the opportunity to attend to university, but to FP (~ community colleges in the US), guide their training and so on. We did this with three guys in my office and I'd say that was one of the best ideas my boss had.
But now HR is not willing to allow this anymore. Somehow hiring poor people and investing in them is not trendy, but hiring women and minorities is.
I'm going to say it. The most excluded group in SV are conservative republicans. Its a death sentence to your career to come out as one. If you truly value diversity, their point of view is the most absent from tech.
One personal example was pointing out that referring to "white brogrammer culture" is sexist, racist, and insulting. I didn't get fired, but I had to talk to a few people in HR because of it.
Can you please explain how reprimanding people referring to "white brogrammer culture" as sexist, racist, and insulting a far-left idea? I would think many would slap some kind of alt-right label on that type of wrongthink.
I believe that the term "white brogrammer culture", as a pejorative, is sexist and racist and insulting. (See the article I mentioned for a use of this term.) And I've observed that pointing this out leads to trouble.
Can you give an example of a critique of intersectionality that is acceptable in a tech company? I suspect you can't.
Absent from tech in Silicon Valley maybe. Go work in IT at State Farm Insurance or some other tech area east of Silicon Valley and observe the absolute and complete lack of openly liberal or openly atheist tech people. It's the end of a job, often, to say that you are liberal or atheist in many places I've worked.
Conservative Christians are definitely not a minority in my experience; they are a very vocal majority.
What exactly do you mean by "conservative republican"?
Back in the middle of 2016, conservative author and Research Fellow at the Cato Institute P.J. O'Rourke made a surprising announcement:
"I have a little announcement to make ... I'm voting for Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary. I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."
If someone is a "conservative republican" as the term would have been understood 20 years ago, or perhaps even as late as 10 years ago, I think they could openly state their political positions in SV today without any dire consequences, if they stated them without actually saying they are "conservative republicans".
Liberals would think that some of those positions, or even most of them, are wrong, but they would think they are, as O'Rourke would say, wrong within normal parameters.
Heck, some of the major ideas from those classic "conservative republicans" could probably even build up some strong liberal support today. Conservative republicans are behind one of the best proposals for addressing climate change, for example [1].
But those kind of "conservative republicans" aren't openly welcome in the Republican party any more. They are still around, but they are keeping silent. What was once the right's conspiracy nut lunatic fringe has effectively taken over the party, or at least taken over the party's messaging. Those are the people that come to mind now if you label yourself "conservative republican" without further clarification.
Well, conservatives in the US have thrown in with a party that typically demonizes people of color, is actively working to disenfranchise them, and has a growing white nationalist element to it.
Are there some conservatives who really just care about there being too much government regulation, or whatever? Sure. Looking at the party they rally around and the way it wants to treat people, there sure are some general trends that do not speak to a desire to embrace diversity.
There's a difference between being a Republican, and being a Conservative. To that end, the Republican party itself is not the monolith that you see in the Democratic party. There still exist factions that resulted in the passage of a lot of Democratic policies while the Reps. controlled Congress during the last presidency.
While I don't support the Republican party, I still hold conservative ideals, primarily regarding regulation and oversight. My social views are fairly liberal, but I don't identify with the progressive movement and intersectional politics.
EDIT: I think diversity is great, but diversity as an end goal is misguided.
TBH the other side is kinda big on demonising people of certain color, sex and sexual orientation too. The whole identity politics thing is disgusting regardless of vector.
A lot of "diversity" is confined to US progressive style who are kinda similar in all of those things. Especially those who think that conservatives wouldn't want to be around them.
They shouldn't be when there are so many libertarians in tech that'd prefer small government. Should have something in common.
The problem is the majority of republicans are backwards on social issues and trapped by low-brow "conservative" media. William Buckley must have turned over in his grave.
I know that y'all feel oppressed, but the most-excluded are those who are homeless, computerless, penniless, and therefore voiceless. They aren't our customers, they aren't our users, they aren't our investors, they aren't our employees, and so it shouldn't be surprising that we pay them no attention.
We should consider the life experience of the homosexual boy or girl, who exists underfoot as a pawn for American Christian moral whim. American Christians constitute such a majority that if they willed something, then a mountain would move, such as tax and finance reform which considers the sacred issue of poverty. Unfortunately American Christians have been focused on sexuality for the last decade, but that's really not fair because it ignores the very real Satanic sexual moral scares that swept the nation not long before that.
One should also consider that those who go to churches may have better professional views than those who don't. There are Christian professional job networks there, and if you aren't in there, maybe sucks for you. You seem to think that all weights considered, you experience net career disadvantage for showing your face as one of the moral majority. I would argue those who aren't in these professional networks don't know what they're missing out on. I would also argue that if you come from a poor Christian background, you should try church hopping. Bay Area churches are bastions of quality and professional life.
One should also consider the privilege that is afforded to churches as a tax-exempt organization that does just about everything, including competing in the daycare services market (do you pay for daycare?). One should consider whether any other group is about to gain that same power of tax exemption, which is arguably one of the most lofty powers in a taxed modern life. This is a privilege cloaked in power.
I was discussing religion in the scope of American political conservatism, or does one imagine a robust discourse of power that somehow ignores Christianity, the dominant religion of America?
Am I not contributing something "new to say"? Who here is talking about the intersection of Bay Area churches, tech, professionalism and employment, and financial status?
How much more curating or moderating will it take?
Donald Trump (R) proudly proclaimed himself a nationalist at a rally a few days ago. The Party continues to stand behind him. The frog is almost boiled.
At this point, I can no longer spare any empathy for those who identify as Republican and yet somehow feel oppressed. They are directly threatening my country, my way of life, and our collective peace.
Absolutely, people like Peter Thiel need and deserve our support.
On a more serious note, I don't think this is the case. It's highly likely that coming out as pro capitalism, pro lower-taxation, and pro small government will not be career ending. What might be career ending however, is bringing all of your friends, family and colleagues together to declare yourself an out and proud dickhead.
It’s a shame, because although I have strong liberal views, healthy skepticism of established, centrally organized programs is something that we as engineers should 100% listen to, and it’s the basis for much conservative economic thought. Unfortunately, people wanting to share that healthy skepticism are now associated with a party whose membership is also increasingly racist, violent, and oppressive of personal freedoms.
SV should think back to first principals: one is not guilty of the stereotypes of that group simply by sharing a subset of their thoughts. I find the New York scene more understanding of this nuance.
All that said, painting oneself as “the most excluded” is an exaggeration that does nobody any favors, and perpetuates this stereotype that conservatives are close minded. Understanding that there are people with needs far more fundamental than career and self-actualization is necessary for one to make well-advised policy recommendations, be they conservative or liberal.
I do think that pointing at someone's physical body and saying, "They bring diversity because they're X!" is wrong.
However, I do think that gender and race have an influence on your thought processes because of who you tend to associate with.
In addition, she spent 15 years in China, which is definitely not very common here in the US. That alone means she's going to think somewhat differently than the average engineer.
And finally, a lack of diversity in a group (all white hetero males, for example) indicates an attempt to exclude diversity, though perhaps subconsciously.
A group of white males can be diverse, we just don't accept it.
Do you think a group of white males who went to Stanford, MIT etc... right after high school, are the same as those who joined the military, yet now work in the same company?
They will have a common thread: they all will be recipients of privileged treatment by society. That is indeed a crucially important fact that will share their attitudes and perspectives.
White male coal miners, it could be argued, have had a lot less privilege than a Bobo Stanford grad female accountant. Nancy Pelosi has had a heck of a lot more privilege than some laid off Detroit auto worker.
Elizabeth Holmes, who’s father was Christian Holmes IV, a former Vice President of Enron, was a lot more privileged than pretty much anyone reading this now.
The idea that gender alone determines privilege is ridiculous. It’s far more complex. Yet hiring a pedigreed Elizabeth Holmes would be “diversity” but hiring some West Virginia white male community college grad from a coal miner family would be “Privilege.” That’s ridiculous. Hiring a black Princeton grad is “diversity” but hiring a white University of El Paso grad is “privilege.”
If people really care about diversity, they’d hire for diversity of experience or diversity of thought rather than diversity of biology.
Please do some.more reading on what white privilege is. You are confusing it for physical or financial comfort: this is not an correct interpretation.
White privilege is seeing that politicians are mainly white men, that the people often cast as the heroes of movies and TV shows and books are white men, that nearly everything in society characterizes the "good guy" or the ideal person as being a white man. (I also hope that you learned about the history of how people of color, especially black men, where presented in society.)
It's also why white people are not afraid of being murdered by cops as they reach for their car registration and insurance. Or as they answer the door to a belligerent, entitled, drunk, off-duty cop who attempts to B&E into their home. [1] (This sort of thing never, ever happens to white people.)
The privilege isn't something as superficial as more money: it's significantly deeper. It's summarized as the notion that being a white man means every opportunity is available to you and there are no closed doors.
Perhaps a better way to think about it is that white privilege is the absence of any systematic biases or abuses based upon your gender or skin complexion.
Yep I completely agree that gender and race have an influence on our thought process, and perhaps the title of "I'm not diversity" is a tad overdramatic, because I _do_ bring in a unique perspective.
My goal with this post is to convince people to not just limit their views of diversity to race and gender, but also look beyond those 2 to care about the other ways each of us bring in diverse perspectives as well.
Certainly: the objective is to ensure that perspectives are not systematically ignored.
However, please don't ignore history. Reality is not neat and tidy: there's never a blank slate from which to build anew. Everything real exists in context and has a past, which constrains its possible futures.
Correlation is an important concept because it is evidence of association. And while it's true that associations can be non causal, many associations are causal.
For example, let's run with this description: a white, heterosexual man with XY chromosomes living and growing up in America. There are few absolutely correct inferences made from such a description (e.g. that the individual was and is still benefiting from a soceity built by and for people like him). On the other hand, there are a number of inferences we can make about such an individual that are likely to be true. Or that street true to a varying degree. E.g. we might say that such an individual is likely to view people of color with disdain. Or view women as sexual obejects that exist soley for his pleasure.
Certainly those last two inferences are only correlative. While many men are taught to view women as sexual objects and many white people are taught to believe that people of color are inferior, one can never make such an inference with 0 error.
Working our way back to the conversation thread: correlations are useful for decision making. If I'm hiring people for software jobs, I cannot exclude anyone for their personal, core characteristics of their skin complexion, sex, gender, nationality, ancestry, or age. I can, however, realize that due to the soceity we live in and how it treats people, it's likely that the men applying to my (fictional) company are likely to have some similar viewpoints. And that my woman applicants are also likely to have some similar viewpoints, which are going to be different from the men. Similar reasoning to all of those other characteristics I mentioned above. Knowing history and observing society, I would certainly use such society-level correlations to inform my recruiting strategy.
E.g. Do men take proactive steps to ensure they aren't victims of sexual assualt? On the whole, they do not. Conversely, women often think about this reality and plan around it -- "go out with a friend" or "call me when you get home" or "walk with your keys through the fingers of your hand when you go to your car at night" or "carry pepper spray on your bag". If I'm making a ride sharing service, I better take into consideration that a room full of white men probably won't think about drivers sexually assaulting passengers.
I sincerely hope that my writing here is insightful and informative as to why gender and racial diversity are important in cultivating intellectual and emotional diversity.
So, to paraphrase, you believe it's entirely reasonable to hire based on stereotypes.
It's not clear from this whether it's just your stereotypes that are acceptable or can anyone join in?
As an aside, I happen to find your gross characterisations objectionable. And yes, I find your writing insightful and informative. But not in a good way.
> So, to paraphrase, you believe it's entirely reasonable to hire based on stereotypes.
That's not at all what I wrote. I wrote that due to how society treats certian groups of people, there is a bag of correlated effects that members of said group have likely experienced. Therefore, it's also likely that those same individuals have had certian life experiences that members of other groups are likely to not have experienced. If you're for bringing different experiences to the table and you ignore this, then I'd seriously doubt your motivations.
Absolutely agreed. However, I don't think spending 15 years in China is a particularly rare trait in tech work -- a very good chunk of the people I work with in tech on a day-to-day basis were born and raised in a foreign country (typically China, India, or Russia, though there's a very long tail there). In fact, my own background (that of a very, very, small rural US town) who went to a liberal arts college is extremely rare in my own experience in tech. Of course, I'm a white heterosexual so I'm considered a member of "the majority"...
Diversity metrics based on the color of your skin or the country where you were born are an awful way to assess actual diversity of thought. It's much more about your own personal experiences regardless of your environment. It's a shame that's hard to quantify so everyone ignores it.
I think the point is that the diversity she brings isn’t enough diversity to justify her as someone who is adding to diversity in a tech company. You could add 1000s of women like her and the company wouldn’t be particularly different.
I'm not saying men and women shouldn't work together, but isn't office drama related to sexual tension something to subtract from that complementarity as well?
In my working life I've seen (and also experienced) a lot of productivity-eating unresolved sexual tension, including between people who were married/had partners and didn't reeeally want to mate, at least not rationally.
I mean, I know men behave like pigs at Hackatons and I'm all for codes of conduct but even in better conditions (no one's an incel, yadda yadda) this happens.
I think it's much less about sex than you think. From my experience, groups of all men and groups of all women are much less productive than a mixed group. "Sexual tension" is a factor in mixed groups, but so is any other kind of conflict.
The following is just my experience and I don't claim to generalize although I will use it as a generalization since it is what I have observed.
Groups of men tend to fall into a pattern. There is a leader, there are people vying to be the leader, and there are "subordinates" who execute directives. Male groups try and get something done. These groups are about organizing people.
Groups of women also fall into a pattern. They tend to plan and analyze and put less priority on execution. In female groups the leader/subordinate dynamic is much less apparent, and it's mostly a dance of trying to understand what everyone is saying and what everyone wants. These groups are about organizing ideas.
Mixed groups obviously have a mix of these approaches. Men and women help each other to reach a balanced state of execution and planning, looking at the details while also keeping the big picture in mind. In addition to that, mixed groups are way more dynamic and adaptable. Patterns emerge contextually within the group, rather than following a standard social protocol. To me, this indicates higher potential for productivity in all areas of a project.
Sexual tension can occur, but I think it's a bit silly to suggest it's a Big Deal in the workplace, that it's something significant enough to single out from every other messy thing that can happen in groups of people. To make myself clear, sexual tension is a separate thing from sexual harassment, which is definitely a problem but is the result of some bad players and not the mixed group dynamic itself.
If a man cannot do his job while around a woman, that's undeniable proof that said man is immature and lacks basic discipline. That's grounds for dismissal: it's not the company's job to train aan how to act properly and not treat women as sexual objects.
Does anyone else find it weird/disturbing that someone is compiling a list of women engineers and where they work? I understand having a list of influential speakers and such to look up to, but this does not seem to be the case. The author mentioned she has no idea how she made it on there.
not just weird, I found it creepy too. If I was being profiled and added to some public list, without my knowledge, that would make me extremely uncomfortable, however noble the intentions are.
I liked the article, but even her expanded definition of diversity doesn't resonate completely with me. My brother and I had exactly the same background and upbringing. And we are both remarkably different people. None of the metrics of diversity mentioned here would reflect that, but it's reality.
The priority should be diverse people, not diverse backgrounds.
I think the finer point is that pinning diversity to something specific like gender works against people that don't want to be viewed as a diversity candidate. It's hard to get this right and the end goal is that we don't even talk about diversity anymore but just recognize its benefits.
Word. I'm a female undergrad in mathematics, and the department is constantly trying to get me involved with female-oriented STEM events, offering to sponsor me for "women in STEM"-type conferences, etc etc. I refuse on principle.
It's well-meaning, probably, but really gets on my nerves sometimes. I want to be a mathematician, not a "female mathematician". It feels like I have this bright red sign covering my face that says "FOSTER DIVERSITY HERE". It's okay guys! I'm already fostered!
I agree with her, diversity is more than just race, sex, sexual preference, etc. However I would say that I think these things as a top level attribute DO correlate with different lived experiences that you want in a diverse workforce.
Companies are not going to ask you about your political leanings, they are probably not going to give you some mental test to see how you react to situation A and situation B. If you look at the stats, race and gender do correlate between stark differences in people. For instance, the "wealth gap" between black and white Americans is about 10x, growing in poverty vs. growing up in a stable middle class family causes a different lived experience, you view the world differently because of how you grew up. That's not to say that all black people are poor and all white people are rich, but if you're working with a limited data set and are thinking about how you can get some people in a room with different lived experiences, you could do a lot worse than saying "let's get a mix of different races in here". I think the same thing applies to women and other traits that companies and institutions use for their diversity metrics.
That's not something you should ask someone in a job interview though. And most people (mercifully) don't talk about politics at work. So what would promoting political diversity look like?
>So what would promoting political diversity look like?
Not ostracizing people for having political opinions that are not the majority but fairly mainstream.
I work at the satellite office of an east coast tech company and how you have to be careful not to say anything that betrays politics that are not officially condoned is a bi-weekly gripe among the group I eat lunch with.
I'm not saying it should be perfectly acceptable to tell your coworkers you went to a KKK chapter (is that their organizational unit?) barbecue when discussing what you did over the weekend but if you went to see NASCAR you shouldn't feel compelled to tell people you stayed home.
It's lacking insofar as political opinion is restricted to "should the poors starve" and "is the female intellect inherently inferior"; but when it comes to things like engaging with problematic regimes, capitalist/socialist choices, and bottom up/top down solutions, there's quite a diversity
Does it matter who's diversity? If the argument is that a company with a non-diverse workforce can't deal with users from different walks of life, they don't have a diversity problem, they have an empathy problem. (Arguably most programmers have an empathy problem.)
While I'm sure hiring 2 women and 0.2 black people for every scrum team may help fix the empathy issue, so would hiring white guys who don't think they're the center of the universe. Of course to do that we'd need to stop (as an industry) rewarding and recognizing people who think they're the elite for doing a perfectly normal white-collar job that occasionally involves high school math.
(And I definitely don't think we need diversity of political opinions. I don't want to know my coworkers' political opinions, whatever they may be. What would be great would be if I could get coworkers who just don't think their particular ideology is super important in terms of their work life. Any companies that are more on the chill side like this?)
This comment might not be relevant to the article.
Isn't diversity ultimately relative to the group you are comparing to? And how you want to define the group might differ among people? Also how you weigh the trait in relation to its effect on the some kind of performance metric of the group?
Someone with trait A could be considered diverse if we define a group with predominantly trait B. Does having diverse traits (a mix of both A and B) highly correlated with better performance/survival/whatever metric? Maybe having diversity means the group can adapt better over time (surviving an evolutionary bottleneck in some sense)?
Most of these concepts are obviously not quantifiable in this way, but I think we need some kind of framework to think about how we define diversity.
All this article says to me is that no matter how hard I work or what decisions I make or what my life experiences are, I'll never be good enough for progressives. I'll fall "lower" than others on some arbitrary and ever-changing grading scale which puts value to my experiences.
For most companies it probably doesn't matter, but if you're trying to market a product to a diverse group, it'll help to have diverse input when creating the product. An example is facial recognition software developed by a US company not recognizing black people, or cameras saying "woops, looks like someone blinked" after taking pictures of an asian person. If they had a more diverse development or testing team, they probably would have noticed it before being publicly embarrased.
I wonder if those studies got correlation vs causation correctly. Maybe well-doing companies have more satellite offices. Or particular cities have become magnets for people to come do business and have good ecosystem for kickstarting their growth.
:) You may be underestimating the average intelligence of a HackerNews reader.
I am well aware of why some people think diversity is good. Many things are good. Few things are critical.
I'll make a strong claim - there is no evidence, that diversity is critical for the success of any business, on this planet.
It's an easy claim to make because diversity is not a well defined scientific term, hence there can be no evidence. Which was my point - we can hand wave about diversity, inclusivity and all kinds of things - let's just not pretend it's anything but empty hand waving.
Before anyone comes back with saying I'm cherry picking one sentence out of an entire article - it is the foundation of this entire diversity movement. If we agree that we don't know whether diversity is important, we can begin to focus on things that people actually care about - like standards of living and wages.
I'm kind of surprised by the extent to which people have bought into this diversity thing, to the point where it's actually literally a thing people care about. My understanding is that this modern push for diversity and all the rhetoric surrounding it effectively started as a dogwhistle used by liberals to push affirmative action in pursuit of social justice without having to talk about the uncomfortable reality of white privilege and the controversial politics of social justice and reparations. Diversity is sort of a cop-out, a way for liberal white people to convince less liberal white people that affirmative action is the right thing not because white people did anything wrong ever but because it make white people richer.
Taking this as a serious thing on its own devoid of the political context in which it became a necessary tactic and getting into the weeds about what truly is diversity is sort of like the liberal equivalent of taking the Republican rhetoric about makers and takers, welfare frauds and the need for voter ids seriously without realizing that these talking points are largely understood by their audiences to be about black people and immigrants. Seeing the world through rhetorical devices created specifically to confuse the issues results in confusion like this entire article. This is not what diversity means to people for whom it's an important issue.
Otherwise, do we believe the biggest advocates of diversity are just really passionate about making shareholders richer by getting workers to produce more at lower costs? That is what makes them push for a more diverse workplace everywhere? I mean some middle manager somewhere might be convinced that diversity is an important ingredient for increased productivity and that may be true for some definition of diversity, but by and large the push for diversity comes from an entirely different place that is far more about the politics of gender, race and social justice and the movement that is providing the actual weight behind this push for diversity doesn't care one bit about which teams and companies are more productive.
I get the point the author is making, but I'm not 100% sure I agree with how she expressed it. By limiting the definition of diversity/minority, we can probably identify a cohort for any individual where they are in the majority.
Diversity measured across an entire company or large cohort doesn't really show the value of diversity in the first place. For me, the real power of diversity is at a micro-level. The author would absolutely add diversity to a three person team where one member is an Indian woman born, raised, and educated to PhD in India, another is a Croatian man with no formal education beyond secondary school, and the third person was a poor kid from Detroit that scrapped their way through community college and into the job market.
When I'm putting a team together, I try my hardest to create diversity. That doesn't mean running through a checklist of gender, ethnicity, sexual identification, etc. but it does mean looking for people with different points of view, experience, and ways of solving problems.
tl;dr: Diversity == good, agree gender doesn't necessarily mean diversity, diversity is a meaningless term without context.
I think checklists get favored because they're easy to codify in the form of procedures and business processes. They're also easy to measure and report on.
The broader, more complex concerns you point to are difficult to measure and thus perhaps more likely to be given short shrift.
All excellent points. It's definitely not press-release material, but (IMHO) highlights how things should be. Companies would naturally reach the desired levels of "diversity" if they simply practiced it at a micro level. Certainly some teams would look "unbalanced" by some of the traditional metrics, but I think everything would even out on the larger scale.
An interesting anecdote was that I led Engineering for a startup that was acquired by a large ($50-100 Billion) company. After we were acquired, several people commented on my collective team as being the "most diverse" in the company. That was nice to hear, but (for me) the most gratifying part was the team members taking stock and collectively thinking "oh yeah, I guess we are diverse!" It happened on purpose, but with the intention of using diversity as a source of strength not as a means of checking off a box.
Thinking about this further, something else comes to mind.
One of the other things worth considering is that failing to comply with checklist-driven diversity can land you in court for supposed discrimination, where the traditional metrics matter quite a bit and other approaches matter not at all. Between liability and ease of implementation and measurement, it's definitely going to be privileged over other approaches.
This article is part of the problem. By pointing out that she does not contribute to "diversity" because of her economic and cultural background, the author reinforces the idea that those are the interesting ingredients of this elusive "diversity." She says nothing about her ideas, interests, or opinions. Does she perhaps add to diversity by having original thoughts? Or are her political opinions and taste in music predictable? I'd say this article is evidence that she may in fact possess some intellectual diversity, but that it is something that she herself does not recognize as such.
You said (in a much better way) part of what I was trying to say in another post. She reduces herself to bullet points and ignores all of the things that I would consider critical parts of what makes people different. Upon a reread, I think that was her point. Measuring diversity based on a few predefined attributes makes no sense. Creating diversity by hiring someone because they're female isn't the answer, we need to go beyond that to truly have diversity.
>>> Measuring diversity based on a few predefined attributes makes no sense. Creating diversity by hiring someone because they're female isn't the answer, we need to go beyond that to truly have diversity.
I think I might have been a tad overdramatic by just saying "I'm not diversity" in the title, but what you wrote above there is exactly what I'm trying to communicate: diversity is more than just bullet points, we need to see it more holistically.
Exactly. The greatest problem with this article is its underlying assumption that "diversity" is good by itself and that companies should pursue it. The author makes the point that she is not "diverse enough", while ignoring the fundamental issue that measuring "diversity" and showing that it is a goal worth pursuing by itself is non-trivial and problematic. The fact that she is counted as "diversity" while claiming that she isn't is exactly the reason why current societies' and organizations' extreme focus on and overvaluing of diversity is misguided.
I know that statistics can be found that in some way correlate "diversity" with some financial metric or other being better. But that still is not definitive nor does it address the fundamental issue which is "what really is diversity, on what basis and features should it be measured, and WHY should we optimize for diversity as opposed to OTHER traits that potentially will correlate even more highly with other desirable metrics?"
1) That they are competent and smart until they definitely prove otherwise to me.
2) That they are technical and interested in technology.
It's worked really well for me so far. In practice it means when I meet someone I say "You're a dev right?". Most people appreciate being assumed to be technical, and if they aren't we still get a great convo out of it. I admit it's kind of a silly thing, but so far in years of doing it I don't know of a time it's made anyone feel bad.
Edit - Also, if their answer to the dev question is that they are instead a product manager, UX, Designer, etc, I try and follow up with a funny compliment about their field. "Ah, so you make apps useable", etc. Again, just a simple conversational technique to make people feel valued.