[lucaspm98]

Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.

[joshuamorton]

Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.

You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.

[thu2111]

Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher hiring bonuses for women for a while but I believe they stopped (this is in the public somewhere).

The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates.

Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.

[joshuamorton]

> I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well

I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed.

This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss.

> Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour

Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages.

> For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before!

Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.

[lordCarbonFiber]

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit.

To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.

[thu2111]

There are no internal biases in favour of men in any organisation, anywhere. This is feminist propaganda - an assumption that if women dominate a field it's because they're good at it, but if men dominate it's because of innate sexism.

Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.

[lordCarbonFiber]

The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable. Like, jsut, do some basic math. If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender and compound the fact that people tend to not like working in environments where they feel tokenized, hiring women (or any unrepresented minority talent) is just good business sense, no moralizing required.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

[thu2111]

If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender

Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption.

The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable

My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty.

Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims

If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it.

I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]

It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s

[lordCarbonFiber]

My bad for the previously missing source that's on me. Ive expanded on the thought below with references. (and despite calling me out you still can't find a single source for your claims (short of a vague, go read a document I clearly haven't read for me, which is just, beautiful))

Edited previous comment for the missing source, that's my bad. (and despite calling me out you still can't find a single source for your claims (short of a vague command to go read a document you clearly haven't read, which is just, beautiful))

Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios and instead just look at the rates graduating with CS degrees. That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school] and, by your own admission, we close to half that on average (the numbers fall of faster if you consider technology leadership[1] or look more at smaller companies (which is harder to source considering a lot of places aren't very open with regards to their hiring stats, but in my experience working in nyc I’ve only seen sub 10% (N=3). Sub 10% to me essentially none, since that can basically evaporate with normal engineering churn). If we were to assume there was a grand bias, you'd expect an over representation in relation to the rate graduating at the very least.

“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms. Also, as an aside, people are talking about inequality in the HR field, you’re just not paying attention to it (tldr it is weird that there are more women and even with the numerical advantage they’re still underrepresented in leadership which reflects in their comp) [2]. When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present. Despite what men on the internet like to believe there’s no evidence women that go into math or computer science are worse at it than men. Estrogen is great but it doesn’t change your ability to write code. Hell no mechanism to explain why the ratios are more skewed than medicine [5] or law[4] even.

As for women being “uncomfortable talking with you about this”, I’d suspect that has a lot to do with your fear of a nonexistent feminsit boogieman and repeated claims that they don’t deserve their jobs than any kind of conspiracy. Imposter syndrome acts across genders and this repeated narrative plays to a lot of people’s insecurities.

[0]http://oue.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/Georgia%20Tech%20C... [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/4467/female-employees-at-tech... [2] https://recruitingheadlines.com/71-percent-of-hr-professiona... [3]https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-... [4] https://www.enjuris.com/students/law-school-female-enrollmen... [5]https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/specialty-profil...

This was far more effort than you deserve, but, I can only hope one day the culture at some of these major tech companies start to change, if only so I don't have to hear think pieces about how hard it is to hire from people that auto exclude 50% of the population. I can't imagine why women are uncomfortable talking you, a proud sexist that openly claims there's feminist propaganda involved in their hiring. I can't think of any reason short of shame of being involved in such an obvious conspiracy.

[thu2111]

short of a vague, go read a document I clearly haven't read for me, which is just, beautiful

This isn't even a grammatical sentence, but you appear to be suggesting that being told what to read isn't providing a source, which is nonsensical.

Go read: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

To repeat - for most of what I've written I'm the source. Make of it what you want. What I've seen is consistent with similar claims made by others, many times in many contexts. The tech industry discriminates against men systematically, and it's because of the distorted ideological beliefs of people like you!

That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school

GA Tech isn't representative. Even your own linked document says that: "Georgia Tech also awards more engineering degrees to women than any other U.S. institution"

GA Tech is famous for having a much higher proportion of women on its courses than normal. I guess someone told you it's a success story and now it's your go-to example.

They "achieved" this by systematically discriminating against men, which has led to a Title IX complaint against them for no less than ten different programs:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/title-ix-updates-ocr-opens-in...

They routinely ban men from all sorts of events so if you believe this is an example of an unbiased selection process you're making my case for me. Men are systematically discriminated against and women never are: the disparate outcomes reflect fundamental differences and NOT some sort of non-existent bias against women.

Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios

You act like it's an absurd position to "abandon", but it's an absurd position to have in the first place. Let's not do for-the-sake-of-argument, let's deal with reality. Nearly all jobs have distributions different to base demography.

Here's a chart you should look at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

You're picking on engineering here, but why not pick on:

1. Kindergarten teachers, 97.% female

2. Dental hygienists, 97.1% female

3. Nurses, 90% female

4. Phlebotomists, 86.% female

5. Insurance claims processors, 85% female

All these jobs are less representative of the population than programming, which at merely 80% male is significantly less far from 50/50 than a huge number of teaching and medical related roles.

If you scroll the list you'll see that most professions aren't even close to 50/50.

“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms

Actually this kind of thinking is itself a logical fallacy. You're starting from a base point of assuming you can understand the reasons for absolutely every fact about the world, which clearly isn't the case. To believe you can decide what is ideal in any area of human existence requires a vastly over-exaggerated sense of one's intellect.

What you call traditionalism is really just a starting assumption that when studying complex evolved systems there are reasons for its current state that you may not understand. This is a perfectly rational assumption and made all the time in e.g. medicine. It's an assumption of incomplete information and inaccurate methods, that can lead to creating new problems instead of solving them. It's what led to "first, do no harm" as a medical concept.

When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present.

This is the root of the problem - that belief is pure ideology. The obvious explanation is that women find technology less interesting than men because they're women and women are different to men, in all sorts of complex ways. This statement is like saying "there's no clear mechanism for why almost everyone who works with children is a woman". Of course there's a clear mechanism for it: they're women, they have babies, they evolved to want to care for children as a result and thus women very often enjoy children's company more than men do. The idea that anything other than the base 50/50 case must be bias ignores not only vast amounts of basic evolutionary theory but also common sense.

In the end I'm arguing with you because it's people like you who ultimately argue for and implement anti-male discrimination, on the belief that you're on some grand moral quest to eliminate discrimination against women. But like Animal Farm, the evil you think you're fighting is in fact yourself - the only gender based discrimination I've ever seen in my entire career was done by feminists.