[smt88]

> I’ve seen this 50/50 split used based on ideology alone

The ratio is not based on ideology, it's based on the ratio of humans.

The "ideology" that makes them care about that ratio is the belief that someone's gender is not a determining factor in their qualification for senior leadership at GitLab.

If you also consider the number of adult men who are in prison or don't have an advanced education, you would actually expect to see more than 50% women to be representative of the general eligible population.

> shouldn’t the board have the same proportions as the population of people who want to work at GitLab?

No. "Want to work at GitLab" is also going to encode undesirable traits, such as "perceives GitLab to be a bad place for women to work".

If you know the company is mostly men at the top, you might assume women have a hard time getting promoted -- regardless of the reasons. That means you might not want to work at GitLab as much as an equally qualified man.

For the candidate: that's fine! No problem, there are lots of other places to work.

For GitLab: it's something they have decided is not desirable, and their quota system is how they are attempting to fix it.

What you're proposing would just be a vicious cycle that would reinforce what GitLab sees as a problem.

[jonfw]

> If you know the company is mostly men at the top, you might assume women have a hard time getting promoted -- regardless of the reasons. That means you might not want to work at GitLab as much as an equally qualified man.

I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.

If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general, which is to say it would mostly be men and you'd still assume that promotions are fair.

But promotions aren't fair or strictly meritocratic, and there's often good reasons for that. For instance, if you get more women in leadership the tail can wag the dog and you can get more women interested in tech.

[smt88]

> Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.

It's also true that men are vastly more likely to be autistic, and the social challenges with autism can make someone a fantastic engineer, but not a fantastic manager.

That's not true of all autistic people, but there's certainly a correlation.

Again, GitLab is talking about senior leadership -- not people who are writing code or ever needed to have done it well. Most tech execs don't even have CS degrees, because most senior leadership positions are in organizational things (operations, management, HR, sales, etc.)

> I don't agree. The tech industry is predominantly male and everybody knows it. Anybody who's ever been to a computer science class knows why- more men are interested.

If this were true, and gender were the only variable, then we'd see stable ratios of men to women in computer science. We haven't seen that. There used to be far more women up until the 1980s.

> If you assume that male and female employees have a similar distribution in merit, than you'd expect the top of the company to have a similar percentage to that of women interested in technology in general

You're assuming many things here:

A. "interest in tech" is a stable personality trait and not influenced by opportunity

B. "senior leadership" at a tech company like GitLab is mostly technical roles

C. merit at tech companies is primarily a function of interest in technology

All of those are debatable at best, although I'd say they tend more toward the side of being obviously false once you actually write them out.