[dangus]

Who are your peers and where do they work?

What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one.

I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced.

It’s also on me to not join teams that have a curious lack of women. E.g., if I interview with a DevOps team that had 10 people and zero women, there might be something wrong with hiring. Statistically there should be at least one or two.

[jimbokun]

> Statistically there should be at least one or two.

Of course not. Women make up a minority of people working in tech, and are highly recruited by the large companies able to pay the highest compensation. So it's very difficult for other companies to find women willing to work at the lower salaries they can offer.

So there likely is a problem with hiring. They don't have enough money to afford hiring more women.

[dangus]

When I say that statistically there should be one or two women on the team, that is already taking account the fact that women are the minority in tech.

Women are about 23% of software engineers. So if you have a team of 10 with zero women, that is somewhat suspicious to me as an applicant.

Is my prospective future team hiring the best talent or are they letting their biases creep in to their hiring process?

Source: https://www.celential.ai/blog/percentage-of-female-software-...

[jimbokun]

You did not address the point about the large, wealthiest software companies hiring up all the best women candidates.

You are probably correct these companies are not hiring the best talent. But the reason is not necessarily bias. It's just as likely that they can't afford the best talent, including women who the top companies are competing for to improve their diversity metrics.

[dangus]

I didn’t address that point because I think it’s pretty weak. The little regional companies who are “behind the times” where I ended up on teams of all men were mostly apathetic to their hiring process and had no formality involved nor any incentive to change what little process they had.

Imagine a regional bank or insurance company that hires you off of a couple of pulse check interviews and your general vibes. Those are the worst for bias hiring. (I’ve worked at two or three of those).

You don’t get your foot in the door to interview at Google or Amazon unless you pass a rigorous technical challenge. Tech companies need people who are as efficient as possible since that’s their core business. Companies that write software but aren’t tech companies just need passable technology, they need a butt in the seat.

So I don’t really agree with the premise that the wealthy tech giants are scooping up all the women. They’re scooping up top talent.

[scottyah]

I've heard a lot of women say they won't join a team with only men. Not exactly the most productive feedback loop.

[com]

There is a proverb: once bitten, twice shy.

If we want our teams to be broadly representative of our communities and recruiting the best people for the roles, it’s clear that we cannot put the weight of solving the problems that lie behind such experiences and choices on the underrepresented individuals themselves.

I’ve been reading the comments and it seems clear to me that many of the commenters are either unaware or dismissive of the reasons that a woman might say that she would not join a team that was otherwise only men.

Without acknowledging the data, and failing to provide any useful hypothesis for why it is the way it is (apart from “it’s not called design” or some kind of gender-based competency model or perhaps a hand-wavey “but we shouldn’t discriminate; it’s their preference”), resistance to whatever we as professionals and leaders choose to do about it will be the norm.

And it’s hard to force people to deploy critical thinking when they believe they benefit from not doing so.

My own theory is that many men benefit from single gender bro spaces (where other forms of diversity are also highly constrained) and this rather than genuine lack of empathy or creative thinking lies at the bottom of gatekeeping and making teams and working environments toxic enough to drive women who dare to enter away.

The guys who early on in my career were dismissive of women in tech roles who have changed their tunes significantly tend to have had a daughter with an aptitude for STEM. Perhaps they’ve got skin in the game and somebody who shares what it’s like coming into difficult study and work environments?

[bookaway]

>Statistically there should be at least one or two.

Well, if the statistics takes into consideration the notion that a lot of women don't even apply to certain jobs thinking they're under-qualified should we be surprised if there are less than we initially expect?

I appreciate the point of being proactive, since the point above can be somewhat mitigated by HR reaching out to prospects instead of relying on the existing applicant pool. But it seems everyone involved in the hiring process should be as convinced as you about the mid/long-term benefits of having women on the team, otherwise it's a uphill battle passing up perfectly acceptable candidates when there is so much work to get done. It's much easier when everyone believes that the X factor of having a women on the team far outweighs the delays and the accumulating negative effects of business in the short term.

[dangus]

The statistics say that 23% of software engineers in the US are women.

That’s what I’m referring to. If there are no women on a team of 10 I start questioning whether the team is hiring for their biases or if they’re doing a good job of setting them aside.

I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with your last paragraph. Do you believe that women being hired on a software team causes delays and negative effects? Because I do not and that has never happened in my experience. I would hope you wouldn’t similarly falsely claim that male teachers and nurses are less qualified than their female peers.

[Jensson]

> What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one.

That is a failure, you don't need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved. See doctors for example, in my country kids ask if men can be doctors since they see them so rarely, the "women aren't doctors" thing has been solved, there is no need to do anything at that point except try to ensure it doesn't tip to the other side.

> Statistically there should be at least one or two.

That isn't how statistics works, statistically there would be 2-3, 0 is perfectly normal just by random chance. If you intentionally try to only join teams with more than average women then of course you see more and more women, even though the field as a whole hasn't changed.

Edit: And given that SRE often have lots of on-call I'd bet there are much less women there than regular SWE roles. Men tend to be over represented in roles that sacrifices free time.

[dangus]

The best SRE team I was ever on beat the industry averages for gender equity. We had 50% women, including a Black woman, and a trans woman.

Our hiring practices actively surfaced people who had difficulty being considered and retained on other teams and at other companies.

This concept of being inclusive is a lot different than having biases. We didn’t reject men or anything like that, we just made ourselves more visible to underrepresented candidates and hired on very specific personality traits on top of the technical requirements. We also made it clear to candidates that our team was accepting and empowering to people in minority groups as they relate to our industry.

For example, we would use specific interview questions to screen out people who were selfish, egotistical, and closed-minded. There would be a zero or low chance of hiring someone who would make our minority team members uncomfortable and lead them to quit because those people would have been screened out.

Another example was being open to diverse backgrounds, like transitioning from a different team within the company or having a resume that lacked formal schooling.

I remember a conversation that stuck with me where the Black woman on our team told me about how she tended to job hop because she could only stay at a company so long before she started to have difficulty tolerating how she was treated by everyone else in the company. As someone who isn’t a minority in my industry it was a very eye-opening thing to hear. I had never once quit because of the way people treated me on a personal level! I had always quit for job reasons like pay, quality of my projects, effectiveness of my managers.

So, you’re right about random chance and statistics, but in my opinion a good team won’t allow random chance to dictate their candidate pool. In my opinion a good team that approaches 10 people will notice the fact that there are zero women and question whether they have made their team a good place for women to work for in the first place.

Let’s not forget that diversity is a proven dollars and cents benefit to corporations. Conservative media right now is using “DEI” as a substitute for racial slurs, but their intended audience for those insults isn’t corporate board rooms. No, Disney isn’t a liberal corporation, they just have a policy of inclusivity to the point of being perceived as overdoing it because they know that including everyone means a larger employee candidate pool and a larger customer pool.

When you say “You don’t need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved,” the problem with that argument is that the problem is so obviously not solved. You can’t look at various outcome statistics for the racial demographics of the US or the gender pay gap statistics and tell me with a straight face that the problem is solved.

The people who have the power to make those outcomes more equitable are institutions like schools and employers. That’s why I prefer my employer to be active rather than passive.

(I have a hard time believing on-call is a reason why women don’t join SRE teams, especially considering that nursing has the opposite gender bias and also has far worse scheduling woes than any SRE on-call schedule I’ve ever witnessed or heard of)