[todayiamme]

I try to usually stay away from such debates, but I've thought a lot about the point you're making: if people are being irrational with respect to hiring then clearly the solution is to start a company that isn't ageist, sexist, or any -ist by formalising the hiring logic and finding people who share something deep - like a passion for building things - in common. But after talking to people and many, many companies, I've come to realise that, although a "market correction" is inevitable, markets can stay irrational longer than most people can stay solvent.

Change is inevitable and sooner or later a company will come along which will swoop up all of these people and apply them towards an audacious goal, but the time at which the stars align and such a company is born cannot be predicted and most people can't hold on until that time. Hence their desire to fix it through advocacy, which is quite understandable.

[Jare]

I think this argument needs to be less black and white than what you present. There's no need for a company to "swoop all" of these people and go for an "audacious goal"; that's all too exaggerated. All that's needed are a few companies competing in a largely male-dominated space, staffed with "a larger presence" of women, and being reasonably successful in whatever goal they have, regardless of how trivial or lofty it is.

Advocacy is great, and necessary to get out of local maximas, but living proof is always going to be more effective.

Of course, there's always the question of how useful such a competitive advantage (access to a large pool of excellent staff) would be to drive success. It may not be, which is a different discussion and one that would make engineers of both genders nervous regarding their own value.

[malandrew]

Some companies actually are able to disproportionately hire many of the women available to be hired in the industry.

Company A has a hard time hiring women because Company B had a few more and better female engineers early on. Network effects take over as the company grows affording it the opportunity to hire far more women than other tech companies.

This infographic shows the ratios at a bunch of companies from those with gender ratios below the higher education pipeline ratio to those well above that ratio: http://do-better.studiometric.co/

Women earn 18% of computer science degrees: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

That table shows the ratio at that sample of companies to be around 19% women. Assuming those companies are representative, that is a 1% different in favor of more women than men based on the pipeline feeding the industry.

[personjerry]

Sure, you may believe that to be the case, but in the meantime, others may believe that, exactly due to the lack of a company that has swooped up all these people, that there is no such opportunity.