6 ms·

Women bring different perspective on a vast variety of issues. It has obvious bearing on the technical work.

• rosser 8y ago
  For a great many products that technical teams make, women are on the order of half of their users. I can not comprehend why you would not want them helping to build that thing.
  • BadassFractal 8y ago
    Very frequently that argument gets made for teams and organizations where that kind of representation is pointless. Does your cloud ops team rolling out container clusters need 51% female representation to bring the female perspective to devops? How exactly is diversity going to help there? Don't get me wrong, having an environment where women feel welcome, instead of a locker room boys-club, is quite sensible if you want to open the doors to that 10-20% pool of candidates that otherwise would not be enticed to join you. BUT, the argument that diversity of genitalia, melanin, and sexual orientations will somehow make Docker work better is nonsense. There's plenty of evidence to show that super homogenous groups perform exceptionally well, and there are countless examples out there of teams that excel without any kind of "perceived" diversity among them. There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today.
    • castlecrasher2 8y ago
      >There's likely diversity of thought between them, but that's not what anybody cares about today. I agree. In fact, Apple's former VP of diversity (or whatever they called it), a black woman, was probably forced to resign because she stated a room full of blond white men could be diverse. It's practically a cult at this point.
      • BadassFractal 8y ago
        It has, unfortunately, become a prominent moral issue, and a way to signal one's team affiliation. The label "diversity" evokes as emotional of a response as "gun control", "pro choice", "immigration", "Affirmative Action" etc. It's a tribal identifier, not a topic of conversation. You're either with us, or you're a hate monger with no human dignity to be acknowledged. Just saying "Hey guys, I don't know if this it totally sensible, can we take a breather and investigate if this really makes sense?" immediately equates you to someone with a tiki torch or an Uncle Tom, if you don't happen to be caucasian. Ironically, this self-consuming zeal is at its most fervent in the Bay Area, which is AS progressive and left leaning as you can imagine. Everybody's preaching to the choir. And because invoking moderation in the area is seen as a moral transgression, the region cannot but constantly radicalize itself even further, due to lack of opposing opinion. And yes, the Apple case is amusing. You could have put together a room of white men of all sorts of social, cultural and financial backgrounds from the US, South Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South America etc and regardless they would have all been immediately reduced to "cisgendered, privileged white men". I guess we have a word for that kind of treatment, but apparently it only applies in one direction.
  • RA_Fisher 8y ago
    Exactly! It's a good competitive business decision. When your team lacks diversity, you've got massive blind spots.
  • taneq 8y ago
    The users of the product that my team makes are overwhelmingly male, in fact I don't know that I've ever had a female user. Should I refuse to hire women on that basis?
    • throwaway19342 8y ago
      No, but I think it would be odd and likely sub-optimal to have a team which was exclusively female build that product.
      • mirko22 8y ago
        So, if the most of that team just writes code and product manger lets say is male, how would that be sub/optimal? Are you saying all female developer team could not write good code for a product that is used by males? Cos that sounds totally crazy to me... Quality of someones work has nothing to do with their gender in general.
      • repolfx 8y ago
        You appear to be promoting a double standard. You got rid of men in order to increase the number of women on your team. But when someone says they'd merely not hire women citing your own apparent justification, you disagree that it'd be OK and then respond to a strawman that nobody proposed.
  • trgv 8y ago
    I don't think anyone in this comment chain is saying "we don't want women building stuff". Rather, some commenters are uncomfortable with the assumption that moving from 15 males to 11 males + 5 females is necessarily an improvement. Maybe 5 of the original 15 males were gay. Does that change your perspective? I find this whole way of thinking unsettling. Doesn't it simply depend on who these people are as individuals? I'd also be careful with the argument you've (implicitly) made. It doesn't seem to follow that the distribution of gender of programmers should match the distribution of gender of users. Besides, there must be software projects where 95%+ of users are male or female. In general, I think most of us here agree that gender discrimination is bad, people being discouraged from making career choices due to gender is bad, and sexual harassment is bad. We may disagree on the frequency with which these things occur or how to fix them, but I think we're a lot closer than it appears from these contentious comments.
    • rosser 8y ago
      I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Please don't put words in my mouth. The thread-parent's comment made it clear that, in his situation, it made things better. Is it going to in every case? No. But using edge cases to argue against the median is even more specious than the argument you assert I was trying to sneak in.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        > I said nothing about matching engineering's gender distribution to the user base's. Then why say this? > women are on the order of half of their users.
        • rosser 8y ago
          Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably can not understand them. You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
  • realusername 8y ago
    Women are not automatically making you a better perspective on that, genders are not some kind of homogeneous religious group where everyone thinks the same. Companies should just hire competent workers, trying to fill quotas is a meaningless task.
    • rosser 8y ago
      The word "quota" appeared, until this comment was posted, all of once in this discussion: in your comment, and none in The Fine Article. Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team?
      • realusername 8y ago
        > Can you clarify what "trying to fill quotas" has to do with believing in, encouraging, and supporting diversity on a technical team? "supporting diversity" means absolutely nothing, it's empty buzz-speak. Either you hire people regardless of their genders/religious group/sexual orientation or you make a conscious choice to reject candidates which are not in your approved list of "diversity" (whatever that means). In a tech world where you have probably less than 10% women, trying to achieve a "diverse" (whatever that means again) team is just putting quotas in place to reject people not in the approved whitelist of "diversity".
        • rosser 8y ago
          That comes across as rather dismissive, black-and-white thinking, about something which people other than you care deeply and find quite nuanced, and tells me we probably have little else to say here. Have a good evening.
          • realusername 8y ago
            I thought my argument was nuanced and progressive by supporting people regardless of their genders/sexual orientation/religious group. I don't like much to divide people across arbitrary lines which are often artificial, especially in the modern day where we have so much sub-culture that it's difficult to find anything in common in people supposedly from the same "group".
  • refurb 8y ago
    You’re making the assumption that women as a gender have different product needs then men do?
  • ralusek 8y ago
    You make two arguments that I fundamentally disagree with. 1.) Individual women inherently bring a perspective that individual men do not, and vice versa. And more importantly, the needs and perspectives of people in a given group can not be understood by those outside of it. 2.) A technical team necessarily benefits from diverse perspectives. What if they're building low level drivers for circuit boards? What if they're programming an application, but have no bearing whatsoever on the product decisions or design? I find these ideas, particularly #1, to be diametrically opposed to liberal philosophies of universality and the focus on the individual. I legitimately find that line of reasoning to be abhorrent.
• whatshisface 8y ago
  Can anyone be specific about what diversity, exactly, gender involves? Will the list sound like anything other than a list of stereotypes? Which perspective is it that one gender has but the other doesn't? I doubt anybody is thinking about tetrachromacy...
  • BadassFractal 8y ago
    Isn't gender a social construct anyway that is fluid and changes based on one's feelings at that specific point in time?
  • bArray 8y ago
    It's completely arbitrary. (Generalization of the vocal people in this area.) Their line of thinking is: "only people from those specific backgrounds can cater for their own groups tastes". And there's evidence for this, you have these people getting mad that an actor playing a gay person isn't gay and a trans person not trans. It's almost as if the narrative is that empathy is dead, no person could possibly ever think about anything other than themselves. Somebody who thinks this would appear to lack personal experience of empathy, draw your own conclusions.
    • BadassFractal 8y ago
      > It's almost as if the narrative is that empathy is dead, no person could possibly ever think about anything other than themselves. Somebody who thinks this would appear to lack personal experience of empathy, draw your own conclusions. Probably an accurate reflection of the people who are proposing that world view.
  • DoreenMichele 8y ago
    The first female senator to give birth in office needed the rules changed so she could breastfeed her baby at work and still do her job. Historically, no family members were allowed on the Senate floor. Until a woman gave birth as a senator, this was not an issue. Some years ago, a Jewish person on a professional forum told an anecdote about some group trying to do outreach to the Jewish community and scheduling their first meeting on the night of some really major Jewish holiday, a holiday so big he compared it to Christmas. Unsurprisingly, no Jews attended this meeting. When I worked at Aflac, they always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." If you don't have any members of certain demographics on your team, there will be things that just never occur to you that you may never learn you needed to know if you wanted to genuinely serve such people.
• throwaway19342 8y ago
  Indeed, one of my arguments was the same one used at Etsy: our userbase happened to be disproportionately female. To be honest, the atmosphere when I arrived was not that great -- a case could have been made that it was a hostile workplace environment. However, my colleagues saw themselves as loyal to the company, and they didn't see themselves as discriminators. To their great credit, they found ways to moderate both their their behaviors and their mindsets. This approach won't always work. Some people are more entrenched in their attitudes and had there been someone like that there, maybe it would have been uglier and more difficult. But sometimes, one at a time, people can change.
• scooble 8y ago
  This argument also justifies not hiring women if you consider a female perspective (whatever that is) to be less valuable. I would rather reject the premise that someone's perspective is a function of their gender. Not least because it would concern me to find myself sharing a premise with sexists. Furthermore, if you want to hire someone with a particular perspective, using gender as a proxy for it rather than testing if the candidate has that perspective directly looks like poor hiring practice.