10 ms·

Hire More Women In Tech

54 points by kgunette 12y ago

josu 12y ago
This is the person that made the site: https://twitter.com/kgunette https://twitter.com/kgunette Karen Schoellkopf
splintercell 12y ago
Boy, I hope I never get hired in a company because they needed to hire more Indians.
- aristus 12y ago
  Boy, I hope tired horseshit like yours goes away someday. Seriously. The OP took the time to make a reasoned, step-by-step argument for hiring more women in order to build a better company. Grow up.
  - splintercell 12y ago
    You are implying that because I don't wanna be hired just because the company needed more Indians, that means I am completely against building a better company. Sorry to break it to you, but you don't build a better company by hiring a minority just for the sake of hiring a minority. From the article: > Fortune 500 companies with at least three female directors have seen their return on invested capital increase by at least 66%, return on sales increase by 42%, and return on equity increase by at least 53%. You may not realize this, but this actually shits over the accomplishment of those women. Imagine if my employer who hugely benefitted from my work for them goes out and says "Hire more Indians, we hired an Indian and our sales went up by 43%", I would walk out of it so fast. Mostly because they need me as an individual(and wouldn't just replace me with another Indian guy) but they don't treat me as an individual.
    - aristus 12y ago
      Using fake outrage at a hypothetical situation as an excuse to maintain the status quo is not a valid response. A woman, asking companies to look at how they hire and giving specific examples of how their hiring is biased is not shitting over the accomplishments of women.
- mjfl 12y ago
  Hell, you're more likely to be rejected with today's policies.
nawitus 12y ago
>The premise of “We Only Hire The Best Candidates.” >The idea is not to hire women just because they're women. Hire women that are amazing at their jobs. Okay, so should you pick a female candidate who is estimated to be 1% worse than a male candidate? That answer just sidesteps the whole question. I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair. EDIT: >"You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." That's seems sexist. Since the majority of tech students and tech graduates still are male, the non-biased ratio shouldn't be 50/50.
- aristus 12y ago
  Let's assume that the best candidate should always be chosen. How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate that it can distinguish people within 1%? I would love to see a writeup of your methodology, and how you confirm those numbers.
  - nawitus 12y ago
    It's just a thought experiment. If the accuracy is -+n%, then lets say "2*n% worse".
    - aristus 12y ago
      Sure, hire the best. But first you have to recognize that N is probably larger (and less replicable!) than you think. Also, that there is more than one "N". Job interviewing is not a 100-yard dash with only one metric.
      - nawitus 12y ago
        The metric should be composed of several factors.
  - sejje 12y ago
    It doesn't matter. You choose the candidate that your process deems the best. If it's inaccurate, so be it, it's the best measure you've (currently) got.
buckfitchesget 12y ago
what a bunch of bullshit, you'll never hear feminists lobbying for hiring more women in dangerous fields like off shore oil drilling (pay is great btw) or campaigning for equal pay for male pornstars "We want equality! But only in x,y,z you can keep a,b,c lol"
- pgsandstrom 12y ago
  You know, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  That's because men are not systematically discriminated against in the way women are. These "won't someone please think of the men?!" arguments are tired and not good.
  - buckfitchesget 12y ago
    Nice strawman. >Pay gap >Women are just as capable choose one, otherwise companies would pay the lowest price for labor. The "problem" (not even sure why a difference in what fields people like to go into is a problem) is reflected in open source statistics; women just don't like to code as much as men do.
  - john_b 12y ago
    While I agree with your larger point, invoking a systematic trend to support a specific issue in a specific context is a logical fallacy [1]. The parent's comment, while crudely phrased, did actually highlight some legitimate counterexamples to the "only women are discriminated against" narrative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
  - McDoku 12y ago
    Unless you consider, homelessness, suicides, social stigma regarding being sexually assulted, mancession, acceptance of physical abuse in public. I mean no one is advocating we get the sucide rate to 50%. If you want parity, you can't cherry pick and that means recalibrating society as a whole. Which means questioning bad ideas like an equal. There are way to many people intresting in thought stopping for the sake of PR.
opendais 12y ago
> "Only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26% of all American coders." - Wired and > Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires. > "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal > *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system. This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split. Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard. If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.
- arrrg 12y ago
  Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant? The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified. The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix. Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.
  - epochwolf 12y ago
    Because there are places that will loosen qualifications to attract people of a specific race or gender because they can't find enough qualified candidates of that race. One of the universities I attended had a lower set of requirements and scholarships for those that identified as "black". (The region was 96% white at the time so not really a surprise. Diversity was lacking and the admissions department was desperate.)
MPetitt 12y ago
The biggest thing that I feel like these initiatives always miss is that the onus on fixing the problem of gender equality in tech shouldn't be on the companies at this point in the game (not to say that won't change), but on getting more women interested in tech in the first place. Overwhelmingly women don't seem to care about the technology field. We need to focus less on bending over backwards to find appropriate female candidates from such a small pool, and focus more on what organizations like Girls who Code[0] who are trying to get more young women interested in technology. Once there is actually a sizable amount of women involved in the field, then maybe the conversation over discrimination or lack of diversity may be worth having. But until then I cant just make female engineers poof into the interview room like magic and thats not for lack of trying. [0] http://girlswhocode.com/ http://girlswhocode.com/
- stonewhite 12y ago
  Exactly. It is anectodal but, every women who works in our office (and mostly on other offices I see) is either business related, or semi-techie (QA Engineer). We just can't find any women coders that can actually pass a basic competency challenge for more than two years.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Transcendence42 12y ago
    Then you're incompetent with regards to recruiting.
- acbart 12y ago
  This is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, so you can't narrow your focus, but instead approach it from multiple angles. Women aren't encouraged to get involved in tech because they can't find good role models, and there are no good role models because women aren't being encouraged to get involved with tech. It's important to have initatives like this to get more role models so we can encourage more women and get more role models to encourage more women ...
onetimeusename 12y ago
I object to the part about gender coding the language. I think people should be able to speak and write the way it comes naturally to them. It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men. Apart from that, the "better" descriptions were vague and unclear as to what the focus was. "understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.
- BSousa 12y ago
  I'm a man, I support having more women in tech (thought I don't agree it is the companies responsibilities for this) but I can honestly say, her rewritten job descriptions would make me NOT want to apply (maybe that is the goal?). 1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients' 2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients' First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.
  - darthgoogle 12y ago
    The problem is that social activists have discovered computing. Now they are trying to force their world view into the tech domain because they have failed to impart change in the real world. Hence the faux moral outrage over gendered words. Hence the hounding of Brendan Eich for his personal views which had no bearing on his technical competency. Hence the Gnome foundation running out of money because they diverted all their funds to a women's outreach program instead of focusing on software development. Right now, in the real world, scantily-clad women in bikins are draped across magazine covers, sporting events segregate the sexes, and in many Islamic countries women are treated like slaves... yet somehow “The tech industry may have a problem with women"?
    - mkr-hn 12y ago
      The process has to start somewhere. People in tech like to call themselves egalitarian and progressive, so they should be open to encouraging more people from different backgrounds to enter the pipeline.
Arnor 12y ago
I'm really impressed with this post in general. I understand that these concepts are beyond the scope of this page, but I hope to hear more from OP about getting more women prepared as candidates for engineering/software jobs. I agree that there is a gender bias in hiring practices, but I think it's a symptom of the more systemic problem driving women away from STEM fields. I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.
- kgunette 12y ago
  fair enough re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions. nothing on the site is original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters.
jasode 12y ago
> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1] As for the job description rewrites such as: "We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately." "Sensitive to clients’ needs," Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop. I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job. As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line." [1]http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. The advice is from a CEO, presumably to CEOs (whose set of concerns include longer range strategic goals, and whose tools are broader, than those who are merely "hiring managers".) > For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering. People who are qualified to work as computer programmers are not exclusively graduates in computer science and computer engineering. I'd be surprised if even the majority of working programmers had degrees in one of those fields.
- KuraFire 12y ago
  “I can't believe that any woman” — stop right here. Whenever anyone on HN ever says this, they're really showing themselves to: 1) lack imagination 2) lack empathy (egregiously so) 3) generally be wrong about whatever follows next What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same. This is IDIOTIC and you're revealing yourself to seeing women as "a demographic" rather than as 3.6 billion unique individuals who each have their own unique personality, interests, etc. Also, you're revealing your massively shortsighted perspective and utter inability to educate yourself a little on the matter before chiming in with your assertions, but let me help you improve perspective and learn something new: Study: Women Do Not Apply To ‘Male-Sounding’ Jobs http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sounding-jobs/ http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sound... You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see-gender-bias-in-your-job-postings/ http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see... > A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women. So, your assertion that it's "ridiculous goop" has actually been proven (repeatedly) by scientific studies, and is a tremendously stupid assertion to begin with (it hinges on the assumption that all women are exactly the same). Perhaps next time, before opening your mouth, assess whether you actually have any fucking knowledge of what you're about to assert.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I'm going to have to contest the complaint on "gendered wording". Ironically, this is coming from the same people who will often berate you for "tone policing" them, judging by the ideological dispositions of several of the linked resources in the footer. I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator. Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days. But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves. So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.
wil421 12y ago
I think you could say train more women in tech and you would have a better staring point. The 80s and 90s were graduating more females. From Wikipedia: In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing I graduated with an Information Systems degree and we probably had something like 30% - 35% females that I walked with.
doctorfoo 12y ago
I always feel slightly bitter about stuff like this. As a male, I don't ever recall being encouraged to work in tech. Any geeky pursuit made me the subject of ridicule. There was always a battle with my mother as a child to even be allowed access to a computer. Bleh.
- purringmeow 12y ago
  Not to mention the mocking most of us had to endure from the cool kids. I was systematically bullied, because of being a geek, who loved tech.
  - doctorfoo 12y ago
    And yet... we still did it. Is it simply a matter of having enough aggression, or something, such that we continued anyway? In which case, it would certainly be nice to see more sensitive people of either gender encouraged to take up the subjects they are truly interested in. There's a pervasive culture of social shaming of people who don't fit the norm. Will it ever go away as a whole, or is it a unchangeable component of society?
    - purringmeow 12y ago
      Sadly, I doubt it will go away anytime soon, people just dislike the different, which isn't a bad thing in every case. Sometimes it fuels constructive criticism and discourse on a topic. There is a reason why less women than men are going into tech, but I don't want to elaborate on that, since I am going to be downvoted into oblivion(and no, it's not intelligence).
therogerwilco 12y ago
The title should be, "Elevate interest from women in tech, so the qualified ones who want to learn, have a better chance" To not pay attention to anything else but gender, that's sexism.
mjfl 12y ago
I'm not going to change the wording of my job postings to "make women more comfortable". That's bullshit. Women are adults too, we should not do them the disservice of coddling them. It is much better to let them rise to the challenge. Many do, and many do very well. As noted in the article, and something I agree with, companies do better with women in management. However, this is not due to babying them.
- oddevan 12y ago
  I think the point of the job postings was to point out how those postings can be seen as biased even when they weren't intended to be.
omegaham 12y ago
The wording changes in job descriptions strike me as treating a symptom rather than a cause. Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?
sremani 12y ago
The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline. Hiring in tech is the end of pipe-line, if people do not enter the queue i.e. get some form formal or semi-formal techEd they are not going to make it to the other end. Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative. Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share. So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions. Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).
- danilocampos 12y ago
  "The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline." Oh yeah? Then how come with blacks taking 10% of CS degrees and Latinos taking 8%, their representation at Google and Facebook is only 1% and 2%? Meritocracy?
  - sremani 12y ago
    Google and Facebook are kind of extreme cases - I would not be hired by Google in spite of my Master's degree - in most of these companies one may have to look at the CS degrees from Elite Universities. An A.S degree from Collin County Community College or BS from TAMU-Commerce is not same as Stanford or UT-Austin. You can cherry pick the data all you want, are there biases - apparently not White Engineer Bias for sure, if there is. I do not know all the variables, but I prefer uneven organic growth over over-curated even growth that sucks resources and energies from vital parts of the company.
ps4fanboy 12y ago
"A diverse workplace is proven to get better results" citation needed
- kgunette 12y ago
  it's actually linked in the point below:http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028227/here-are-all-the-quantifiable-reasons-you-should-hire-more-women http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028227/here-are-all-the-quantifi...
  - ps4fanboy 12y ago
    http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Women-314.pdf http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for... While the study does point out that successful companies have more women it fails to provide causality. Do successful companies hire more women or does hiring more women cause you to be more successful?
john_b 12y ago
Note that the job descriptions the site labels as "better", and which it presents as neutral, are those that are explicitly labeled as "feminine" in the source it quotes. If you want to recruit an even ratio of men to women, use actually neutral job descriptions. The original source [1] notes that the experiment only tested female aversion to the masculine job descriptions, and not the other way around. Treat these examples as the ends of a spectrum and shoot for somewhere in the middle. Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do. [1] http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see-gender-bias-in-your-job-postings/ http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...
- kgunette 12y ago
  i did edit from "masculine" and "feminine" to "average" and "better" as i found masculine/feminine ultimately problematic. this reference is simply a few examples of what a change in language can do. they still describe the exact same job and functions.
peter303 12y ago
MIT students are 45% female. But they have a pool of 12 applicants for very seat. (fewer than that for female and minority)
K-Wall 12y ago
I am confused with the section about job descriptions. A firm must not have gender biased descriptions is the OP assertion yet the ere article that was cited specifically states the "BETTER" descriptions are feminine. So to solve the issue of low representation of woman in tech the industry must introduce a bias towards men?
- laurenbee 12y ago
  I'd vote in favor of removing gendered language altogether. The descriptions listed are vague and kind of meaningless. For example, in the "masculine" company description, the words "dominant" and "boasts" are just fluff. Plus, who cares if you "are determined to stand apart from the competition"? Isn't everyone? And the "feminine" description is so passive and unclear that it makes me think the company could be an engineering support group and not an actual engineering firm. I would suggestion something like, "We are a leading engineering firm with clients including X, Y, and Z." It's short and to-the-point. This way, it is clear that the company is an engineering firm, and hopefully clients X, Y, and Z are illustrious enough that they speak to the firm's capability/status.
  - kgunette 12y ago
    i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.
jgrahamc 12y ago
Every time this comes up I'm dismayed at the responses on HN. No wonder some women don't feel encouraged to enter the tech. world.
- xrctl 12y ago
  People who belong in tech don't need to be spoon fed. The barriers to entry are some of the lowest for any professional field in history.
mbesto 12y ago
> It’s tough to prove gender bias. followed by > Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings" I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.
bcassedy 12y ago
I'm disappointed by the reworded job descriptions. Many times in the examples the entire meaning was changed rather than just being painted in a more gender neutral light. There's a huge difference between "Direct a team" and "Support a team".
- kgunette 12y ago
  i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.
rpsw 12y ago
Maybe I'm just more drawn to the average descriptions cause I'm male, but some of the language feels off in the "better" descriptions. > We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately. Intimately sounds wrong here to me. Intimacy is something I would associate with things of romantic nature. > Strong communication and influencing skills. vs > Proficient oral and written communications skills. They sound like descriptions for different jobs. One sounds like a job where you need to be able to close deals or lead people the other sounds like a generic soft-skill that everyone says they have. Turning "Direct" to "Support" also gives a different meaning. The descriptions feel like the position is more entry-level or wishy-washy. I'd imagine the "better" descriptions would approachable to both genders, as they don't seem they demand as much or need people to be assertive/confident. Maybe this works out well in practice, as maybe you lose a lot of suitable candidates to effects like impostor syndrome. They just feel like they are advertising two different jobs.
IanDrake 12y ago
As a husband to a female minority executive in aerospace and a brother to an engineer/executive in green tech, I have to say this is focused on the wrong issues. From what I have seen, qualified women get hired and get promoted. The biggest problem that remains is one of conduct by male employees on the job. Also, for the life of me, I just can't understand why people want to take a census and say ok, our population is 50%/50% male/female, 50%/20%/15%/5% white/black/hispanic/asian, 80%/9%/9%/2% straight/gay/lesbian/transgender, so let's make sure those magic ratios are equal across all home makers, software developers, the rich, the poor, etc... There is no end to it and it's folly.
vampirechicken 12y ago
I don't understand what makes those average wordings gendered and the 'better' wording not gendered. From my readings of Dr. Deborah Tannen, (who writes books on the topic of the differences in male and female communication styles, and their possible cultutral origins) they both seem like they are gendered, with the 'average' wording being an example of masciline-ish speech (my interpretation, not hers) and the 'better' wording being more feminine-ish. I'm happy to learn how I've misinterpreted it, but I'm not seeing it. Can somebody please enlighten me?
- kgunette 12y ago
  it's tricky, and agreed - simply an example (by ERE) of how changing language may increase the pool of people interested in the job posting.
  - vampirechicken 12y ago
    I see that, but the examples were introduced as examples of removing gendered speech. I was expecting the bad examples to be the kind of jobs that are posted to the techcompaniesthatonlyhiremen tumblr, pepperd with 'he', 'him', and 'goto guy' kinds of language. Given that they weren't, I think that calling them 'gendered', but not explaining the specific connotation of 'gendered' in that context is what caused my confusion.
McDoku 12y ago
> Wealthy white women are not the most disprivileged class < If we are considering equality. A native american man is way more disprivileged then a caucasian univerity educated woman. I mean name one VC backed start up with a Native American CEO? I am Metis (Native American) and frankly the low employment on reserves could be mitigated by remote work. Having more coders and startup from reserves/communities could be an amazing way to help many of the cripling social issues. We could have a Native American Steve Jobs... and then have him played in a film by Johnny Depp :) TL:DR > It is not really fair to almost exclusively focus on the most privilidged dispriviledge class. PS > Also those are some big numbers for ROI with no sourcing. Sceptical me is skeptic.
- kgunette 12y ago
  PS. there's absolutely sourcing for those ROI numbers. Here are a few of the sources for the studies linked to directly below the ROI metrics (Anita Borg Institute), and pages 11-12 of that report detail all of the sources and studies. Here it is, in case you missed it on the site ---> http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Women-314.pdf http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for... Those metrics are based on studies by: Cristian Dezsö at the University of Maryland, and David Ross at Columbia University Business School; Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Cindy Padnos, founder of Illuminate Ventures, who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship; The London Business School report, Innovative Potential: Men and Women in Teams; the September 2013 research report, Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth by The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI); Professor Anita Woolley, an economist at Carnegie Mellon; Cumulative Gallup Workplace Studies; and McKinsey & Company's annual series "Women Matter."

54 points by kgunette 12y ago

josu 12y ago

This is the person that made the site: https://twitter.com/kgunette https://twitter.com/kgunette Karen Schoellkopf

splintercell 12y ago

Boy, I hope I never get hired in a company because they needed to hire more Indians.

aristus 12y ago
Boy, I hope tired horseshit like yours goes away someday. Seriously. The OP took the time to make a reasoned, step-by-step argument for hiring more women in order to build a better company. Grow up.
- splintercell 12y ago
  You are implying that because I don't wanna be hired just because the company needed more Indians, that means I am completely against building a better company. Sorry to break it to you, but you don't build a better company by hiring a minority just for the sake of hiring a minority. From the article: > Fortune 500 companies with at least three female directors have seen their return on invested capital increase by at least 66%, return on sales increase by 42%, and return on equity increase by at least 53%. You may not realize this, but this actually shits over the accomplishment of those women. Imagine if my employer who hugely benefitted from my work for them goes out and says "Hire more Indians, we hired an Indian and our sales went up by 43%", I would walk out of it so fast. Mostly because they need me as an individual(and wouldn't just replace me with another Indian guy) but they don't treat me as an individual.
  - aristus 12y ago
    Using fake outrage at a hypothetical situation as an excuse to maintain the status quo is not a valid response. A woman, asking companies to look at how they hire and giving specific examples of how their hiring is biased is not shitting over the accomplishments of women.
mjfl 12y ago
Hell, you're more likely to be rejected with today's policies.

nawitus 12y ago

>The premise of “We Only Hire The Best Candidates.” >The idea is not to hire women just because they're women. Hire women that are amazing at their jobs. Okay, so should you pick a female candidate who is estimated to be 1% worse than a male candidate? That answer just sidesteps the whole question. I think the best candidate should always be chosen, as that's fair. EDIT: >"You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." That's seems sexist. Since the majority of tech students and tech graduates still are male, the non-biased ratio shouldn't be 50/50.

aristus 12y ago
Let's assume that the best candidate should always be chosen. How certain are you that your interview process is so damned accurate that it can distinguish people within 1%? I would love to see a writeup of your methodology, and how you confirm those numbers.
- nawitus 12y ago
  It's just a thought experiment. If the accuracy is -+n%, then lets say "2*n% worse".
  - aristus 12y ago
    Sure, hire the best. But first you have to recognize that N is probably larger (and less replicable!) than you think. Also, that there is more than one "N". Job interviewing is not a 100-yard dash with only one metric.
    - nawitus 12y ago
      The metric should be composed of several factors.
- sejje 12y ago
  It doesn't matter. You choose the candidate that your process deems the best. If it's inaccurate, so be it, it's the best measure you've (currently) got.

buckfitchesget 12y ago

what a bunch of bullshit, you'll never hear feminists lobbying for hiring more women in dangerous fields like off shore oil drilling (pay is great btw) or campaigning for equal pay for male pornstars "We want equality! But only in x,y,z you can keep a,b,c lol"

pgsandstrom 12y ago
You know, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Blackthorn 12y ago
That's because men are not systematically discriminated against in the way women are. These "won't someone please think of the men?!" arguments are tired and not good.
- buckfitchesget 12y ago
  Nice strawman. >Pay gap >Women are just as capable choose one, otherwise companies would pay the lowest price for labor. The "problem" (not even sure why a difference in what fields people like to go into is a problem) is reflected in open source statistics; women just don't like to code as much as men do.
- john_b 12y ago
  While I agree with your larger point, invoking a systematic trend to support a specific issue in a specific context is a logical fallacy [1]. The parent's comment, while crudely phrased, did actually highlight some legitimate counterexamples to the "only women are discriminated against" narrative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
- McDoku 12y ago
  Unless you consider, homelessness, suicides, social stigma regarding being sexually assulted, mancession, acceptance of physical abuse in public. I mean no one is advocating we get the sucide rate to 50%. If you want parity, you can't cherry pick and that means recalibrating society as a whole. Which means questioning bad ideas like an equal. There are way to many people intresting in thought stopping for the sake of PR.

opendais 12y ago

> "Only 11% of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26% of all American coders." - Wired and > Track the gender of your applicants, not just the hires. > "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." - Allison Sawyer, The Wall Street Journal > *NOTE: aim for this ratio in these early days, as we try to build towards a more equitable system. This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women. You, at best, can hope for a 74/26 split. Also? Gender bias in hiring is illegal, regardless of direction. In fact, employers are generally make the "gender identification" and "race identification" portions optional for liability reasons in this regard. If your objective is 50/50, you need to encourage more women to enter the field [programming] rather than complain it isn't 50/50. 74/26 makes it mathematically impossible for every company to hire a 50/50 split.

arrrg 12y ago
Literally no one was arguing to not hire based on qualification. Why is it that, whenever this comes up, everyone starts babbling incomprehensibly about qualifications as if that’s relevant? The link presents several non-qualifications-based ways of not hiring more women. Another one I think might work (that has already been very successful in increasing the number of women speakers at conferences) is to actively approach women and ask them to apply and talk to them about the job if they say they are not sure whether they are qualified. The actual selection process between those applications can and probably should still be blind, but the pool of applications will be a better mix. Yeah, it’s more work, but nobody says this is easy.
- epochwolf 12y ago
  Because there are places that will loosen qualifications to attract people of a specific race or gender because they can't find enough qualified candidates of that race. One of the universities I attended had a lower set of requirements and scholarships for those that identified as "black". (The region was 96% white at the time so not really a surprise. Diversity was lacking and the admissions department was desperate.)

MPetitt 12y ago

The biggest thing that I feel like these initiatives always miss is that the onus on fixing the problem of gender equality in tech shouldn't be on the companies at this point in the game (not to say that won't change), but on getting more women interested in tech in the first place. Overwhelmingly women don't seem to care about the technology field. We need to focus less on bending over backwards to find appropriate female candidates from such a small pool, and focus more on what organizations like Girls who Code[0] who are trying to get more young women interested in technology. Once there is actually a sizable amount of women involved in the field, then maybe the conversation over discrimination or lack of diversity may be worth having. But until then I cant just make female engineers poof into the interview room like magic and thats not for lack of trying. [0] http://girlswhocode.com/ http://girlswhocode.com/

stonewhite 12y ago
Exactly. It is anectodal but, every women who works in our office (and mostly on other offices I see) is either business related, or semi-techie (QA Engineer). We just can't find any women coders that can actually pass a basic competency challenge for more than two years.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Transcendence42 12y ago
  Then you're incompetent with regards to recruiting.
acbart 12y ago
This is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, so you can't narrow your focus, but instead approach it from multiple angles. Women aren't encouraged to get involved in tech because they can't find good role models, and there are no good role models because women aren't being encouraged to get involved with tech. It's important to have initatives like this to get more role models so we can encourage more women and get more role models to encourage more women ...

onetimeusename 12y ago

I object to the part about gender coding the language. I think people should be able to speak and write the way it comes naturally to them. It gets to a point where being friendly to women is so strenuous that it becomes hostile to men. Apart from that, the "better" descriptions were vague and unclear as to what the focus was. "understanding the engineer sector intimately" sounds like it is actually NOT an engineering position.

BSousa 12y ago
I'm a man, I support having more women in tech (thought I don't agree it is the companies responsibilities for this) but I can honestly say, her rewritten job descriptions would make me NOT want to apply (maybe that is the goal?). 1) 'We are a dominant engineering firm that boasts many leading clients' 2) 'We are a community of engineers who have effective relationships with many satisfied clients' First one makes me think of a solid company with many clients, second one just makes me think they are a hippie community living in the woods foraging for food and no showering while coding.
- darthgoogle 12y ago
  The problem is that social activists have discovered computing. Now they are trying to force their world view into the tech domain because they have failed to impart change in the real world. Hence the faux moral outrage over gendered words. Hence the hounding of Brendan Eich for his personal views which had no bearing on his technical competency. Hence the Gnome foundation running out of money because they diverted all their funds to a women's outreach program instead of focusing on software development. Right now, in the real world, scantily-clad women in bikins are draped across magazine covers, sporting events segregate the sexes, and in many Islamic countries women are treated like slaves... yet somehow “The tech industry may have a problem with women"?
  - mkr-hn 12y ago
    The process has to start somewhere. People in tech like to call themselves egalitarian and progressive, so they should be open to encouraging more people from different backgrounds to enter the pipeline.

Arnor 12y ago

I'm really impressed with this post in general. I understand that these concepts are beyond the scope of this page, but I hope to hear more from OP about getting more women prepared as candidates for engineering/software jobs. I agree that there is a gender bias in hiring practices, but I think it's a symptom of the more systemic problem driving women away from STEM fields. I was disappointed in the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions" section. It had the potential to be a really good point, but the descriptions were contrived. The "Average Description" was a straw man, and the "BETTER" seemed wishy washy. I'd prefer real world samples rewritten in OPs recommended voice.

kgunette 12y ago
fair enough re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions. nothing on the site is original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters.

jasode 12y ago

> "You need to be aiming for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio." This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering.[1] As for the job description rewrites such as: "We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately." "Sensitive to clients’ needs," Sorry, but that is ridiculous goop. I can't believe that any woman of substance requires new-age touchy-feely rewrites to respond to job descriptions. In my opinion, it's patronizing and underestimates the technical reasons that may attract women to the job. As an analogy, if only 1% of kindergarten teachers are male and we wanted to "fix" that ratio, please don't rewrite job descriptions with sports metaphors such as "we're recruiting teachers to keep kids from fumbling the ball and get them across the goal line." [1]http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...

dragonwriter 12y ago
> This advice is completely ignorant of other forces outside of the hiring managers' control. The advice is from a CEO, presumably to CEOs (whose set of concerns include longer range strategic goals, and whose tools are broader, than those who are merely "hiring managers".) > For example, women only account for ~12% of the graduates in computer science and computer engineering. People who are qualified to work as computer programmers are not exclusively graduates in computer science and computer engineering. I'd be surprised if even the majority of working programmers had degrees in one of those fields.
KuraFire 12y ago
“I can't believe that any woman” — stop right here. Whenever anyone on HN ever says this, they're really showing themselves to: 1) lack imagination 2) lack empathy (egregiously so) 3) generally be wrong about whatever follows next What you're doing here is saying you think all women who would have an interest in tech are exactly the same. This is IDIOTIC and you're revealing yourself to seeing women as "a demographic" rather than as 3.6 billion unique individuals who each have their own unique personality, interests, etc. Also, you're revealing your massively shortsighted perspective and utter inability to educate yourself a little on the matter before chiming in with your assertions, but let me help you improve perspective and learn something new: Study: Women Do Not Apply To ‘Male-Sounding’ Jobs http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sounding-jobs/ http://time.com/48578/study-women-do-not-apply-to-male-sound... You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see-gender-bias-in-your-job-postings/ http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see... > A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women. So, your assertion that it's "ridiculous goop" has actually been proven (repeatedly) by scientific studies, and is a tremendously stupid assertion to begin with (it hinges on the assumption that all women are exactly the same). Perhaps next time, before opening your mouth, assess whether you actually have any fucking knowledge of what you're about to assert.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

I'm going to have to contest the complaint on "gendered wording". Ironically, this is coming from the same people who will often berate you for "tone policing" them, judging by the ideological dispositions of several of the linked resources in the footer. I don't have time at hand to analyze the study (which is never directly linked, even in the supplied article, by the way), but there's a reason why companies use the supposedly "gendered" wording, in place of the "neutral" wording: it conveys a different meaning. "Strong communication and influencing skills" and "Proficient oral and written communications skills" are two different things. The latter is much looser and removes the implication that one should be a decent manipulator. Indeed, the implication that women cannot have "strong communication and influencing skills" and that the very wording repels them, actually reinforces traditional gender roles quite neatly. The ones that are allegedly to be abolished here. At least, judging from the ideology of the web page's authors. I'm making assumptions, I know, but gender politics and theory as a whole is a clusterfuck these days. But there's also a wider belief being pushed on eradicating "harmful language". I'd agree, but I have a different interpretation of it. Language is harmful not when it has a negative or potentially offensive meaning, but when it has no meaning. Examples are the words "socialism" and "liberalism" which have become so diluted in public discourse, so as to be meaningless in of themselves. So while I can't contest the end goal, the methods being used to achieve it are less than stellar, to say the least. Finally, the need to aim for a 50/50 men-to-women ratio is simply unrealistic. It really depends on one's goals. If you simply want to neutrally deliver a product, getting yourself involved in someone's identity politics crusade is of little meaning. Not everything revolves around that, you know.

wil421 12y ago

I think you could say train more women in tech and you would have a better staring point. The 80s and 90s were graduating more females. From Wikipedia: In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998. Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing I graduated with an Information Systems degree and we probably had something like 30% - 35% females that I walked with.

doctorfoo 12y ago

I always feel slightly bitter about stuff like this. As a male, I don't ever recall being encouraged to work in tech. Any geeky pursuit made me the subject of ridicule. There was always a battle with my mother as a child to even be allowed access to a computer. Bleh.

purringmeow 12y ago
Not to mention the mocking most of us had to endure from the cool kids. I was systematically bullied, because of being a geek, who loved tech.
- doctorfoo 12y ago
  And yet... we still did it. Is it simply a matter of having enough aggression, or something, such that we continued anyway? In which case, it would certainly be nice to see more sensitive people of either gender encouraged to take up the subjects they are truly interested in. There's a pervasive culture of social shaming of people who don't fit the norm. Will it ever go away as a whole, or is it a unchangeable component of society?
  - purringmeow 12y ago
    Sadly, I doubt it will go away anytime soon, people just dislike the different, which isn't a bad thing in every case. Sometimes it fuels constructive criticism and discourse on a topic. There is a reason why less women than men are going into tech, but I don't want to elaborate on that, since I am going to be downvoted into oblivion(and no, it's not intelligence).

therogerwilco 12y ago

The title should be, "Elevate interest from women in tech, so the qualified ones who want to learn, have a better chance" To not pay attention to anything else but gender, that's sexism.

mjfl 12y ago

I'm not going to change the wording of my job postings to "make women more comfortable". That's bullshit. Women are adults too, we should not do them the disservice of coddling them. It is much better to let them rise to the challenge. Many do, and many do very well. As noted in the article, and something I agree with, companies do better with women in management. However, this is not due to babying them.

oddevan 12y ago
I think the point of the job postings was to point out how those postings can be seen as biased even when they weren't intended to be.

omegaham 12y ago

The wording changes in job descriptions strike me as treating a symptom rather than a cause. Ideally, your job description should accurately state what the position's responsibilities are. If you're working in a high-pressure, high-stress environment with a lot of individual responsibilities, it would be absurd to represent it as a laid-back happy environment. Would a roofing company be able to attract women with a conciliatory job description?

sremani 12y ago

The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline. Hiring in tech is the end of pipe-line, if people do not enter the queue i.e. get some form formal or semi-formal techEd they are not going to make it to the other end. Real efforts should be focused there. There is huge myth there is mono-culture in tech. No, actually White and Asians make up significant chunk of Engineering population and Asian component is very diverse and conveniently neglected in the narrative. Groups that are under-represented in Engineering do a little bit better with their share in management except for Asians - they were, in Yahoo's case 51% of Engineering share and 17% of Management share. So once you start social engineering an environment based on Gender, Race etc. may be there are positive effects, but there will be unintended consequences because of unorganic fiat regulations or assumptions. Large companies should strive better but I think some Gender or Race based initiative will not solve a thing, it makes us more conscious of things that we did not choose (our race and gender).

danilocampos 12y ago
"The reason why Women, Blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in tech boils down to the pipeline." Oh yeah? Then how come with blacks taking 10% of CS degrees and Latinos taking 8%, their representation at Google and Facebook is only 1% and 2%? Meritocracy?
- sremani 12y ago
  Google and Facebook are kind of extreme cases - I would not be hired by Google in spite of my Master's degree - in most of these companies one may have to look at the CS degrees from Elite Universities. An A.S degree from Collin County Community College or BS from TAMU-Commerce is not same as Stanford or UT-Austin. You can cherry pick the data all you want, are there biases - apparently not White Engineer Bias for sure, if there is. I do not know all the variables, but I prefer uneven organic growth over over-curated even growth that sucks resources and energies from vital parts of the company.

ps4fanboy 12y ago

"A diverse workplace is proven to get better results" citation needed

kgunette 12y ago
it's actually linked in the point below:http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028227/here-are-all-the-quantifiable-reasons-you-should-hire-more-women http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028227/here-are-all-the-quantifi...
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Women-314.pdf http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for... While the study does point out that successful companies have more women it fails to provide causality. Do successful companies hire more women or does hiring more women cause you to be more successful?

john_b 12y ago

Note that the job descriptions the site labels as "better", and which it presents as neutral, are those that are explicitly labeled as "feminine" in the source it quotes. If you want to recruit an even ratio of men to women, use actually neutral job descriptions. The original source [1] notes that the experiment only tested female aversion to the masculine job descriptions, and not the other way around. Treat these examples as the ends of a spectrum and shoot for somewhere in the middle. Also, if you do want to recruit using more feminine job descriptions, please don't be as vague as the feminine descriptions given as examples here. Unless you want your female candidates to not know what they are supposed to do. [1] http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see-gender-bias-in-your-job-postings/ http://www.ere.net/2013/03/01/you-dont-know-it-but-women-see...

kgunette 12y ago
i did edit from "masculine" and "feminine" to "average" and "better" as i found masculine/feminine ultimately problematic. this reference is simply a few examples of what a change in language can do. they still describe the exact same job and functions.

peter303 12y ago

MIT students are 45% female. But they have a pool of 12 applicants for very seat. (fewer than that for female and minority)

K-Wall 12y ago

I am confused with the section about job descriptions. A firm must not have gender biased descriptions is the OP assertion yet the ere article that was cited specifically states the "BETTER" descriptions are feminine. So to solve the issue of low representation of woman in tech the industry must introduce a bias towards men?

laurenbee 12y ago
I'd vote in favor of removing gendered language altogether. The descriptions listed are vague and kind of meaningless. For example, in the "masculine" company description, the words "dominant" and "boasts" are just fluff. Plus, who cares if you "are determined to stand apart from the competition"? Isn't everyone? And the "feminine" description is so passive and unclear that it makes me think the company could be an engineering support group and not an actual engineering firm. I would suggestion something like, "We are a leading engineering firm with clients including X, Y, and Z." It's short and to-the-point. This way, it is clear that the company is an engineering firm, and hopefully clients X, Y, and Z are illustrious enough that they speak to the firm's capability/status.
- kgunette 12y ago
  i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.

jgrahamc 12y ago

Every time this comes up I'm dismayed at the responses on HN. No wonder some women don't feel encouraged to enter the tech. world.

xrctl 12y ago
People who belong in tech don't need to be spoon fed. The barriers to entry are some of the lowest for any professional field in history.

mbesto 12y ago

> It’s tough to prove gender bias. followed by > Re-evaluate your job post descriptions. Excerpt from "You Don’t Know It, But Women See Gender Bias in Your Job Postings" I admire the OP's "take action" stance, but this isn't the right root cause of the problem. I don't see any evidence of employers not wanting to hire women because they're women. What I do see is that many women aren't qualified enough (yet). Let's focus on that first.

bcassedy 12y ago

I'm disappointed by the reworded job descriptions. Many times in the examples the entire meaning was changed rather than just being painted in a more gender neutral light. There's a huge difference between "Direct a team" and "Support a team".

kgunette 12y ago
i replied to a few threads about this re: "re-evaluate your job post descriptions" - i did not draft those descriptions, they are linked to the actual original content by ERE. everything on the site is not original content. i find the descriptions could use some work, but do a decent job of illustrating the point that language matters, especially when the goal is simply to expand the pool of people that respond positively to your post.

rpsw 12y ago

Maybe I'm just more drawn to the average descriptions cause I'm male, but some of the language feels off in the "better" descriptions. > We are committed to understanding the engineer sector intimately. Intimately sounds wrong here to me. Intimacy is something I would associate with things of romantic nature. > Strong communication and influencing skills. vs > Proficient oral and written communications skills. They sound like descriptions for different jobs. One sounds like a job where you need to be able to close deals or lead people the other sounds like a generic soft-skill that everyone says they have. Turning "Direct" to "Support" also gives a different meaning. The descriptions feel like the position is more entry-level or wishy-washy. I'd imagine the "better" descriptions would approachable to both genders, as they don't seem they demand as much or need people to be assertive/confident. Maybe this works out well in practice, as maybe you lose a lot of suitable candidates to effects like impostor syndrome. They just feel like they are advertising two different jobs.

IanDrake 12y ago

As a husband to a female minority executive in aerospace and a brother to an engineer/executive in green tech, I have to say this is focused on the wrong issues. From what I have seen, qualified women get hired and get promoted. The biggest problem that remains is one of conduct by male employees on the job. Also, for the life of me, I just can't understand why people want to take a census and say ok, our population is 50%/50% male/female, 50%/20%/15%/5% white/black/hispanic/asian, 80%/9%/9%/2% straight/gay/lesbian/transgender, so let's make sure those magic ratios are equal across all home makers, software developers, the rich, the poor, etc... There is no end to it and it's folly.

vampirechicken 12y ago

I don't understand what makes those average wordings gendered and the 'better' wording not gendered. From my readings of Dr. Deborah Tannen, (who writes books on the topic of the differences in male and female communication styles, and their possible cultutral origins) they both seem like they are gendered, with the 'average' wording being an example of masciline-ish speech (my interpretation, not hers) and the 'better' wording being more feminine-ish. I'm happy to learn how I've misinterpreted it, but I'm not seeing it. Can somebody please enlighten me?

kgunette 12y ago
it's tricky, and agreed - simply an example (by ERE) of how changing language may increase the pool of people interested in the job posting.
- vampirechicken 12y ago
  I see that, but the examples were introduced as examples of removing gendered speech. I was expecting the bad examples to be the kind of jobs that are posted to the techcompaniesthatonlyhiremen tumblr, pepperd with 'he', 'him', and 'goto guy' kinds of language. Given that they weren't, I think that calling them 'gendered', but not explaining the specific connotation of 'gendered' in that context is what caused my confusion.

McDoku 12y ago

> Wealthy white women are not the most disprivileged class < If we are considering equality. A native american man is way more disprivileged then a caucasian univerity educated woman. I mean name one VC backed start up with a Native American CEO? I am Metis (Native American) and frankly the low employment on reserves could be mitigated by remote work. Having more coders and startup from reserves/communities could be an amazing way to help many of the cripling social issues. We could have a Native American Steve Jobs... and then have him played in a film by Johnny Depp :) TL:DR > It is not really fair to almost exclusively focus on the most privilidged dispriviledge class. PS > Also those are some big numbers for ROI with no sourcing. Sceptical me is skeptic.

kgunette 12y ago
PS. there's absolutely sourcing for those ROI numbers. Here are a few of the sources for the studies linked to directly below the ROI metrics (Anita Borg Institute), and pages 11-12 of that report detail all of the sources and studies. Here it is, in case you missed it on the site ---> http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for-Investing-in-Women-314.pdf http://anitaborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Case-for... Those metrics are based on studies by: Cristian Dezsö at the University of Maryland, and David Ross at Columbia University Business School; Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Cindy Padnos, founder of Illuminate Ventures, who compiled data from 100 studies on gender and tech entrepreneurship; The London Business School report, Innovative Potential: Men and Women in Teams; the September 2013 research report, Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth by The Center for Talent Innovation (CTI); Professor Anita Woolley, an economist at Carnegie Mellon; Cumulative Gallup Workplace Studies; and McKinsey & Company's annual series "Women Matter."