>They developed a compensation philosophy that was conscious about not rewarding aggressive negotiators, nor punishing those who were conflict averse.

I'm all for compensating employees fairly, but being able to negotiate and advocate for oneself is an incredibly important skill both in the workplace and in life. I think we as a society need to focus on reversing any cultural pressures that lead women to be conflict averse, as opposed to dumbing down the process for everyone. The way this is worded seems to imply "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves, so we take that out of the process to keep things equal".

I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these "conflict-averse" women would be too.

I have never seen a highly emotional negotiation tactic work. Screaming / demanding will more likely get an offer rescinded. Best negotiations I see usually go "market pays X for Y, here's the data to prove it from multiple sources", "competitor is paying X+Y%", "This job requires X% more time than stated, I have done this before. Here is the proportional increase I should get for the extra time."

The example with the competitor might seem as a one off. But market rate has a range, and it changes. Whatever competitors offers will eventually become market rate, if all else being equal (___location, company prospects, coworkers, etc).

I'm not sure you can escape it. I'm not sure you want to escape it. "Hey Jane, wouldn't the code be better written like this?" enters the process of negotiation. Do you really want to not explore a better way to write a given section of code because of some perceived conflict?

And maybe she will respond with: "Nice thought, but I avoided doing it that way because of a bug on platform X.", so you come back with: "Oh, I did not realize that. I still believe there is room for improvement. What if we did _this_ instead?". To which she returns with "I never thought of it that way. Good idea."

And there you have an act of negotiation. You won't always reach an agreement. Jane may not like your updated suggestion either and you ultimately walk away, leaving the code unchanged. But even when disagreements occur, I'm not sure I would want to go near an engineering team that was afraid to do that, to be honest.

> I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself.

Perhaps we have differing ideas of what negotiation is. Senseless fighting and trying to beat someone down into submissiveness doesn't sound like the process of negotiation at all to me.

But yet... You name several possible states of "truth". For which either team member may or may not weigh as heavily..?

And, negotiations re-enter the conversation..

I've worked in a variety of places, from rigid union seniority scales, to 100% commission, to traditional corporate bands. End of the day, as long as the pay was enough, there's not much difference. Assholes, incompetents, average, high skill and genius people existed in all of those environments.

The other thing is the future time wasted through the negotiation process and dealing with the issues created. Dealing with a aggressive negotiator is a signal of a pain in the ass to me, better to cut bait.

"Please stop the yelling Bob, that's not helping your argument. You come back with an offer from another company and I'll see what I can do."

Negotiations going aggressive is a sign of immature negotiations. Speak calm and slow. Keep it short, the longest it goes, the more chance it has to go wonky.

As a technical stakeholder, everyone has a voice of some sort. The architects may have more weight, but your opinion is based in your professional knowledge and work. In a salary negotiation, there is a lot of information asymmetry -- the employer knows the budget, probably knows the market better and knows the cost of fringe benefits that you do not, and has less to lose.

IMO, semi-transparent scales work best. They also avoid many discrimination issues. If you want to have financial incentives, use bonuses.

In my experience, the employer have little clue about the market. He's tainted by the organizational culture. For instance, a $XX-YY band for everyone your age or a habit to import cheap worker from A Mexican city.

A wage negotiation is adversarial. More money for one side means less for the other.

I think those are quite different skills and situations.

The adversarial part is how to divide that mutually created gain. The "surplus", as economists call it.

Incorrect. More money for you means the manager get more budget for this years and the next and he can write "hire X people for $Y". More money mean you both got more.

I also think this isn't so much "women aren't good at negotiating for themselves" as "women who negotiate for themselves aggressively and are conflict-seeking are penalized socially for non-womanlike-behavior, so they learn not to do so." There are legitimate criticisms to be made about implicitly buying into that social standard, but it seems like an easier change to just prioritize different things in compensation, if the goal is short-term fairness in compensation.

Are they?

When I negotiate on pay it is with my manager and maybe someone from HR. How does this translate into social penalty?

Do you have studies which show women who aggressively negotiate salary and change jobs at a similar frequency to men typically earn less than women who don't? Or have a worse social environment than men?

I have a feeling you are extrapolating based on very limited studies.

One of the main ingredients of a successful negotiation is to be likeable. Men can be likeable and aggressive, leading to better results than a likable but non agressive man. Women on the other hand, have more difficulties being aggressive while remaining likeable. If they act agressively they get labeled as "bossy", a term that society rarely if not never use on men. Since remaining likable is more important than being aggressive for the long term, women have a harder time getting big raises.

That's the social penalty I think the parent refers to.

You don't need to be an aggressive person to be aggressive in salary negotiations.

Being aggressive once or twice a year in salary negotiations with your manager is not going to land you a reputation as bossy.

Edit: or are you saying the parent was suggesting that being aggressive in the workplace itself is the best/only way of getting ahead?

LOL.

The only ingredient of a successful negotiation is leverage.

You don't need and you shouldn't use anything else.

If aggressive negotiators can't get raises at this company then they'll just go elsewhere when they get better offers. If it's true that women aren't able to negotiate as aggressively as men then they'll just be stuck at one company instead of moving around a lot. The pay disparity will remain, it'll just occur between companies rather than within them.

One thought that comes to mind is hazard pay in the military. A and B are in same role and share the same base pay. But A works at a desk, and gets no hazard pay. B goes to war, and gets paid extra for dodging bullets.

Or think of it this way, is the ability to negotiate aggressively that much of a value add to a company, and if so, is that worth more then the interpersonal skills that a less conflict prone person might have developed in areas like team work?

How many of these companies end up paying in the top pay ranges?

They also have a reputation for playing hardball in negotiations with their suppliers. Which has a lot to do with those low prices, and seems wrong to leave out.

Why is that?

You get screwed everywhere in life if you don't have, at a minimum, mediocre negotiation skills.

Craigslist, car buying, house shopping, gardening services, plumbers, painters...

Heck, even the grocery store has room for negotiations in some cases - "Come on, I only have this one bag of cat food, can you ring me up here in the cosmetics department instead of me standing in that big line?".

We should encourage people to get better at negotiations, and not just because they might get paid more... rather, you will succeed in life more and will be far more confident in yourself and your own abilities.

Life is one big negotiation.

You could compare it to the incentives for an ideal standardized test. For a test taker, the incentive is to study for the test as much as possible to get the highest score. But for test maker interested in measuring actual intelligence, ideally you want to design a test whose scores are relatively insensitive to time spent studying/memorizing, at least after a certain point.

Obviously, you're never going to reach the ideal, but getting closer to it is still helpful.

Also, "aggressive negotiation" (the phrase used in the article) is not necessarily the same as effective negotiation, so saying that you don't want to reward aggressive negotiation is not necessarily saying that the goal is to remove all negotiation from the equation.

Paying people what they're worth benefits everyone involved.

I think there are a lot of conflict-averse engineers. Not giving them the raises they deserve (putting the onus on the engineer to negotiate for it) sends a message employee: this company is more concerned with getting a "good deal" than with valuing you as an engineer. That's a breeding ground for sentiments of zero loyalty.

Because it's not good to screw someone over unnecessarily. If the job they want to hire you for doesn't require you to negotiate, then why make it a silent requirement to excel in the position, if you don't have to?

> We should encourage people to get better at negotiations

And to exercise more, eat healthier, learn to cook, take public transit when possible, be generous to the needy ,etc... but a job shouldn't compensate someone more when they do.

Like, it clearly must be, right?

Here's the acid test: who gets a bonus if your company happens to hire five doormats in a row? Is it the best negotiator on the engineering team?

The market rate for senior software engineers could easily be $250-300k if everyone negotiated aggressively. The ceiling on developer pay is the value they produce, and developers at many/most companies produce well above $300k in value a year. The hiring pool for senior talent is supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. If all developers were paid $250k/yr, I would expect top companies to hire just as aggressively.

Negotiating aggressively could simply be bringing you closer to the perfect-equilibrium market price without implying that you're bringing down the salaries of non-negotiators.

If anything, it's the non-negotiators bringing down salaries for everyone. Their not negotiating allows (some) companies to think the market rate is lower and to avoid paying for the higher negotiated rates.

There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool:

1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. In which case, congratulations? But it's nothing to brag about. And it's only possible for low-n. The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.

2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse.

3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent and have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job. Congratulations, you made your company worse. Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers.

All this, for what? Plaudits in the tech press? Maybe attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth? You haven't made your products better, and you haven't connected with your customers more. You've either hired a worse team or wasted your time.

If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.

I think there are objective benefits to fixing some of the weird culture in tech, including but not limited to (at least) doubling the available talent pool. And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams.

I'm not so stupid as to think there aren't costs associated with bringing populations that aren't well represented in. There's gonna be catchup. You're going to have to develop talent. It is going to take a while. Engineering and entrepreneurship is absolutely a hard job, and most folks aren't cut out for it, not really. So widening the net is going to take work. And bigger, more established companies are probably better equipped to shoulder more of that investment, but smaller, hungrier companies can ALSO afford to take risks on talent that has potential, but isn't a 100% safe bet.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

Like that some people won't work in a place where there is only one demographic, or there is a VERY large imbalance.

Anecdotally I know a woman who refuses to work in a place where there aren't at least 2 other women that she will interact with on a daily basis. She's an amazing developer, but has been brought into male-only teams or teams with only one other female and it becomes an issue. And she's at a point in her life where she can require that of potential employers.

So by striving for a more diverse workforce, you could be opening up doors to exceptionally good employees who have the ability to set the bar for what they want in a company. To put it more concisely, diversifying your employees can increase your hiring pool.

I think a big question is why companies do it (there is a comment thread above tackling this).

A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.

Would you want to work somewhere that nobody shared any interests? Maybe a language barrier? Perhaps a place where you would be bullied? or be talked down to constantly? If you had to choose between a place like that, or a place that you would "fit in" better, which would you choose?

It stands to reason that the "best" candidates are going to have a choice in where they work. Hell, even "slightly above average" candidates can often have a choice between multiple offers. So when you are looking for talented individuals, you are going to either need to pay more, offer some other benefits, or will need to ensure your workplace doesn't make them feel unwelcome.

Personally I think of diversifying your employees like buying a pingpong table for the break room, or paying for lunch a day or 2 a week. It's a small price to pay, that can pay off big time when hiring. And that seems like a big enough "reason" for me to want to do it.

Can you back that "surely" up with data or even anecdata, like a straw poll of things women are/aren't worried about when accepting offers? Anecdotally, I've heard numerous women say that they're worried about being the first woman hired on a team (and sometimes even the second) and they've made decisions to reject jobs based on that.

> A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.

There's the classic story of Alan Greenspan's economic research firm, which prioritized hiring women because they were equally qualified but undervalued in the market, and they did pretty well (and in general I think that Alan Greenspan successfully doing a strategy is a sign that a capitalistic company should consider the strategy potentially valid).

One can also imagine that if you are a particularly "female-friendly" company, word of mouth and primarily-female contact networks (e.g. women who know each other through female-only meetups or "girls who code" style events) would naturally bias your most qualified candidates towards being women, particularly if almost all your competitors are either seen as "female unfriendly" and/or don't have access to the primarily-female contact network.

If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.

Yeah, but look at where Netscape is now. Why would I trust them?

I'm serious—I've worked for a lot of 50-year-old straight white men who wouldn't vote for anyone left of Kerry and have a resume of mediocre but famous companies, and they're genuinely not good at their jobs. Unless their job is making more mediocre but famous companies, of course, which I'm starting to suspect.

> Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

I think you're overestimating how many companies are genuinely putting effort into hiring women. Are you getting your data from news articles instead of walking around companies and looking at who's actually employed? The people that are zigging are those who are honest about trying to hire women / minorities instead of just looking for media attention.

I agree. I would also gently suggest that the Silicon Valley monoculture is not one of 50 year old Republicans.

For that matter, I wouldn't want to be in a company of progressive women only, either. Any monoculture is a bad idea. I'm happy to have friends and colleagues who span the spectrum, thankfully.

Given the massive downvoting the comment got, that doesn't seem to be a concept that the HN crowd agrees with. I'm not surprised about that, either.

- Have strong sexual harassment policies and aggressively enforce them.

- Require employees to keep up-to-date documentation on everything they work on so somebody else can jump in and take over their stuff in an absence.

- Nobody should ever work more than 8 hours in a day. Even voluntary overtime should be strictly banned (if it's not banned, then people who work overtime voluntarily will look better on performance reviews than people who can only put in 8 hours).

- If there's truly an emergency situation where someone has to be called in, those emergencies should be exceedingly rare, should only happen when there is an existential threat to the company, and accompanied by a massive bonus and/or extra vacation days ("hey, I know it's Saturday, but the servers are on fire, and we'll get sued if they're not back up ASAP, so if you come in and fix them now we'll give you the next week off"). If anything actually needs 24/7 attention on the regular, then hire people to work in shifts instead of calling people in on their days off.

- Flexible hours. As long as an employee works ~8 hours a day, it doesn't matter what those 8 hours are. They don't even have to be contiguous. If you want to work 11:00-14:00, go home for a few hours, and then come back and work 19:00-22:00, you should be able to do that.

- Absences should only count against PTO if you take off at least four hours in a day. If you have to leave two hours early for your kid's doctor's appointment, it won't count against you. (this is actually policy at my employer, and it works very well)

- Allow people to work from home whenever they want. Imagine you're a parent, and your kid is stuck at home sick and needs you to stay home and keep an eye on them: you won't have to eat a vacation day to keep an eye on your kid.

- Avoid any other hallmarks of brogrammer culture I can't think of right now.

Basically you want to create an environment where women, especially mothers, would kill to work at.

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.

Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")

More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.

Well, one, to first order everyone in the Valley has badly broken hiring practices.

Two, I don't think that's true. It's extremely common for, say, top universities' freshman classes to look nothing like their applicant pools, because their applicant pools are full of people who want to go to that university but genuinely wouldn't do well there. There are a lot of people who optimize for making good grades and a perfect SAT score and have nothing to characterize them otherwise, and I would expect there are way fewer of those people, by percentage, in the freshman classes. (And yes, the modern university application process came out of anti-Semitism and there are a lot of other indefensible things about it, but this effect, I think, is defensible.)

My personal hypothesis is that technical aptitude is pretty uncorrelated with demographics, but that due to (for lack of a better term) "the pipeline", certain demographics are more encouraged to stay with technical studies and apply to these roles than others. So you have demographic A, which consists of a large number of people of varying abilities, and demographic B, which is a smaller number of people who have done particularly well throughout the pipeline. A fair hiring process, that selects for people with high aptitude, would naturally reject many more people from group A (who weren't filtered out from the pipeline) than from group B.

If a company seriously apply diversity to their hiring strategy then it actually means that at some point they must turn down some higher skilled candidate #1 in order to hire some lower skilled candidate #2 just because they have too few employees with the same gender which candidate #2 has.

In this case, a company put skills at the secondary role which means that they praise mediocrity, not talent.

You will be wrong if you argue, that a company don't have to prefer lower skilled candidate over higher skilled candidate just because they need to keep gender diverse teams. Because if it were possible, then highly skilled teams were already naturally gender diverse and then whole diversity talk won't exist in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, as a male, I'm sick that vast majority of software engineers are male. It really sucks! It's a biggest single thing I don't like about my profession. But unfortunately it's how it is. Let's face the truth, most women are not interested in software engineering at all. In companies where I worked we had a few female software engineers, they were just as good as male engineers, no difference at all. But they were not hired because of their gender but because of their coding skills.

Don't listen retarded third-wave feminists yelling about discrimination. Software engineering probably is the most meritocratic profession ever. Nobody cares about your degree (I don't have one!), citizenship, ethnicity or gender. Contribute to open source, participate in algorithm competitions, make your personal projects on GitHub and you will be noticed for sure whoever you are! It's because of a great shortage of good software developers in the market and companies are desperate to hire anyone who is able to solve their technical interview challenges.

- when someone evaluates another person's skill, the person doing the evaluation is completely objective

- highly skilled individuals would enter a monoculture environment of people dissimilar to themselves

- no prejudice exists in software because you haven't personally ever experienced any

- women are uninterested in software engineering because they're biologically wired to dislike computing, rather than because every computing class and workplace is heavily male dominated

Some time ago, major European symphonic orchestras recognized that their hiring process was bugged, and began to hold blind auditions. The hiring rate for women jumped substantially everywhere this was done.

Orchestra musician is a technically and physically demanding job. Your arguments could have been applied there just the same, for the same result as we see in computing today, but they were wrong there. This suggests we ought to do the experiment to find out if something is wrong here, and that's what lever appears to be doing.

I born in a small provincial town in a poor third world country. There was literally no social support of doing programming because vast majority of people had absolutely no idea what it is (in 90s). I was doing programming completely alone!

To start coding you need: open a book, download compiler/interpreter, write a code snippet from the book, run the code.

To start competing in algorithm competitions: register by entering your email, read a problem statement, write a program, submit your program.

To start contributing to open source: download software, hack it, send a patch to a mailing list.

That's it, no social interactions involved. Yet I still don't see much of women among programming hobbyists.

I have no idea why women are not interested in CS. They just don't.

To any female feminist I prepared an answer - open a text editor, write a code, run it, repeat.

And please, don't talk about discrimination, I was rejected many times based on my lack of degree, lack of experience (when I just started), on my citizenship (when I started looking for a job abroad), on my bad Engish and many other reasons I don't know. And still, I managed to find a job in 4 countries with completely different cultures (UZ, RU, SE, NL).

P.S. I have different background and born in mixed family. You can't just fit me into your typical western political classes - left, right.

The age issue being another important point. How many over-50s does Lever employ - of either gender?

To me, this looks like neoliberal boardroom feminism.

It's important to have the appearance of equality -

1. In certain selected job markets only. 2. As long as class-of-origin privileges are never challenged or questioned. 3. As long as the culture remains reassuringly homogenised, so there's no genuinely challenging diversity of cultural thought or opinion.

In younger startups it also seems to be very important that everyone appears to be having extrovert fun while all this is going on. (What about neurodiversity? Are introverts or Aspies not welcome?)

So when Lever says "poor cultural fit" isn't used as a reason for not hiring someone, the reasonable response is to raise an eyebrow and look rather unconvinced. The reality is more likely to be a different flavour of corporate conformity.

Which is fine if that's what you want. But it's also fine not to want it, just as it's fine not to accept unquestioningly that it's absolutely the best possible kind of culture for everyone.

which would seem to go against actively selecting people of a specific gender or trying to achieves a fifty percent representation of women or whatever.

I don't think anyone objects to the programming equivalent of a 'blind audition'. What is happening seems to be anything but a 'blind audition'.

My point wasn't to adopt any particular procedure, rather I meant that we ought to find similar experiments. This seems to be one of them.

P.S. HackerRank and Codility are doing great job to improve blind non-CV based hiring.

Plenty of companies made that bet, especially if we go back a few years. Hell, nintendo just made that bet with super mario run. There are good and bad reasons to do it.

I'm not really sure what the point is? These guys were wrong because they were rich white guys as opposed to they were wrong because x?

> I’m considered a non-technical founder, despite the fact that I have an engineering degree from Stanford and maybe I guess I don’t look like a technical founder.

Are you capable of (and/or interested in) working on the tech side of things? Then why would you not be a technical founder. If you aren't, then does the engineering degree really have any bearing?

The steps they took sound reasonable. I'm curious about which were the most effective.

> So they built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce

I'd quit. I hate doing dishes. Can I just agree not to use the dishes?

> They decided that the opposite of the word “guys” was not “girls,” and that they would use the word “women.”

Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal.

I wonder if having a female founder has helped. Strong female leader, someone for people to look up to.

>Unfortunate quirk that guys is fine, but girls is condescending and women sounds awkwardly formal.

I found that kind of odd. I would never have said the complement (calling it opposite is weird) of "guys" is "girls". It's "gals".

People will look at you funny if you say "guys and women".

Exactly. I don't use the dishes at work, so I'm not washing them.

Then gay, straight, bi

Then equal ratios of every age band in a working age range

Then equal ratios of race: white, AA, Hispanic, Arab, ....

Then native language family. Surely the language you think in affects what you can think of - so the more the merrier

Good Luck, Lever!

(I am deliberately not adding a /s tag, or denying the need for one)

Being "White" in the US is as much cultural as it has to do with skin color. Hispanics, even those of light complexion, tend to be a part of Latin culture and thus do not consider themselves to be "white".

"Latin" culture is what people have in Italy, Spain, Portugal and, to a degree, France.

Without even discussing what "groups" are being balanced, let's ask a simple question: what are the odds that 50/50 GroupA/GroupB would be the optimal split? The half-and-half sounds unnecessarily generic. Why would the company's inherent biases towards/against GroupX be superior than those imposed by a natural labor market of supply and demand? Maybe one group is slightly better suited for the company's needs, and the labor stats reflect that [0].

Maybe the founder is chasing a moral imperative moreso than maximizing shareholder value. By all means, that's their perogative.

As another commenter said, if nothing else this is an interesting experiment. I wanted to leave this comment in my post history to come back to in the future, to see how things end up working out for the company in question.

[0] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-chinese-cit...

    100% under forty. (USA is 50% over 40)
    95% white and Asian.
    <5% Latino and black. (USA and Bay Area are >33%)
    <5% overweight and obese (USA is 40% overweight and obese)
    21% duckface (0% of USA finds duckface appealing)

2. Everyone except Christian Identity white nationalists considers Ashkenazim white. DNA lineage studies strongly agree. The majority of Ashkenazi DNA is Polish and German followed by Italian.

> The genetics suggest many of the founding Ashkenazi women were actually converts from local European populations.

Okay, even if they were over-represented in Ashkenazim, where were all the Latinos and blacks? 30% should be one of those two groups if you wanted to be proportionate to the US population, but it was definitely way lower than 30%(again, by visual inspection only).

Not that I'd argue for that.

Just 4 years in, we are far from done building our culture and achieving our values. In truth, we will never be done; there will always be more room to improve and grow.

Yes, we currently have many younger workers. However, we already do take steps to welcome all workers, such as healthcare plans that include dependant coverage, maternity and paternity leave, and clearly defined work expectations. We also increase opportunity for experienced candidates to demonstrate what they can bring to the team with bar raising interview formats like our engineering project interview and career trajectory interview.

How many of the Lever employees are openly Republican or conservative?

We do not ask employees about their political affiliations.

> For two years, Sarah Nahm was the only woman at Lever, the company she co-founded and now runs as CEO... has roughly 100 employees... has a roughly 50–50

In any company, the first X hires are likely doers - e.g. for different companies, all software developers, all plumbers, all landscapers, all accountants, all lawyers. Then the roles you hire for start to change. Lets say hire say 5 is a sales person, 6 is an accountant, 7 a marketer. Then a company starts to hire lower-skilled support staff like personal assistants / people to answer phones, a gopher maybe, then say cleaners. These lower skilled jobs are easily filled with either gender, but pay a lot less.

So my question, in a company with a female founder, and a proud 50-50 gender ratio, this seems the best chance to hit pay parity, and I wonder, has that happened? Is the ratio of pay $1-$1, or does Lever have the classic $0.77 on the dollar pay gap?

The parent comment is basically asking "do you have men in higher-paid positions (Software devs) and women in lower-paid positions (receptionists, secretaries, etc)?"

We believe that inclusion is worth the investment. At the core, creating an inclusive environment is about employee engagement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement) One company that studies the importance of employee engagement consistently is Gallup. Here is an interesting article on the intersection of diversity and engagement: http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/190103/using-employee-e... "Engagement and inclusiveness are closely related. Gallup has also found that engaged employees are more likely to say their company values diverse ideas."

When our company was very small it felt reasonable to say "We need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities", but after the team grows a bit I worry people might view that as "affirmative action" of some sort in a negative way - and I don't think I know how to handle that conversation.

Not to mention how this might interact with US employment laws around discrimination - I think I'm misguided in worrying about this because so many tech companies (like Lever) are vocal about their desire to hire more people from these groups, but it does feel a bit like there are landmines when discussing this topic.

I feel like I don't know what kind of language / goals I should be using. I DO feel like there's a distinction between good diversity efforts and accidentally shutting out some over-represented groups that don't deserve it - but I don't really know where that line is drawn.

My recommendation would be to check out Project Include; they've invested a ton in putting resources together: http://projectinclude.org/

The obsession with having an even split is, ludicrous. Should every industry have an exactly even 50%-50% ratio? Why not? Why should it? I think we need more women in highly male-dominated fields like dock working. They're good paying jobs, so why don't we have more women?

Why are we always focusing on putting women in STEM and not focusing on getting women good jobs in general?

The men that don't get jobs because of these new 50-50 splits, where do they work?

The question people aren't asking is why this actually matters. The only answer I can see is to make sure women are getting good jobs. Women are clearly getting an education, since more of them are going to college than men, but are we focusing on good, well-paying jobs, or are we focusing on only the best jobs?

I'm sure this will get pc-d the hell out of. But I'm just concerned that we're over-compensating. Paul Graham wrote a good article about "What you can't say". I think me saying this, even if it's idiotic or something, is an example of something I "can't say" in our society.

I support women, but I support men too.

So what's left are bad reasons. Women who are logical/mathematical go into medicine or law instead of programming because frankly it sucks to be the only woman in a room full of men. It gets tiring.

And even if you get into the realm of "things you can't say." The ratio of women to men in the SAT Math in the upper ranges where you'd expect most programmers to score is like 40/60. I think everyone would be ecstatic if 40% of programmers were women.

Medicine or law used to fill rooms with men, but like most other fields, that changed in the past few decades. The question is, what is the differentiator with CS that has led to the severity of the current imbalance?

> The wage gap for pharmacists has shrunk significantly because the profession has changed.

> In the 1970s, pharmacies were primarily independent and self-owned businesses. A single pharmacist might be responsible for keeping his or her shop open. The pharmacy would need to be open typical business hours; the owner would need to be available to do that.

> Now large chains own most pharmacies. And while you might get nostalgic for the mom-and-pop shops, you should know this change has been undeniably good for female pharmacists’ earnings.

> The majority of pharmacists are now women. And their wages have grown faster than those in other professional roles, like lawyers or doctors.

> Bigger pharmacies hired more pharmacists, and customers essentially saw the workers as interchangeable. Most patients don’t care about seeing a particular pharmacist — they just want to make sure they get the right medication.

> This meant it wasn’t important to be around 9 am to 5 pm — a shift from 6 am to 2 pm would do the pharmacy just as much good. And nobody accrued higher hourly wages for working exceptionally long hours.

And speaking of doctors, the article has this to say:

> You see this shift happening elsewhere too. Primary care doctors, for example, have shifted away from running one-person practices to joining larger, multi-doctor offices. In these situations, doctors become more interchangeable: When I go to my medical practice in downtown Washington, DC, I usually just want a doctor who can solve my problem — and I care less about which doctor is doing that.

The short version is that the Walmartization of professions has resulted in them becoming more amenable to women. If you want to correct the imbalance, a lot of programmers who think of themselves as auteurs are going to have to accept moving to a shift work model where individual professionals are interchangeable and might as well be anonymous. Startups are going to have to suck it up and accept that environments where employees are expected to work more than 8 hours per day are actively hostile to anyone responsible for rearing children (another thing the article points out: most child-rearing in the US is performed by women, even when both parents work).

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

So, I have doubts about the reasoning displayed in this article.

That seems a bit harsh.

I've seen this first hand in the legal industry. Business generation has shifted from getting a call from your golf buddy to formally pitching your team/strategy/rates. Meanwhile, 30% of GCs and new partners are women. Not a coincidence.

I don't know if that's really true. A lot of pharmacist jobs are essentially retail sales roles.

Or I guess women just won't join startups?

And startups aren't the only places where women work more than 8 hours/day.

There are 7 episodes but here is some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Bascially, Norway is/was the most gender equal country in the world according to some index, yet the gender disparity in jobs is still very high. Apparently, the more advanced and gender equal a country is, the greater the disparity. The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

Are we actually going to do further research even if the result is uncomfortable? If we find that biological differences are pushing girls to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks, are we going to stop pushing women to go into STEM fields?

Well that's facially not true: women receive more than 40% of the bachelors degrees in physical sciences, mathematics, and biological sciences.

> The host of the documentary goes and finds some real scientists and they agree that biology plays a role.

The issue I have with the biological evidence is the half-assed conclusions people want to draw from them. For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women! And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

There is also evidence that women place a higher value on concensus and cooperation. That explains why programming, which involves working together to build things, has a much harder time attracting women than law, which involves being the proxy for acrimonious disputes between people.

I hope you place just as much skeptism on the research done in social sciences. Watch the documentary, not a single social science researcher in the doco had any evidence what so ever. They simply dismissed the any research that ran counter to their views.

> For example, it's pretty well established that women place a higher value on social connections than men. So that explains it, right? That explains why Silicon Valley, golden land of open offices built on software for advertising and chatting with your friends, has such a hard time attracting women!

That makes little sense. Having an open office is not going to make the people on opposite sides of the office get up and talk to each other if they really don't want to. And why would the act of writing social software be more social than writing other types of software?

> And that also explains why medicine and accounting, detail oriented left-brain jobs without much of a social component, attract a high percentage of women?

I am not a doctor or an accountant. I won't make assumptions about those professions. This may simply be the overlap area between men and women where these professions have things that appeal to both men and women almost equally.

I'm not suggesting individuals stick to their gender roles. If you want to go and do something, go do it. But I am suggesting that using employment numbers as a proxy for equality could be very wrong and encouraging one gender to do one thing or another could be a waste of time.

Remember, in the countries where gender equality is the best, gender sterotypes are still prevailant and the numbers remain stable. At the very least you have to question the idea that gender roles are enforced by society or that our ideas of what an equal society looks like is wrong.

There is no rational "biological" explanation for why women would somehow be "biologically" averse to CS while pursuing degrees in a closely related field at much higher numbers. There is no "biological" explanation why women's interest in CS would drop dramatically over just a few decades.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...

Programming can be social, though it often isn't. But the basic job is changing machines. While in law the task is to affect people.

In my "things you can't say" speculation, I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around. Being the only woman in a room full of men can be quite different depending on what kind of men.

You're looking at the two professions at two different levels. Changing machines is what the programmer does, but the end result is people communicating with each other. The end result of legal work is affecting people, but the actual job is down in the weeds of comma jockeying. Especially on the transactional side. There is nothing people oriented at any level about implementing obscure credit structures dreamed up by some finance nerd. But there is no shortage of women willing to do that work.

> I think the socially awkward guys on the spectrum who dominate the profession are not very attractive for women to be around.

That is not consistent with what I've heard from talking a lot of professional women. Women in finance aren't talking about how great the 85-15 ratio is just because Goldman hires a lot of frat guys.

She made the observation that she enjoyed working in a male-dominated work place more so than the female-dominated work place and gave several reasons relating to social dynamics.

Not only is it tiring to be a minority, but it is also much easier be in a profession that incorporates ones own gender identity into the work culture (a phenomenon that has become very common in the last 50 years). A man or woman who enters the opposite culture has two choices (as a study said), leave or assimilate a work culture which is opposite to their own. Data show a rather clear trend for both groups, which is that most leave after a short time, while many of the remaining tries to find a subgroup within the profession where they can create a local majority.

10% may just represent those that have yet to leave, or who for many reason aren't affected.

But you don't really need a CS degree to be good at developing software, especially for the myriad of other roles in a team that aren't low-level coding. Let people study what the hell they want, then pick the smartest ones and teach them. By shifting the recruitment focus from on algorithmic and data structure knowledge to other types of problem solving ability, you have a larger and more uniform talent pool to recruit from and you'll get more usable software (i.e. the usability increases, not the amount of software). If you keep doing this and the industry is balanced, CS degrees should follow. If not, you already have a solution.

I became a programmer because I was doing this thing for fun and all of a sudden someone started throwing money in my direction. I later became a farmer (another male dominated profession) under the same conditions. In fact, every job I have ever had in my life was a result of doing something for fun resulting in someone wanting to pay me to continue to do it. But if I start doing legal-related things for fun, I'm never going to turn that into a job as a lawyer.

What if males are more apt to do something that allows them to fall into jobs? If the programming profession were regulated like the legal profession, you may not get any more females wanting to be programmers, but you would eliminate all the males who simply fell into the position. A thought.

Diversity in culture.

Diversity in language.

Diversity in education.

Diversity in pay.

Diversity in ___location.

Diversity in religious belief.

For example my boss has no tertiary education and 2 of my coworkers only speak broken English.

There's also a subtle background noise: a constant reminder that males are somehow defective and need to be taught how to behave, so to stop the oppressors. Thankfully, experts whose incomes depend on identity politics are here to fix your mess.

> The obsession with having an even split…

Does it strike you that the article is describing an obsession? It seems like a strong word, used pejoratively in this case.

To me, the article is described an unusual and thoughtful approach that led to surprising results.

It has come to a point where dissenting opinions on the matter are actively vilified and who knows what other forms of actual discrimination. I guarantee you that I would treat every person I interact with with absolute courtesy and respect their known boundaries in all aspects except their opinions. And I am reasonably sure that there are hiring teams out there that would skip me because they'd find my comments distasteful or worse. "Culture fit"

Oh that's an easy one. Literally no-one cared about this while the IT department was at the bottom of the corporate pecking order and sometimes literally at the bottom of the company in a windowless basement. But now it's important and well-paid and people sit in nice offices on Herman Miller chairs, and suddenly out of nowhere a bunch of people who weren't geeks at school, who hated the geeks, have appeared and started demanding that they get some of this money and prestige too. Brogrammers are another symptom of this exact same phenomenon.

I support women, but I support men too

I'm an engineer. I care about what's between your ears, not your legs! :-)

If there are cushy office jobs where you have to sit most of the time, women are clamoring for equality in those. If you have to do a lot of physical labor, not so much.

Where is the feminist outcry to put women on oil rigs in the middle of the gulf?

They only have their jobs because better-qualified people don't. So, they should do exactly what the better-qualified people are expected to do today: improve their skills, find another field, lean on their spouse for support, etc. If we don't think there are enough jobs for the population, a) changing the gender ratio of people who are employed doesn't make that problem worse, and b) that's a different conversation about UBI or whatever.

If we truly believe in a meritocracy, we're going to have to kick out incompetent people. There's no getting around that, and there's no getting around the fact that it's unjust to keep employing incompetent people and just to fire them.

> I support women, but I support men too.

I support women, and I support men too. I support qualified men, qualified women, and qualified everyone else having jobs they're qualified for. As far as I can tell, gender isn't correlated with job performance, and there seem to be about 50-50 men and women in the world.

The moment that you or anyone demonstrate a reason to believe (not even conclusive proof, just a plausible hypothesis) that men are over twice as likely to be good at technical jobs as women, I'll support a 70-30 split. Similarly, the moment anyone demonstrates a reason to believe that women are twice as likely to be good at technical jobs than men, I'll support a 70-30 split in the other direction. I haven't seen such a reasoning in either direction, so I support the null hypothesis, the 50-50 split.

Same with dock workers, honestly! But I'm not a dock worker and I know nothing about dock working and this isn't Dock Worker News, so I'm not going to comment about it. I hope the dock workers are trying to hire the best people, too!

The problem is that we're turning this "50/50" split into some sort of magic number that solves diversity "problems", and we're only doing it in this one specific industry, and without any particular reason. What's the ratio of male hairdressers to female hair dressers? If I was interested in hairdressing, should I get a full scholarship to beauty school and preferential hiring treatment based on my gender and a focus on having an exact 50/50 split at the absolute best hair salons in the world? Why is this any different than any other industry? Why not equality across the board?

Somebody will come and cite pay, but there are other jobs that don't require as much education that pay quite well too. So why aren't at least focusing on those in addition to tech jobs? I bring up the dock worker example because it's a typical glass basement example that can be used.

The truth of the matter is that tech jobs are sexy right now. Lavish perks, great offices, fantastic pay, etc.... Nobody wants to advocate for equal opportunity for tough jobs and 50/50 gender ratios in those tough jobs.

If there is a gender bias there, and there's something I can do about it that won't be sticking my nose where I don't belong (I don't really want hairdressers telling me how to do tech recruiting), let me know, I'm glad to support it. But until then, I'm in tech: this is my field, and the one I care about improving. This is a tech forum. And the people running Lever are in tech.

Simple as that, it has nothing to do with the job perks or pay. If there were outsiders putting pressure on the tech industry and not the dockworking or hairdressing industry, you'd have an argument--but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

And the question is why is there so much emphasis on only technology to make the workplace 50/50, but not similar pressure on other industries that might be experiencing some sort of imbalance? Besides, why is it a good thing or a necessary thing that technology be 50/50? If you want to argue that we need gender balance in this one specific industry, then I want gender balance in every industry. Otherwise, I'm not on board.

When you vote, do you make yourself as knowledgeable about the political problems of every other city and country in the world as with the political problems of your own city and country? Would you refuse to vote for a particular candidate who promises to do good things for your city and your country, but is silent on improving the lot of every other city and country?

Anywho

What makes 50/50 gender balance "right"? What makes that desirable? The only arguments I'm seeing from anybody revolve around two things:

1. Diversity 2. The population is 50/50

If diversity is the aim, you have to come with some pretty convincing evidence that diversity = 50/50 male/female split.

If it's population, then you need to explain why technology has to have this split and not every industry, or at least explain why this is unique to technology.

Anyway, my argument for the 50-50 gender balance being "right" is that it's the null hypothesis. Absent specific data, one should assume that every industry should have a 50-50 balance.

This is basically 2, except that my confidence about that statement depends a lot on the existence of data that would disprove the null hypothesis. I have little data about other industries, so while I would say that, yes, every industry should have a 50-50 split, my confidence about such a statement is pretty low for almost all industries; I can easily be convinced that there are physiological or sociological factors that justify a non-50-50-split.

I have much more data about tech, so I make the same claim that tech should have a 50-50 split that I make about industry. However, I am much more confident in that statement because I've seen a lot of attempts to reject the null hypothesis that haven't panned out. I would have to see some evidence that's at odds with a lot of existing evidence in order to be convinced of a different split.

If you start with for example a group of people that is 75% male and select the top n workers. The top n will be 75% male and the only way to arrive at 50% female instead of 25% is to replace some of the more qualified males with less qualified females further down in the stack. The ones higher in the stack are by definition already taken.

This isn't saying that men are more qualified just that they make up a larger portion of the pool. Places that select a higher portion of males than the population suffer from the same deficiency.

That's an assumption, and not the assumption I'm starting from. I think that your pool of 75% men and 25% women does, in fact, contain n/2 qualified men and (75% - n/2) unqualified men, and n/2 qualified women and (25% - n/2) unqualified women - that is, the number of qualified men and women is the same, but there are far more unqualified men in the pool. If your recruiting process has false positives (and everyone's does), you'll end up hiring much more unqualified men than unqualified women, as a result.

Mine is also an assumption, but it seems to line up better with the underlying null-hypothesis that, in the abstract, the same number of qualified men and women exist in the world.

Second, I went to MIT for computer science. I TA'd a bunch of classes. There were quite a few students who were barely scraping by, and they were mostly men. This might be politically incorrect to say, but it's true. The fact that you see 60/40 enrollment ratios at MIT doesn't mean that MIT has 1.5 times as many qualified men as women in course 6.

The National Girls Collaborative Project said that woman received 57% of all bachelors degrees but only 18% of computer science degrees http://ngcproject.org/statistics further some sources say the ultimate percentage of female software developers is even lower, as low as 8%.

Women are succeeding at school but they aren't going into computer science and a greater percentage of them are leaving.

Your belief that there are just as many female developers as men is utterly unfounded and without merit.

The fact that you interact with a lot of female developers doesn't change the actual numbers and the plural of anecdote isn't data.

We have one side complaining that we need to erase the gender gap in computer science, another scoffing and saying girls just don't like computers. It probably doesn't help either case to pretend that there is no gap.

If you're looking at current ratios only, then you're ignoring the past ratios over the last, say, 20-30 years which would have been significantly more male-dominated.

I don't think there is any evidence supporting the assertion that more male applicants = more unqualified applicants.

Two years ago, the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosted a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors were invited to attend - you didn't even need to be accepted to the university.

The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how does the industry recover and get a 50/50 gender ratio? The problem seems to start way before industry, as much as some would prefer to think otherwise.

There are a bunch of white/Asian males who suck at their jobs. If you don't believe me, note the demographics next time you angrily git blame something.

Stop hiring them. Easy.

The problem is from companies who care more about hiring someone at all than hiring good people. It's pretty well-documented that men are more likely to apply for jobs they're not qualified for than women (see, e.g. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...).

There are a bunch of white/Asian males who suck at their jobs (there are a lot of people who suck at their jobs across all demographics really) but if that's the group of people who applied... well, I'd rather have somebody than nobody. I'm nog going to go walk around outside and find women on the street to try to get them to apply for a job. Plus, I'd probably have the cops called on me.

It's interesting how you straw-man the other person of being uncomfortable with a good-sounding word such as "equality". So, because they're against something noble as "equality" then they're automatically the bad guy?

I'm not the OP, but if you ask me I would tell you that we have different definitions of equality. People not like me want to write the wrongs of cosmic injustice and circumstance under the guise of fixing "discrimination" by treating people unequally. But really, at the end of the day, we would probably agree with you that equality is a good thing and we'd welcome a universe that was equal. But it's not; chance, circumstance and history dictate as much. It's not "equal" for the people being discriminated against so that this company can have a feel-good tick-box somewhere about being 50-50. Does this help out females that are potentially being treated unequally by society? Yes. Does this "throw out" perfectly good and capable males because they happen to be in the bath-water? Yes.

Two wrongs don't make a right. And it certainly isn't fair.

No one argues that. What is true is that it's impossible for everyone to have a 50/50 teams (because most fields don't attract precisely 50/50 men/women), and it also makes recruiting substantially more expensive if you hope to maintain a high and equal standard for both men and women. This is a consequence of the fact that, assuming skill distributions are roughly the same across genders, there are simply much fewer (in absolute terms) women of a given skill level than men of a given skill level in CS or engineering.

I've encountered this argument in real life. I agree it sounds a lot like a straw man though and doesn't help much with my argument -- thanks.

And I agree that it is more expensive to hire this way because of how diverse CS graduates are. Do you think it might be worth it in order to help nudge the industry at large in a more positive direction?

Why? How are you making this determination? Should your demographics reflect the US population? State population? Hell, why not world population? Why are any of these inherently better or worse than any other?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+confidence+in...