So much this. I work at a FAANG company which has terrible diversity numbers in hardware development. Upper management is frequently asked about this by employees at big q&a sessions. The answer is always to blame the pipeline, as if we do not have billions of dollars that we could direct at solving it ourselves...
Except it isn't their responsibility. Clearly they don't have trouble making profit so why would they spend billions of dollars trying to urge people who may or may not even want the job to try and do it?
I like to think that companies run by humans don't solely consider profit as their only metric for success. If you're not solvent you can't do much as a company but it surely helps to actually give a shit about the people you affect both immediately and from a distance in both circumstance and over time.
Billions are being spent on housing in the bay area by these ultra rich companies even though it is arguably not at all their responsibility.
Except it is, because of course it is.
Who is responsible for fixing the gender imbalance in tech, if not the leaders in tech?
(Of course the housing thing may just be a cynical calculation that it’s cheaper than the toxic public relations of doing nothing. But maybe that should be the case for the gender thing too.)
An imbalance doesn't inherently need to be fixed. If the imbalance is because women are simply less interested- an imbalance is desirable.
Equality in opportunity will not neccessarily lead to equality in outcome. Any argument on this topic that is rooted in outcomes can be immediately dismissed. Attempt to measure the actual source of the problem- which is opportunity.
This is anecdotal, but I have noticed this pattern in several large (multinational) companies at which I have worked.
In a particular well-known American tech company with a large office in Tokyo, our recruiters were in part responsible for the pipeline of new recruits from abroad. I began to notice the recruiters feeding the pipeline with people that were essentially cookie-cutter templates of themselves.
I would say 90% of the interviewees had the same background: 30s-40s white male with a Japanese girlfriend/wife that wanted to move to Tokyo for family reasons. At one point, it just became a cliche.
I have no opinion on whether this was a good or bad thing, but it definitely overfitted for that particular persona and shifted the company's internal culture and diversity.
So while the source of the pipeline is definitely skewed, I would argue that whoever is doing the recruiting and subsequent hiring need also be evaluated regarding their criteria for employee selection.
If you could showcase where women are born with DNA that leads them away from software related jobs, I would be very interested. Otherwise, "interested" is incredibly affected by environment and biases, which can be fixed, and should be.
We still have very little understanding of the human brain- but we understand enough to know that women and men are different.
The theory of evolution also provides strong support for this idea. Women and men have had different selection criteria, and therefore have evolved differences.
We do know that more egalitarian countries lead to significantly pronounced differences in choices between male and female. That directly suggest that males and females biologically like different things.
