There is an expression which I think is fitting, in a weird way - a successful marriage does not have to last forever. For some reason, we always tend to imagine that, once a company or organization is created, it must last forever. That for it to ‘close its doors’ or ‘wind down’ is somehow a failure. And that’s just not true; a professional athletes career does not last forever, and neither does the lifespan of most corporations or non-profits.
The organization accomplished what it set out to do; make the tech industry more inclusive and accessible to women. To a large extent, though it wasn’t a primary factor, it aided that journey nicely with its thousands of events that it organized over the years, according to this announcement.
It didn’t last forever, but it was never meant to - that would mean the presence of women in tech would never become truly equal to the presence of men. While its goal wasn’t ‘achieved’, this organization did what it could to move things in that direction and now, with its energy spent, it leaves the door open for new contributors to take the next step.
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you to everyone who helped organize the events this organization hosted in the last seventeen years.
I could read it as either way. It could be a sadness to see it come to and end, but still having full agreement the time has come. It could also be a sadness because financial hurdles or other operation hurdles are making it near impossible. It's hard, but I get it either way.
You could read it that way, but she said "with sadness and devastation".
You are taking some extreme liberties with your interpretation of what she's saying. The sentiment she's sharing is clearly quite negative. I don't think she's happily wrapping up her mission, I think she's going out of business and has no ability to continue her mission as she would like to.
We can still view operating for 17 years to be a success. We can still view helping women in tech for 17 years to have improved the world, even if it cannot continue.
We can consider winning one basketball game a success even when our team is disbanded after one season, but I don't know how that's relevant to whether someone is devastated about closing a group down that was meant to help women, when women still need to be helped.
Yeah this terrible article doesn't explain why it's shutting down and doesn't link to the source (a newsletter I guess, so maybe it's not available online) so people can find more answers, but I also go the impression that this wasn't what she wanted.
There are lots of possible definitions for success— making it until death parts you is the obvious one, but "success" can also be producing fruit in terms of community, family, or even career.
And there are of course marriages that make it until death, but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole time miserable; that's hardly a success either.
There are definitely multiple failure modes, for sure.
That said, if you take vows to spend the rest of your life with someone and then don't do so, then at least the marriage itself failed, though the years you spent with your spouse may not have been a total failure.
>And there are of course marriages that make it until death, but the partners and everyone around them spend the whole time miserable; that's hardly a success either.
Maybe according to your personal opinion, but the general opinion of society at large has been, for centuries if not longer, that these miserable marriages were in fact "successful" because they kept the two people married which was apparently much more important for various reasons (like religion or social stability) than whether the people involved were actually happy or not, which was not considered important at all until recent years.
I think society is going through a lot of "growing pains" now because of this change in attitude and the idea now that people's happiness is of prime importance in a relationship.
Yes, that is a good point. I don't think it's my "personal opinion", but yes, the rise of people breaking up marriages because they aren't happy or fulfilled enough is definitely a phenomenon of the last hundred years or so; there's much less of a sense of duty to family, community, or God in any of it, and there's arguments to be made there around gender roles as well.
That said, I think another factor that's stressed modern marriage is longer life expectancy arising from better diet, healthcare, and working conditions. Even a few hundred years ago lots of marriages might last only a decade or two on account of a partner falling fatally ill or dying in childbirth in their thirties or forties. Nowaways a couple in their thirties are staring down the possibility of five more decades together and it's a lot more reasonable to feel like your whole life is ahead of you still and maybe you want to do the corresponding soul-searching around who will be your companion for such a long period of time.
Is this still true? If I knew a couple that had a great ten years but then decided that it was time to part ways on friendly terms for whatever reason, maybe continue being great coparents, I'm not sure I'd consider it unsuccessful.
This roughly describes my parents. Speaking from the perspective of the child, I'd say that is probably not success. It's probably closer to lots of acute behavioral issues along with some lifelong damage.
Sorry to hear that. My own parents divorced and it was very much for the best, but their marriage wasn't great beforehand (hardly a surprise given that they got divorced of course!)
I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at "premier" large tech companies and they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale.
That being said, true senior roles in engineering (VP+) is still very male dominated. Part of that is the pipeline catching up and part of is that I see women leave engineering for other roles more often. For example I would say, in my experience, I've seen more women have an interest and engage in transitions to PM, designer, etc.
> they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale.
Slight tangent, but most large tech companies DEI programs were never really great at doing DEI at scale. They were mostly funnelling the existing pool of diverse candidates into them. The result is that companies without an active DEI program end up less diverse through no fault of their own.
what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.
Retention improvements are generally a net positive for industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the industry all together.
Sponsorship is generally net positive as well.
The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software developer, they were already looking for a job. They already made a significant personal investment in getting the job. The industry is still enough if an employees market that they were probably going to get a job. You did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All you did is increase the chances that they end up working for you in particular. On the margins, this is still probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling effect.
Of these three buckets, the most effective way of increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment (unless you have horrid retention). In the current environment, there is no way for a large company to get anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in the recruitment bucket.
Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.
>hire promising juniors and do on the job training.
I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years later.
We train juniors for years (we accept interns as young as junior year of high school) and its been pretty great. I really don't understand why more companies don't do it.
That seems to imply that they singlehandedly (or fivehandedly) exhausted the promising pool and kept it dry since! But that's not the case, right? So whatever they did - while definitely important at the margin does not completely change the bulk of the market.
We can look at their employment numbers, they did not hire millions of people, yet there are millions of capable juniors globally eager to jump head-first into software development.
Bootcamps closed because hiring slowed down. (Because ZIRP ended, everyone doubted that the Fed can do a soft landing, and on top of that the certified bubble of AI-mania meant that companies increased spending on buzzword driven development, and ... on top of all this increasing cloud costs and slowing growth meant that no one felt the need to hire juniors.)
Oh, and of course due to the amazing tech demos where this or that LLM created a site/game in React in a few minutes, or even issued a PR, the meme of end of coding led to a pretty significant belief about the end of juniors.
This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed. That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten significantly worse across the industry while vastly improving at the top end but I have no data to back that up.
It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.
There is a great book (written by a female engineer, Tanya Riley) called "The Staff Engineer's Path". I've learned a lot from the book, but one part of Tanya's experience that I could not relate to was having mentors who would encourage me and provide "you can do this" kind of pep talks. For a male engineer the usual experience is the opposite: we are expected to be competitive, and if we display any doubts then the only advice we'll get is "are you sure you want this promotion enough?" and "are you cut out for this?"
It appears to be much easier to advance in one's career as a self-doubting woman than a self-doubting man. This is probably because women are expected to have a high degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that they are defective if they admit to it.
And management is absolutely more prestigious and better compensated than IC work, despite what some may claim.
> This is probably because women are expected to have a high degree of self doubt and there is no assumption that they are defective if they admit to it.
A simpler explanation is that there is a perceived need to increase the number of women in management positions.
That would imply that women aren't deserving of the promotion, and that aggressive posturing is somehow a requirement for the job (and women get a free pass).
However, if the book is any indication, Tanya is a great staff engineer, probably among the best of any gender.
This of course begs the question: could it be that discriminating against men who don't display the stereotypical behaviors is detrimental to diversity? And increasing the number of women may actually help here: they may be able to empathize with people who don't fit the traditional mold.
It’s not clear that people incapable of being assertive or direct would make naturally more effective managers.
And assuming that women drawn to management positions will be more empathetic to the neuro diverse is a gigantic reach. I have no idea why that would be the case.
Organizing apes to do things is always more prestigious than a single ape doing the work. The organizer ape gets to claim that they did the work of the group.
Think about a plaque on a bridge. Who does it say built the bridge? The guy who never touched a shovel after the ground breaking ceremony.
YMMV, but my experience is very different from what you mention above. Every company I've been at has paid very close attention to ensure that women are treated fairly with the understanding that these biases exist.
But there's some truth to what you're saying. I do think women tend to be the "babysitters" on the team. I've noticed this often on teams I've been on. They're usually the ones that are the "cultural heart" of the team and organize all the events. Sometimes I've been their manager so I've asked and I'd say it's about 66/33 they legitimately enjoy doing it vs they felt pidgeon-holed into it because they volunteered once.
As for the transitions into other roles, I think it's impossible to tell if it's bias and or a natural inclination. There's no way to look at the data empirically and determine this. In my experience though, I think women are often encouraged to take these roles not because there's a bias towards "women are good at soft skills" but that these are generally the roles that provide better career advancement and visibility. It has always seemed to be a somewhat mis-guided outcome of allyship.
> and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc
Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged.
Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.
I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that.
Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist".
More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to "well, there's nothing about the material that's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't want to do it". It reveals a staggering lack of imagination and empathy, especially within a group that stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people.
>I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man
In my experience this isn't "because he was a man" but because he was an engineer. And from what I've seen it also has nothing to do with you being a woman. Engineers tend to be condensing, and will do so indiscriminately. Or said different being "condescended to by some other engineer" means they are treating you equally, if you're not then you are getting preferential treatment.
Perhaps, but I've seen it directed towards numerous female engineers, from less senior engineers who were noticeably deferential to male engineers, at or below the seniority of the female engineer.
I think there's this perception amongst male would-be engineers that starts in college or earlier that women in that space are not sincere enough in their desire to become engineers, are physiologically incapable of doing the work at the same level as men, or that women have entered the space by means unrelated to the mastery of the materials.
I think your comment is a good demonstration why this is still such an issue, despite the overwhelming evidence of gender based discrimination in tech, people are dismissing the experiences of the majority of women in tech. Can't really improve if people are still in denial about it.
I don't know what to do, you can't teach people empathy or not to be sexist. Given how weirdly conservative young people are nowadays I don't see it getting much better in the future either.
> stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people
There is actually evidence [1] that suggests that victims of bullying often develop long term psychological issues / depression, and depression leads to a lack of empathy.
The comment I responded to didn't have any data either, not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment while they don't?
The university I went to did that and they said it was to get more women, and easily got over 50% women into engineering fields just by adding design to the name of the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
As a student I have personally experienced "sorry, you cannot join the event, you're a boy we're looking for a girl" and instead of me they picked a girl whose only job was to stand, smile, and tick the box "yes I'm a girl, this makes the team diverse". Having such an experience makes my brain heavily biased against all actions supporting gender equality.
Which are many. And they're almost always about improving the position of women. "Gender equality" is rarely ever about improving the position of men. The social consensus is that it's impossible for a situation to exist where a man is discriminated against, and even discussing this idea is a very much taboo topic. Which is not true, because such situations exist, and the number of people who have this opinion but are afraid of voicing it is growing.
I'm deeply convinced that a societal shift is on the horizon, and what we see as "modern feminism" will be, in the future, considered one of those things that aged like milk. The only question is whether this change will result in a society where people feel equal, or the pendulum will simply swing back and it's going to be taboo to discuss the hardships of women.
This change isn't very visible in western societies yet, but we're starting to see it in South Korea. This movement is going to grow and spread.
It's not visible on the outside in western societies because outright saying "you're a boy and we're looking for a girl" is outright illegal (in 99% of roles). They need to be a bit more subtle than that. e.g. make a "women only/highly encouraged" event that happens to have a job fair.
I guess in Asia there is no such barrier. So the results and backlash are equally more explicit.
Product is a lot more prestigious at most companies. Design is too, at quite a few, in that it’s often a better stepping stone to product, though that depends on the org.
In general, programming jobs are low-status. High pay, but low status.
People like to think programming is a purely luxury job, and in some ways it is, but not compared to something where you often have more agency in the direction of a product. Programmers at lower levels probably take more bullshit and have less influence than anything with a title that conveys a higher level of abstract problem solving.
Being a freelance website designer likely pays less but is more rewarding as a practice than being a random cog
Positives are diminished when the paths you wanted to pursue are closed off. Things that look like privilege when you don't have it can be a prison when you're stuck in its boundaries.
> women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles
Do you have actual data to support this claim?
> into coordinating work, managing people
So promoted into management. Are you saying managers are systemically making less than the engineers they manage? Which would be interesting, as management is generally seen as a more prestigious role than individual contributor.
Every time I’ve looked into it, pay gaps for same role and same experience are very small, sometimes favoring women. And if anything, women are promoted faster in an attempt to diversify the management ranks.
1. Group A is literally paid less than Group B, for the same work. This is much less of an issue today than it used to be, but its still an issue.
2. Members of group A are promoted much less often than members of Group B, so while a Group A member in a high-earning position has commensurate pay to a member of Group B in the same position, there are simply fewer Group A members reaching that position. This is the more common, and frankly more pernicious, problem.
The very first link in the recommended google search says that only 25% of C-suite members are women, yet women make up 35% of all tech employees. In other words, a smaller percentage of women are even reaching the highest levels than men. That's pretty clearly the 2nd kind of wage gap. Now, that might because of selective promotion practices (which you discredit), but it might also be that women are laid off 60% more often than men, so they have to restart their seniority journey at a different company.
Engineers viewing design as a 'less prestigious' role is laughable. The compensation for these tracks is pretty much equal. I would love to hear you spell out why exactly you perceive design as less prestigious.
I would agree on the junior side of things. There is a higher threshold for the starting line for engineers, but for higher levels, design is by no means seen as a less prestigious role. Not in any sense of the word.
For salaries – see e.g. levels.fyi for quick comparison. Even Google – a company not really known for valuing design that highly: SWE L6 avg. = 520K USD. Product Designer L6 avg. = 515K USD.
I won't speak on engineering vs design. but compensation doesn't necessarily correlate perfectly with prestige. Teaching is the easiest example in the opposite way.
> Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career.
I don't have data on this other than my own anecdata, so big grain of salt, but I think it's varies pretty widely by company and/or industry. In my last few jobs I've had several in which the engineering teams were overwhelmingly male, while in my current role it's more balanced. Further anecdata but in my most recent job search the engineers interviewing me were overwhelmingly male with only a few women.
It's hard to say, to be honest. In that same decade we had some of the most vicious backlash to POC/women yet. Maybe that's always been there and the awareness at least help clear 5% of the swamp. But in many ways the situation feels (in my perception) even worse. If anything, this is the time such orgs are needed the most.
But yes, it's definitely a large company thing. I could count the number of female programmers at my first job (~150 staff, maybe 80 programmers) on one hand. 2nd was a huge conglomerate and a better mix, even if older personell skewed male. 3rd was a ~150 startup (more like 100 programmers) and back to the "on one hand" situation. I completely agree with more of a shift to management and design for women compared to being "in the field" as programmers.
This is an effect of remote work that isn't discussed nearly often enough: it nearly completely removes any non-work-related "culture fit" filter from the equation for hiring and promotions. Without the happy hours, shared lunch breaks, or even the water cooler conversations "fitting in" isn't nearly as important remote as it was in person.
This benefits everyone who struggles to fit in with the traditional tech bro class: women, but also the neurodivergent, the deaf, the blind, teetotalers, and many more who would otherwise end up subconsciously perceived as less of a team player.
The reasons for the numbers in the global south are different. It's not necessarily a preferred choice through empowerment, more so a profession taken up to propel oneself from poverty.
Interesting, in Korea it's not nearly as bad. CS students are about 1/3 women, and the large majority of them does end up in tech. Of course still overrepresented in front-related roles and underrepresented in back-related roles but I don't think that's different anywhere really.
may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.
Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers?
Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge shortage of software engineers here, which largely stems from how software has traditionally been treated very poorly compared to other more traditional engineering disciplines here.
I am in a discussion about tech, but I was talking more in a general sense. They basically only let highly skilled personnel in and there's still quite a few stipulations with their Visa program.
Most stipulations basically requiring to be highly educated and experienced already. If you don't have those, you need to have some Japanese proficiency.
If you are in one of those categories, the work visa is relatively lax if we're comparing to the process to immigrate into the US or UK. Only real issue is their economy isn't doing great right now, so you'll find it harder than normal to find roles hiring unless you're extremely specialized (so, no different from the US right now).
> And what's wrong with focusing on skilled workers?
Same thing that's happening in tech as we speak. You only look for Purple Squirrels and you may as well not have a job ad. Meanwhile, most squirrels aren't moving abroad to a country to take a huge pay cut unless they are very satisfied with their savings/stock.
Has that shortage actually been driving up salaries? From what I know, Japan has the worst "SWE Salary:Cost of living" ratio anywhere in the developed world.
Citation needed. My salary here is great by local standards. If you're comparing to the US, don't. Salaries in the US for SWE are much higher than anywhere else.
I was intentional when I said "the developed world", so including Western-Europe, South Korea and so on, not just the US. The fact you're on HN speaking perfect English already means you're likely to be very much above the median, salary-wise.
Even though I feel similar and don't have any large data to look at, an unfortunate thought is that their efforts helped keep status quo. Or to put it another way, without that organization's efforts, things could have gotten much worse maybe?
My thoughts exactly. It's one thing to close your doors feeling like you made a difference. It's another thing to close your doors feeling like you have just as much you need to do as you did when you started.
What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one.
I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced.
It’s also on me to not join teams that have a curious lack of women. E.g., if I interview with a DevOps team that had 10 people and zero women, there might be something wrong with hiring. Statistically there should be at least one or two.
> Statistically there should be at least one or two.
Of course not. Women make up a minority of people working in tech, and are highly recruited by the large companies able to pay the highest compensation. So it's very difficult for other companies to find women willing to work at the lower salaries they can offer.
So there likely is a problem with hiring. They don't have enough money to afford hiring more women.
When I say that statistically there should be one or two women on the team, that is already taking account the fact that women are the minority in tech.
Women are about 23% of software engineers. So if you have a team of 10 with zero women, that is somewhat suspicious to me as an applicant.
Is my prospective future team hiring the best talent or are they letting their biases creep in to their hiring process?
You did not address the point about the large, wealthiest software companies hiring up all the best women candidates.
You are probably correct these companies are not hiring the best talent. But the reason is not necessarily bias. It's just as likely that they can't afford the best talent, including women who the top companies are competing for to improve their diversity metrics.
I didn’t address that point because I think it’s pretty weak. The little regional companies who are “behind the times” where I ended up on teams of all men were mostly apathetic to their hiring process and had no formality involved nor any incentive to change what little process they had.
Imagine a regional bank or insurance company that hires you off of a couple of pulse check interviews and your general vibes. Those are the worst for bias hiring. (I’ve worked at two or three of those).
You don’t get your foot in the door to interview at Google or Amazon unless you pass a rigorous technical challenge. Tech companies need people who are as efficient as possible since that’s their core business. Companies that write software but aren’t tech companies just need passable technology, they need a butt in the seat.
So I don’t really agree with the premise that the wealthy tech giants are scooping up all the women. They’re scooping up top talent.
If we want our teams to be broadly representative of our communities and recruiting the best people for the roles, it’s clear that we cannot put the weight of solving the problems that lie behind such experiences and choices on the underrepresented individuals themselves.
I’ve been reading the comments and it seems clear to me that many of the commenters are either unaware or dismissive of the reasons that a woman might say that she would not join a team that was otherwise only men.
Without acknowledging the data, and failing to provide any useful hypothesis for why it is the way it is (apart from “it’s not called design” or some kind of gender-based competency model or perhaps a hand-wavey “but we shouldn’t discriminate; it’s their preference”), resistance to whatever we as professionals and leaders choose to do about it will be the norm.
And it’s hard to force people to deploy critical thinking when they believe they benefit from not doing so.
My own theory is that many men benefit from single gender bro spaces (where other forms of diversity are also highly constrained) and this rather than genuine lack of empathy or creative thinking lies at the bottom of gatekeeping and making teams and working environments toxic enough to drive women who dare to enter away.
The guys who early on in my career were dismissive of women in tech roles who have changed their tunes significantly tend to have had a daughter with an aptitude for STEM. Perhaps they’ve got skin in the game and somebody who shares what it’s like coming into difficult study and work environments?
>Statistically there should be at least one or two.
Well, if the statistics takes into consideration the notion that a lot of women don't even apply to certain jobs thinking they're under-qualified should we be surprised if there are less than we initially expect?
I appreciate the point of being proactive, since the point above can be somewhat mitigated by HR reaching out to prospects instead of relying on the existing applicant pool. But it seems everyone involved in the hiring process should be as convinced as you about the mid/long-term benefits of having women on the team, otherwise it's a uphill battle passing up perfectly acceptable candidates when there is so much work to get done. It's much easier when everyone believes that the X factor of having a women on the team far outweighs the delays and the accumulating negative effects of business in the short term.
The statistics say that 23% of software engineers in the US are women.
That’s what I’m referring to. If there are no women on a team of 10 I start questioning whether the team is hiring for their biases or if they’re doing a good job of setting them aside.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with your last paragraph. Do you believe that women being hired on a software team causes delays and negative effects? Because I do not and that has never happened in my experience. I would hope you wouldn’t similarly falsely claim that male teachers and nurses are less qualified than their female peers.
> What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one.
That is a failure, you don't need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved. See doctors for example, in my country kids ask if men can be doctors since they see them so rarely, the "women aren't doctors" thing has been solved, there is no need to do anything at that point except try to ensure it doesn't tip to the other side.
> Statistically there should be at least one or two.
That isn't how statistics works, statistically there would be 2-3, 0 is perfectly normal just by random chance. If you intentionally try to only join teams with more than average women then of course you see more and more women, even though the field as a whole hasn't changed.
Edit: And given that SRE often have lots of on-call I'd bet there are much less women there than regular SWE roles. Men tend to be over represented in roles that sacrifices free time.
The best SRE team I was ever on beat the industry averages for gender equity. We had 50% women, including a Black woman, and a trans woman.
Our hiring practices actively surfaced people who had difficulty being considered and retained on other teams and at other companies.
This concept of being inclusive is a lot different than having biases. We didn’t reject men or anything like that, we just made ourselves more visible to underrepresented candidates and hired on very specific personality traits on top of the technical requirements. We also made it clear to candidates that our team was accepting and empowering to people in minority groups as they relate to our industry.
For example, we would use specific interview questions to screen out people who were selfish, egotistical, and closed-minded. There would be a zero or low chance of hiring someone who would make our minority team members uncomfortable and lead them to quit because those people would have been screened out.
Another example was being open to diverse backgrounds, like transitioning from a different team within the company or having a resume that lacked formal schooling.
I remember a conversation that stuck with me where the Black woman on our team told me about how she tended to job hop because she could only stay at a company so long before she started to have difficulty tolerating how she was treated by everyone else in the company. As someone who isn’t a minority in my industry it was a very eye-opening thing to hear. I had never once quit because of the way people treated me on a personal level! I had always quit for job reasons like pay, quality of my projects, effectiveness of my managers.
So, you’re right about random chance and statistics, but in my opinion a good team won’t allow random chance to dictate their candidate pool. In my opinion a good team that approaches 10 people will notice the fact that there are zero women and question whether they have made their team a good place for women to work for in the first place.
Let’s not forget that diversity is a proven dollars and cents benefit to corporations. Conservative media right now is using “DEI” as a substitute for racial slurs, but their intended audience for those insults isn’t corporate board rooms. No, Disney isn’t a liberal corporation, they just have a policy of inclusivity to the point of being perceived as overdoing it because they know that including everyone means a larger employee candidate pool and a larger customer pool.
When you say “You don’t need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved,” the problem with that argument is that the problem is so obviously not solved. You can’t look at various outcome statistics for the racial demographics of the US or the gender pay gap statistics and tell me with a straight face that the problem is solved.
The people who have the power to make those outcomes more equitable are institutions like schools and employers. That’s why I prefer my employer to be active rather than passive.
(I have a hard time believing on-call is a reason why women don’t join SRE teams, especially considering that nursing has the opposite gender bias and also has far worse scheduling woes than any SRE on-call schedule I’ve ever witnessed or heard of)
The organization accomplished what it set out to do; make the tech industry more inclusive and accessible to women. To a large extent, though it wasn’t a primary factor, it aided that journey nicely with its thousands of events that it organized over the years, according to this announcement.
It didn’t last forever, but it was never meant to - that would mean the presence of women in tech would never become truly equal to the presence of men. While its goal wasn’t ‘achieved’, this organization did what it could to move things in that direction and now, with its energy spent, it leaves the door open for new contributors to take the next step.
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you to everyone who helped organize the events this organization hosted in the last seventeen years.