But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.
You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending money specifically on recruiting females brings the budget to parity.
> You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to right handed people. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% right handed, then that is money largely spent on recruiting right handed people. Spending money specifically on recruiting left handed people brings the budget to parity.
Dividing up the population into two groups using your favorite method and then demanding that the amount spent on each of the groups is equal is ridiculous. Not only that, but mathematically you almost surely can't even satisfy two people that have that philosophy simultaneously.
What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.
What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.
Why? Just on topic that leaves out two very, very important things:
1. The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men and it will take a nontrivial investment of resources to counter that.
2. Although it wouldn't affect an individual's performance, diversity (and other things that don't affect individual performance) can affect team performance and thus need to be considered.
"The process is already inherently unfairly biased towards men"
This is untrue. There are probably all sorts of societal issues that affect whether one enters the tech industry based on gender, but those aren't inherent to the process. It's also not clear that hiring practices will help the problem. A desirable company can improve its gender ratio, but only by hurting the ratio at other companies. (I don't think this is a bad thing.) Something has to cause more women to become programmers, and I doubt hiring practices are the solution.
Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.
But even resources per candidate isn't a good measure of fairness. Just consider the trivial illustrative possibility of a normal job board posting that every potential candidate sees. In today's world it is likely that more men would respond than women by a nontrivial factor. Everyone who responds receives equal treatment and equal devotion of resources and, in the end, significantly more men are hired than women. Now, imagine that we have the exact same scenario but somebody is hired to stand next to the job board and tell every woman who comes by "you should apply for this!" More resources are now being expended per woman than per man but the proportion of people responding might be different without being unfair to any particular person.
Granted, there are a lot of trivialities in this example, but it's pretty representative of how such programs are supposed to work.
Actually, this is unfair to particular people. Two students (a man and a woman) walk by the job board for company X. Both of them are ideal for company X, and they would love to work there, but they don't notice the board, so they both take a job at Y for less money and are unhappy.
Now, rewind. The situation is the same, but nearby is a recruiter. The man walks by again, not noticing the job board. The recuiter does not flag him down. Now the woman walks by and the recruiter walks up to her and interests her in company X. She takes her ideal job and is happy. The man takes a job at company Y, for less pay, and is unhappy.
Ah, but remember that in this example everyone sees the posting (or, if you prefer, the recruiter only reaches out to women who see the posting) so your scenario is impossible. The recruiter's role isn't to increase visibility but rather to be a signal to women that they wouldn't be wasting their time with this company.
When programs like the one briefly mentioned in the article are done well their net effect is really signalling more than anything. As trivial as it sounds, such signalling can actually have a large impact.
Both of the students are CS majors. They presumably will both eventually work for similar companies. Why would the woman who is equally interested in computer science pass over the job posting, requiring an actual recruiter to be present, when the man does not? Do women get CS degrees and then leave to work in some other field post-graduation, not writing code? If so, that is a huge problem. Do they lose interest in computer science? Do they get sick of the male dominated environment in CS but just stick it out for their degree?
I would hope that the recruiter isn't, in fact, signalling something along the lines of, "your odds of getting hired at this company are greater than your equally talented male friend." If I were receiving that much extra recruiting attention because of my gender, that is the impression I would get.
I hope you don't mind if I'm not interested in spending a few hours tracking down all the sources I've referenced before but to give you a short answer to your first paragraph: for the past decade or so women have held 20-30% of the CS degrees with recent times being somewhat higher. Women also hold less than 20% of the software positions (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/04/science-engineer... ctrl-F for "19 percent"; it cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics but I'm not sure what part). Obviously there's not a perfect correlation between degrees and jobs for a number of obvious reasons but it's evidence against equal chance of CS majors staying jobs. And I've seen separate sources more clearly showing that there is larger fall-off for women than men. Unfortunately, I don't know what the cause is exactly.
However, your second paragraph sort of has things backwards. The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend." Such signalling as I described before isn't about saying that their odds are better than their male friend but rather that the company is actively trying to not disadvantage women.
The current scheme of things strongly signals to women (pretty accurately) "your odds of getting hired are lesser than your equally talented male friend."
Do you have some sort of evidence for this? Anecdotally, talented female programmers stay on the market far shorter than males do. Most companies desire a gender balance, which makes the limited stock of female programmers more vlauable.
You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending money specifically on recruiting females brings the budget to parity.