10 steps to hire more women in tech

https://devskiller.com/steps-hire-more-women-tech/

by tomwinter • 9 years ago

9 7 9 years ago

devskiller.com

HillaryBriss2• 9 years ago

how about just one step: make 80% of your company's job offers to women. eventually you'll get close to parity.

simple.

slindz2• 9 years ago

If only it were that easy....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009759

HillaryBriss2• 9 years ago

i still think it is that easy if the top priority truly is a workforce that resembles the general population

if i tell you i have 10 billion dollars and a giant greenhouse and i'm going to fill that greenhouse with orchids that represent the diversity of planet earth's orchid population, and five years later, you look around the greenhouse and notice it's 68 percent Vanilla planifolia, wouldn't it be fair to question my commitment to fairly representing the diversity of the planet's orchid population?

i must have other priorities. how else could i fail so miserably?

kasia_kandefer• 9 years ago

For sure the problem is far more complex. As recruiters we can take some steps to make women in tech more welcome and reduce at least some of the barriers that are there in recruiting process. Still, a lot has to be done on a much earlier stage - that's why I totally agree with Vidya that "To solve diversity, we must start at the source of the problem — encouraging women to pursue engineering in college!". That's why I'm so glad that such initiatives as https://girlswhocode.com/ as in a long run they will make the difference.

apricot13• 9 years ago

"involving women in the interview process"

THIS ^

Women can pick up the subtle 'creep factor' that some guys tend not to notice both in women and in men. It will also help to see how they interact with the team. 99% of the time it will be fine but it doesn't hurt to have them pop by for five or ten minutes at the beginning! (I've had to work with several people who would never have been hired had a woman been present in the interview!)

turtleofdeath• 9 years ago

Most of these are agreeable enough. "Unconscious bias training" seems like a bit of a stretch, but I haven't taken it to know whether it's helpful. 2, 3, 4, 6 are fair, I'd say.

5. Consider salary transparency

This is a double-edged sword. While good for some things, it is not without cost. For instance, seeing a top performer's pay can be motivating for some and demotivating to others. And others' performance isn't always immediately clear so it may be that other workers don't see higher pay as 'just,' which will cause them to devalue their own work because, "what's the point?"

To resolve this, you can flatten pay but then you remove the incentive to perform well. You can separate people at different paygrades into different physical locations, but now you're segregating performance groups while harming overall open communication.

8. Don’t force female coders behave like men to be successful

I'd say success is acting like a good coder -- regardless of gender -- just like it says in the conclusion:

“Overall, to become a female developer, you only have to do what any other smart dev would do. Spend weekends and late nights in front of your computer, laying down lines of code, debugging and developing your personal projects. Follow tutorials, read articles, and learn on the fly. Master the lingo. And, if you are curious enough to go deep down to the core of what you are trying to build, you will need to acquire a large and useful understanding of computer science. In a nutshell, spend time to learn all you can.”

I don't see a lot of places discussing the concept of trial hiring (i.e. giving someone fair pay for actual work to skip the bias inherent in interviewing and judging them based on some preset metrics). I feel like this would get around the problems highlighted in this study: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas.... At my company, we use trial hires and we have a lot more women involved as a result.

10 steps to hire more women in tech

Related Stories