Why Startups Should Try to Hire Women

http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/08/04/why-startups-should-try-to-hire-women/

62 74 15 years ago

glimcat• 15 years ago

There's always this study, although it's one of those "early results, many possible confounding factors, few samples" cases where the results should be taken with a big pile of salt.

http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...

Women in tech are also already statistical outliers, so the probability that a random female candidate is good may be slightly higher than for a random male candidate. Tricky to study though, starting with it not being easy to objectively measure how "good" a candidate is.

jdp23• 15 years ago

The study described in the HBR article also aligns well with Scott Page's work on diverity, which describes where diverse teams outperform. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html has more.

fleitz• 15 years ago

Company culture is gender agnostic, as a man I've worked with other men who don't share my ideas on work culture / code culture. I stopped working with those people and worked with others where we were all on the same page and when I had to work with them I put my differences aside and helped out where it made sense.

I do more of a cowboy coding style that worked really well for rapid prototyping and then the others in the group could take over and put all the niceties around the code. I liked to go for beers after work, they wanted to go home. It was fine, I had beers with my friends. No biggie. I don't need to spend every waking moment of my life with those I work with.

If a person don't share culture with people it probably has a lot to do with them and not their gender. There are 7 billion people on the planet I don't think men and women are that different that it isn't possible to find 20 people you can work with. I certainly know that if push came to shove I could work with a group of 20 women, despite whatever supposed cultural differences are said to exist.

I'm not sure why anyone would expect 40 other people to change their culture just to suit one person. Work is about getting paid, and there will always be bullshit to deal with at work, why people get paid is because there is stuff they'd rather be doing. Work is never going to be perfect.

yummyfajitas2• 15 years ago

tl;dr Penelope Trunk thinks that diversity is a distraction and provides little value to startups. Jean Hsu disagrees, but is too lazy to tell us why.

wheels7• 15 years ago

This didn't ever really get to the "Why?" part. It just basically says that the opposite is stupid.

My theory: humans behave differently, and generally more civilly, in environments where they (subconsciously) believe they have a chance of meeting a partner. Heck, part of the reason I went to a liberal arts school instead of a technical school was the fact that 4 years in an 80% male environment (which was the case at the specific school that was in the front-running) sounded rather drab.

What's actually unclear to me is if those social dynamics, as opposed to the, let's call them "football team" dynamics, objectively produce better results in a startup. It may be that the sort of bravado that emerges in football-team-ish environments is useful to a startup. But then to swing the hypothetical pendelum again, it might be easier to hire for a company that's more enjoyable to work at, even if the things that made it enjoyable would be a net minus in isolation. I'd posit that it is somewhat variable on the specific set of folks working there; i.e. some employees would flourish in one environment and others in its converse.

americandesi3334• 15 years ago

Sorry to hear that you chose your 4 years of school based on meeting someone from the opp gender. Hoped that worked out for you :)

Have to say that your theory seems shortsighted to me and does not apply to top performers of either genders, especially if you look at professional environment. I have met quite a few women who go into certain educational path to meet partners (medical school is a good example), but they are not passionate about the field and therefore, never become the top performers.

On the other hand, if you look at top performing women in startups, they are passionate about their work and are not there to find partners.

A startup should hire talent regardless of their gender... being a woman myself in the tech field, I dont want to be hired because a startup is trying to cultivate a 'enjoyable' work environment. Its about who brings the chops to the table.

wheels7• 15 years ago

That's a straw-man. I didn't say that:

• I, or anyone should go into a particular field to meet potential partners

• That the women or men whom are at the top of their field chose those fields to meet partners

• That people should be hired because of their gender irrespective of their qualifications

I said that people behave differently in environments where the subconscious flips a switch that says, "You are now in an environment where you may meet a potential partner." Which is quite different. Do you genuinely believe that universally top-performers behave identically in mixed vs. single gender environments?

The basic thesis of the article was that work cultures can be structured in such as to produce a more egalitarian environment without compromising on the quality of employees. The question asked is then why a company would want to do so. Again, my proposition is simply that given that assumption, that a more egalitarian environment is a more pleasant workplace, at least for some subset of employees which includes folks like myself.

jcc802• 15 years ago

"Heck, part of the reason..."

"Sorry to hear that you chose your 4 years of school based on meeting someone from the opp gender."

You have people skills.

edit: quotes

deepGem• 15 years ago

All said and done - it's fun to work with talented women :). Hiring women just for 'joy' factor is crap. There's one more quality - with the right input, women tend to foster team building and sharing qualities not only in themselves but in their fellow co-workers as well. In a high pressure work environment, this can work wonders.

JanezStupar• 15 years ago

Sorry to hear that you chose your 4 years of school based on meeting someone from the opp gender. Hoped that worked out for you :)

I think you don't quite understand how "top-performers" function in human society. There are numerous formal studies that show that charisma and sex appeal have much more to do with one's career prospects than their skill and education.

Not trying to say that skill doesn't matter - but social skills matter more than technical - we can bitch all we want, but thats how world works and we better adapt to the best of our abilities.

I have seen from numerous anecdotal examples how top performing men tend to advance their careers through women in the workplace - be an ass to the ladies and you won't get anywhere. "Work" the ladies - and they will make you king of the world.

lwhi6• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but this is a sexist point of view.

Your argument seems to be "hire women so the men have a chance of a date, they'll be much more well behaved as a result."

erydo• 15 years ago

Wait, why is that sexist? A proposition that mixed-gender groups behaved differently than homogeneous groups doesn't ring any alarm bells for me.

wisty3• 15 years ago

No, he's saying that if you have 8 guys in a room (three male founders, then 5 hires who just happened to be male), they will think it's OK to dress like shit, bathe occasionally, put up lewd posters, leave rubbish under their desks, and no-one is likely to complain. OK, the founders could try to set an example, but they won't have any moral authority if most of the team doesn't really care.

If there's at least one women there from the start, you won't get a subtly sexist or just uncouth subculture developing, because people will worry that "the girl" will complain.

Guys are sexist - they often think that women will get annoyed by bad behavior, while other guys should just suck it up. Girls are sexist too.

biot• 15 years ago

The GP observed that there exists a different dynamic in mixed gender environments then speculated that whether or not a mixed gender environment is beneficial is dependent on the individuals, thus drawing no conclusion about the matter.

That you saw this as a sexist remark advocating for hiring women only reveals your own biases. You misread the comment and what you read between the lines were your own thoughts.

lotharbot3• 15 years ago

> "humans behave differently, and generally more civilly, in environments where they (subconsciously) believe they have a chance of meeting a partner."

I already have a partner. That changes the dynamics, too.

The "football team" and "singles bar" both have their own strengths and weaknesses. So does the dynamic you get when your whole team is married with kids -- some employees are going to really flourish in that environment, too.

benatkin• 15 years ago

Uhm...so not buying the essay by Penelope Trunk. Most of my favorite startups are 10%-34% female. I think the reason they don't get into fights is because they're responsible. Also being an irresponsible founder is seriously overrated.

latch3• 15 years ago

This isn't something I've said out loud often. However, if I had my own small startup, I'd be worried about hiring young women for one reason: maternity leave.

Now, this obviously depends on where you're setting up your startup. However, if I lived in a place where a long[ish] (6+months) maternity leave was the law, I'd be pretty worried about newly hired women going on maternity leave. For a large company, it isn't a big problem, but for a small cash-strapped company, losing a significant % of your workforce for an extended period of time sucks.

I've known women who went back to work, or switched to a job with better benefits, because they planned on getting pregnant. And I've known some who just happened to get pregnant shortly after getting a new job.

I strongly believe that the length of maternity leave should be proportional to the length of time at the company.

Joakal• 15 years ago

What's stopping men from also taking leave to raise a kid?

I support paternity leave for this reason. It'll make businesses worry less about only women having a kid.

yummyfajitas2• 15 years ago

In general, men don't take anywhere near as much leave time as women.

Even in Sweden, where the government strongly encourages men to take paternity leave, men take only 1/3 of all leave days. (The couple gets 330 days of leave to share and the father gets 60 days only he can use.) Germany has an even lower ratio.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden....

maaku2• 15 years ago

Paternity leave is much, much shorter.

alanfalcon• 15 years ago

>This isn't something I've said out loud often. However, if I had my own small startup, I'd be worried about hiring young women for one reason: maternity leave.

IANAL but (in America, anyway) it's a good thing to never say out loud: it's completely illegal. You may not discriminate hiring on the basis of gender, and if any female applicant who got turned down for a job at your small startup in the future and dug up this post... well, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes.

latch3• 15 years ago

Which is a real shame, because then we can't have an open and honest conversation about it without fear of litigation.

Of course, there isn't a lack of countries where maternity leave isn't long, so I can always set up shop there and make the choice I want with respect to maternity leave benefits..

T-hawk• 15 years ago

The variable on which he's trying to discriminate for hiring is not, strictly speaking, gender. He wants to discriminate on the likelihood of an employee missing an extended amount of work time in the wake of a voluntary* personal choice. For a company to want to avoid that is quite reasonable. But of course, pregnancy correlates very highly to gender, so the execution of such a policy ends up functionally indistinguishable from actual gender discrimination.

(*we're not here to debate the fine points of when contraception measures fail.)

mannicken2• 15 years ago

IANAL as well, but as far as I understand it's completely legal to say "I don't want to hire women". Yay freedom of speech. However, If I am hiring people (which I'm not and never done) and reject a woman based on the fact that she is a woman, and she can somehow prove it, then yes.. I risk being sued.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Egregore• 15 years ago

It's why I think all the maternity leaves should be paid by state and insured by state, not by company, otherwise it will cause such hidden discrimination. And I'm in favor of longer maternity leaves (at least one year) otherwise kids will not be breastfeed and it might cause health problems later. Having healthy new generation is in interest of the entire society so the society should pay for it.

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

This. I get that "potential mothers are unemployable" is a huge problem we can and should avoid, but this shouldn't have been an unfunded mandate with costs and risks solely burdening new mothers' current employers. That gives management a big incentive to find excuses not to hire them, and penalizes the ones who do what we assert is the right thing.

gaius• 15 years ago

I'd like to see a right to maternity leave balanced by an obligation to return to work afterwards. It's unreasonable for a company to hold a position open only to find that the employee in question not actually want it, or want to change it significantly (e.g. from full to part-time).

maaku2• 15 years ago

In California, family leave is paid for by the state, not your company.

lmkg• 15 years ago

I consider myself a (male) feminist and I encourage inclusiveness. I think women's different experience and perspective can be an asset. However, I also recognize that the culture that we live in is not yet gender-blind, and that as much as we don't like it, people's perceptions of gender impact how we interact with other people. This means that the advantages that inclusion and diversity brings to a team, will generally have a cost. If you're trying to construct an ideal team, you would be remiss to ignore the very real impact that gender issues can and will have on your team. This may mean that a female, while individually better for a position than a male counterpart, will not provide as large of a net benefit to the team as a whole. Maybe she will, maybe she won't, it depends on a lot of things, especially the team itself, but it's certainly possible: the female's femaleness is something that needs to be considered and may create problems.

I want to make this point very clear: This does not necessarily have anything to do with the female herself. This is as much, or more, about the males on the team and how they treat/act towards/interact with the females. It's mostly about the interactions between people, and how gender relationships are part of personal relationships. And it's completely unfair to the female. It's bullshit. But, it does happen, and if you're trying to build a team, it's something you have to consider because it impacts how well it will function.

I don't even have anecdotes, much less data, to back this assertion up, but I suspect that the problems of integrating women (or other minorities, for that matter) into a team lessen as their representation increases. 2 women on your team means gender-issues than 1, and 5 means less issues than 2, and so forth. But that if you're building a team incrementally, that first female is a barrier, because you get the minimal benefit and quite likely the maximal difficulty.

wickedchicken• 15 years ago

> the female's femaleness is something that needs to be considered and may create problems.

This is the most effective way possible to make someone feel alienated. Tell them their presence is problematic, that it's "not them, but us" and therefore there is nothing they can do about it.

You want to know the dirty secret behind the claim that female programmers make men uncomfortable? It's synthetic. It only exists because you think it exists, like some bizarre fiat currency. The moment you (all of you) stop caring, this concern goes away and you can do more productive things like write code.

edit: whoops, didn't catch this one:

> gender relationships are part of personal relationships

You are professionals. Professional computer programmers. Professionals know how to handle these kinds of things, and this is really just a case-by-case deal. Making some blanket claim that "because there is a woman on the team, there will be fights over who gets to date her" is placing some pretty weak expectations on your team. I expect my team to be professional to everyone in it. If someone can't handle that kind of situation, I may not have a place for them on my team.

lwhi6• 15 years ago

I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that you're are a feminist.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

My experience is it doesn't matter much. The last startup I worked for had 4 women and 4 men (on average, over time; it varied a bit). I don't think gender was a significant issue to anyone. People were hired for their merits and treated as such.

Is that so special?

bfe• 15 years ago

She essentially says that a startup that implements a recruitment process that taps a very large number of potential recruits in search of the best candidates, and that effectively evaluates candidates based on their actual qualifications for the job, will also inevitably recruit a more diverse range of people. And wouldn't those same factors inevitably lead to recruiting better people? So, at a statistically meaningful scale, there's going to be at least some correlation.

pbhjpbhj4• 15 years ago

If you're bothered about equal numbers of people in Tech then just hobble men so they don't have opportunity to follow their desired occupations. Voila, equality.

>It's probably human nature to like people who are like you , but learning to work with people with different personalities, genders, and backgrounds makes for a stronger team, not a distracted one.

People who are like engineers are like engineers. Shocker.

Lets get some lawyers and fashion models in there to do the engineering just to mix things up a bit and provide a diverse environment shall we?¹

While we're at it lets make the engineers work in marketing to make sure they have a diverse environment too.

¹ - they may be good engineers but I'd really expect most good engineers to have similar behavioural traits. The number of Mathematics students with social anxiety seems to vastly out weigh the number of Art students with the same. Certain personalities correlate strongly with certain subject and abilities, I don't think we should be fighting that.

robjohnson• 15 years ago

I agree with the author of the post in that the frequency of posts written that postulate blanket statements that are supported by anecdotal evidence of "something that happened to my friend" is way too high.

As for gender diversity, I think most founders would argue that the more diverse a team you have, the better. The 'Business Model Generation' book goes into this quite a bit and has some incredible insights into correlations between diverse teams and the creativity of their brainstorming sessions.

DennisP• 15 years ago

A better reason: small groups make more intelligent decisions when they have more women in them.

http://cci.mit.edu/publications/pressmentions.html

Gullanian2• 15 years ago

Men in my country at least are just generally more interested in tech. A big population of males who are interested in tech will naturally lead to a heavily weighted male populous of proficient tech people. I don't get why this is sexist it's just fact. I don't see much that needs to be fixed.

If there is discrimination in the hiring process though, yes that needs to be addressed. However that's not the angle the article is taking.

Hiring a woman because you don't have many women in the work place isn't optimal.

zwieback• 15 years ago

I'm sure it's not a question of qualification or skills - after all most of us aren't running down gazelle's or plowing fields.

The question is whether you see yourself primarily as a male or female or primarily as a developer or designer or engineer. I was just talking about that with my wife, who worked as an engineer in a male-dominated field and she never really thought about her gender. I've worked in mixed teams and feel the same, it's really not an issue for me.

However, when bias and prejudice enters the picture the whole balance can be quickly thrown off, even by a single person. I believe that's why in the US large companies have strict policies against discrimination. Unfortunately, these very policies often have the effect of introducing quota-related problems when teams are not allowed to hire who they really want.

So, we're not there yet, but I think things are moving in the right direction.

kstenerud• 15 years ago

Yeah, that's great and all, but the fact is, the percentage of female engineers is very low to begin with, and in today's environment where talented and available engineers is incredibly low, you simply don't have the luxury to pass on qualified applicants in the hopes that someone who meets your "diversity quota" will show up.

I look for the following when hiring:

- Aptitude: Can they do the work?

- Attitude: Are they excited about what we do and the position being offered?

- Flexibility: Are they prepared to step outside the "role" and help out in areas that we don't have fully covered?

- Creativity: Are they going to come up with innovative solutions to the various problems we'll face going forward?

- Intelligence: Can they learn new things quickly? Things have a habit of changing fast in a startup.

- Maturity: Can they behave professionally towards everyone else and keep the work environment a safe, healthy place?

If an applicant meets these criteria, we don't stop to see what "group" they belong to; we snatch them up with all speed before someone else does!

Why Startups Should Try to Hire Women

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