If you want to open opportunities for women, you post the job notice in places where women will see it. That will get you qualified candidates, and if you find a women who is the best person for the job, you hire her.
edit: spelling
Looking at Syracuse, http://wuc.syr.edu/ and http://multicultural.syr.edu/programs/index.html might be avenues.
increase the number of female applicants and go from there.
As it turns out, that's a lot easier said than done.
Because it's not. What if it's between two applicants, a male and a female, who are more or less equally qualified? Also, in case you haven't realized, there isn't an abundance of graphic designers looking for work in predominantly female areas. It's actually rather difficult to hire a good graphic designer who's not looking to telecommute, regardless of gender, much less hire one with specific skill tendencies.
You can't just post there, however. You have to include that as part of the places you'll post. Just posting to those places would mean you are getting a qualified candidate, but not necessarily the best one.
If you want to increase diversity then, well, don't just say 'I need women!', rather go to where the diversity is.
There are a ton of groups, meetups, community boards that would love to know you are 'hiring' not that you are 'hiring <insert minority>'. For example: http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/
Discrimination by private employers based on sexual orientation is not illegal in the United States under Federal law, nor under the state law of approximately 60% of the states.
There are long standing efforts to make such discrimination legal at the Federal level, and they have come close a couple times. [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_A...
In my opinion, being female is equivalent to a skill—sure a hard coded skill, but a skill none-the-less. When you need to connect with a particular audience, how else are you supposed to hire someone with that skill? We've painted ourselves into a PC corner where discrimination is okay if we hide it.
That doesn't mean you can't consider those differences in skills. If you don't interview a more qualified man who possesses those skills (and it seems extremely unlikely in this case that you will) then you don't need to feel bad not hiring one.
If you are hiring for a warehouse position where the only skills required are the ability to lift as much weight as high as possible and you receive a female applicant who has a PhD from Harvard and can't lift 25 lbs, choosing instead to hire a man who can do significantly more labor would be a good decision, not discriminatory. Likewise, if you believe that there are actual skills that you are attempting to hire for that favor women, that's not discriminatory.
> At least be forward with what you're looking for, why should a male apply for a position that he wants, fits PERFECTLY but only get rejected because the company was veiling it's intentions to hire a woman?
I agree that this would be a mistake. The difference comes in how good the fit is. If you are looking for something specific that the man is unable to provide, then it's not a perfect fit.
That's what it is. The inconsistency in the law has created a niche market, and people are taking advantage of it. That's why groups like "Women Who Code" exist; show up here to get a job.
What you can do is gender-specific lead generation. Create a role that's not gender specific, then market the role (news flash: tech hiring is marketing) using women as a target market.
This process doesn't guarantee you women for your roles. At your scale (and ours) there's nothing you can do about this. You're going to have more men than women. When you hit the scale of, apparently, Etsy, you can start to see demographic shifts in your company that correspond to how you market your openings.
If you are worried about a gender gap, you should be looking at why fewer females apply. Once you remedy this, you will be able to consider an equal amount of applicants, and you should then choose them based on their experience instead of their gender. The title of this article makes it out as if people are trying to stop you from hiring women, when in fact, you are instead trying to justify discrimination.
I find it concerning that we so easily discount this discrimination. Someone who is equally capable of doing the job with less experience and education should have an equal chance at the job, no?
Now, perhaps someone with more experience is statistically better for the job, so you might want to look for that, but what if men are statically better for the job? I don't think it is right to say one is discrimination and the other is not. In both cases you are making prejudicial judgements about people through categorization.
At some point practicality takes over and you have to make judgements about people without knowing who they really are, but its not clear to me why the varying levels of treatment are happening.
They are both discrimination, and they are both prejudicial judgement, but only one is illegal. Any property or characteristic of a candidate you use to make a hiring decision is the process of discriminating between the available candidates, and making prejudicial judgements.
Discrimination based on certain properties, like gender, is illegal. Discrimination based on any other properties, like college education, prior experience, communication skills, or how quickly (or more often slowly) they can do FizzBuzz is called 'the decision making process'.
An effective hiring process usually starts with trying to find good places to advertise, and then followed very shortly by figuring out how you will discriminate/prejudge the qualified candidates from the other [95% of] applicants.
As a general guide, typically it's the immutable properties which are the ones where discrimination is illegal.
Disqualifying all male candidates due to their gender is discriminatory, just as disqualifying all female candidates due to their gender is discriminatory.
The problem is they want a diverse workforce. So the question becomes how do they hire for that?
I'm sure the vast majority of companies want the exact same thing but there comes a point where you simply have to accept that we work in a significantly male dominated industry and to get to a point where more than 20% of your staff are female means you have to compromise somewhere in order to achieve that balance. Unfortunately that compromise isn't always going to be appropriate.
Also I find it interesting that you were considering a woman for job as a UI designer. Why not another engineer?
Here is a potentially better way to do it. Is your female co-worker comfortable presenting in public? If so, have her give a technical talk with cool demos and say you're hiring. That's not a bad way to find potential employees. And if there are women available, seeing a female face of the company will make them more interested.
But if she comes back with a smart guy, hire him. Because you're looking for a good employee first, and not a woman first.
Put another way, rather than trying to explicitly seek awesome female employees, just make sure the awesome female candidates don't slip through. I think execs often mistakenly think they can fix cultural issues by fiat, when what is really needed is dedication and time.
I think what constitutes imbalance also needs to be defined. If 10% of qualified engineering candidates are female does having 10% of your engineering staff be female constitute balance? I think the case could be made it does; however, in relation the birth ratio of our species is it certainly imbalance.
Doing that for the reasons you are suggesting is hypocritical. On one hand, you want the best person for the job, but then you are suggesting that the female engineer is apart of the decision making process, as if her gender is what qualifies her to hire engineers, or, more precisely, female engineers.
That's not what you intended to say, I know, but that's how easy it is to slip up in this regard.
> what is really needed is dedication and time.
Dedication to what, specifically? If the best people every time you hire is a white man, then you are losing the value that a diverse work force provides.
I think that is your own projection; The OP already mentioned that his female engineer is an awesome engineer, so I'm assuming she is qualified to be there from an engineering perspective (and I'm not saying she needs to be the only engineer there). And the organization is looking for a check to make sure the hiring team is not discriminating against women, having a woman there hopefully should help. At a minimum it would prevent outright sexist remarks during the discussion of candidates as making them in her presence would reasonably constitute sexual harassment. Also not to be over looked, the presence of a successful female engineer from the hiring organization may also make female candidates more comfortable.
As for dedication, I mean dedication to not over looking awesome female candidates, intentionally or otherwise.
Advertise your position for a designer.
Make sure that the ad is seen in plenty of places where women designers may look. Do as much outreach to women as you want to. Speak to women tech meetups. Pass your job position along to professors likely to know qualified students and let them know the position is open to everyone, but you'd like to hire more women in general and are having problems reaching out to women. Use facebook, linked in, pinterest, to reach out to women developers.
Ask your #1 employee if she is interested in speaking to schools, meetups, conferences. Sponsor her speaking.
Interview qualified candidates.
Then hire a qualified candidate apt to do well at your position.
Also, let it be known you are always interested in good candidates, regardless of their specific expertise. Then when you find good candidates, make a position for them. This works well with your outreach and internship program.
(Other activities: sponsor outreach to high school girls, sponsor women in tech conferences, sponsor outreach to all high school students, create internships (and advertise those internships all across campus))
If I was a woman, I'd rather apply for someone looking for a developer, than someone looking for a woman - because then I knew I was hired because of my skills and personality - not my gender.
In legal terms, this is pretty much what you can do. You can hire a "person" not a person of a specific gender.
So how do they hire for that without discriminating? I think it's a fair question, and one that shouldn't be ignored out of some perceived bias.
In other words, you don't get to "add women to the team" because it's not your decision to make. If you're worried that your hiring process is biased against women, you're allowed to bend over backwards to make your job offers accessible to them, and go out of your way to make sure your workplace is not intolerable to whatever women work there already.
I appreciate the intention but I don't think an 'honest' blog post is going to quell the controversy his tactic will undoubtedly drum up.
That is the only way to build a culture (industry-wide) where there is a diverse group of people making hiring decisions. Once that happens, diverse bigotries will tend to cancel each other out, and the lack of a visible glass ceiling in the profession will encourage more people to try to join it from discriminated against groups.
Marginal discrimination by feel and intuition is mostly voodoo anyway. Thinking Person X is the best person for the job because he worked on a project at Company Y that you thought was interesting isn't necessarily picking the best person for the job (unless the project is directly applicable to what you're hiring them for), but it is necessarily compounding any prejudicial hiring practices from Company Y that may or may not exist there. In addition, at the margins is when people are chosen because they went to the same school as you, or they share your hobbies.
Have a qualification line, and above that line, pick the most historically disadvantaged. If you're still not getting any diversity, examine your qualification line (have I only considered people who went to private universities?) or market your interest, as this blog does well:)
The more important question is: (ii) Why is it hard to get a female interface designer (I have no clue but am assuming it is so) and what can you do to solve this problem? Trying to hire female programmers/designers is good but is an indirect method. Why don't you take your cool gear to your local middle schools, high schools, etc. and meet with future female programmers, to motivate them into this field.
The problem the NFL model solves is the networking problem. The process of interviewing is recognized as valuable because it expands the industry's knowledge of the talent pool and provides a basic opportunity for less well connected candidates to present their credentials.
This means that even if a candidate doesn't get this job, they are on the radar screen for other jobs. Hiring decisions are still based on merit while the known talent pool diversifies over the long run.
However, you're also going to be judged by the statistics, which is to say, if you don't discriminate, you're going to be seen as discriminatory.
Someone write Congress and have them fix this please :)
As far as solutions, recognize that there's a reason most businesses like to hire people they know. They already know the people are capable and will fit in with the team, rather than "rolling the dice" with an unknown who might be perfectly competent but impossible to work with.
What that means is that you have a networking problem. You need to meet enough people so that if you decide to hire someone for a position, you immediately know some candidates. This means that some of them will be women.
I recommend going to the professors, campus organizations, or other authority figures that people already trust. This enables you to meet people without the somewhat creepy idea of showing up and trying to "recruit women" with some weird geek stunt.
Even better, consider your existing network: your employees. Have a dinner or drinks session where you encourage every employee to bring a friend "who might someday want to come on board."
I can't help you with the inherent paradox of being discriminatory in order to avoid being seen as discriminatory. But with more people on your mental rolodex, you'll have a better choice of finding someone who's a fit, and more of those will be women and other protected groups.
Looping back to the topic of hiring women, it was good that he sought the feedback of his wife and his employee. Despite his noble goals, it sure struck me as creepy. "Do you have a vagina? Come work for us!" I read the article, but maybe I missed the part where he asked himself how the workforce got out of balance to begin with. I'm going to guess (given the attitude that he conveys) that he didn't set out to create a boy's club of brogrammers. Advertising in the wrong places? Maybe something in the interview process was more discriminatory than he thought? Something in the company that subtly doesn't appeal to women? An industry predominantly populated by those with penises? Look to identify problems like that, rather than running around where the girls hang out and blatantly recruit for chicks.
I see your problem, and agree with your viewpoint that this PC culture we've developed might have gone a little overboard, however I don't think this is a case of that. You need to focus less on the gender, and what the gender provides.
"WANTED: Graphical Designer, has work consistent with a feminine point of view and can provide alternative perspective to a predominantly male industry"
IANAL, but I feel like that gives you enough legal ass-covering to say any male didn't qualify. Could probably be worded better though.
e: formatting
Then you hope the best candidate is a women.
An accountant will not have the qualification to get the job done and that's why you are not considering them, it's not discrimination.
Discrimination is when you ignore someone or treat them differently based on an attribute that is seemingly non-relevant to what is required to get the job done.
Gender, race, religion is often one of those attributes.
There may be cases where one of the above attributes is so crucial to the job that it is not discriminatory to consider them. For example a church will not accept an 'atheist bishop' and in that case that is not discrimination.
But if you apply for a fastfood job and get rejected because you are an atheist, then that is discrimination.
In the case of the author, it would be wrong to treat female applicants differently or only look for females or ignore the male applicants. In my opinion the right approach would be to do the things that results in getting more female applicants so that there will be a higher chance of the best applicant to be a female.
In a professional work environment, how does gender diversity work better? In over 30 years of programming, dealing with a wide range of types of code and many languages, I've yet to run into a situation where having female-written code would have made any difference.
I can see it making a difference in a non-professional environment where work and social life are heavily intertwined. That's why, for instance, it is important at schools where most students live at the school and the school is where most of their social activity occurs. Things get uncomfortable when you have 15-20% females in an environment where people are both colleagues and boyfriend/girlfriend candidates.
That was the situation at Caltech when I was there. Since then, they have balanced things more, and are now something like 40% female. They did this without discriminating. What they did was work hard on getting qualified females to apply. The actual admission process, though, was kept gender blind.
The absolute best outcome here is that someone breaks his helicopter and he goes home. It's probably more likely that someone calls campus security or the cops and he spends the night in jail.
This is the stupidest, most socially-myopic plan I've seen on Hacker News since... well, since last night's "Very Short Response Expected" post.
edit- looks like this post got flagged off the front page, which is not surprising, but while I'm disappointed that fewer people will see how stupid you are at least it might save you from an EEOC discrimination charge.
After reading your article, I realized it is exactly the same way we try to hire people. We go out on job websites, fill out the job profiles, crawl through resumes and try to interview the perfect candidate. Dice.com, Monster.com, LinkedIn.com, they're the same exact thing as Match.com, eHarmony.com, and OkCupid.com.
And shock and horror, it doesn't fucking work in either case. I've had the same exact experience in hiring.
There were three things I learned through this process, in both spheres: 1) One got just as good of results from random selection as from HR-based, profile-based, direct-effort candidate searches. Actually, the random selection was better because it didn't take anywhere near as much effort. 2) Boiling people down into numbers and rankings and trying to figure out which one was "better" than the others made me physically ill. 3) The only way to find "the one" was to know them already. I quit trying, I expanded my circle of friends, I completely and successfully changed from an introvert to an extrovert, and eventually the stars aligned.
Now, that sounds like a system you can't count on, "stars aligning". But really, I think it is a system you can count on more often than anything else. For one thing, you know the "stars" will eventually "align". "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" -- Seneca. Opportunities are presented to you on a daily basis, you just aren't prepared for it.
I bet, with near certainty, you've met an amazing female designer/engineer already. You have probably met several. And you have probably met several that are interested in working for a company like yours. You just didn't know it, because you weren't engaging people in conversations AS people. You were trying to hire them.
You were trying to turn them into Human Resources.
Do you mean that if you search job board for e.g. "java sql" you would get about the same type of candidates that you can get by stopping people on the street?
The problem is that women aren't getting paid enough. The problem is that women get treated with less respect, or are given busy-work, aren't given the same opportunities. The problem is sexual harassment. The problem is a lack of sensitivity. The problem is the boys' club. Etc, etc, etc.
NONE of those problems get solved because you hired a woman. Once they get the job, they still face all of the same hurdles the rest of their career, because you didn't do anything to fix the cultural disparity which is (one of the) reasons why there aren't more women in the field to begin with.
I mean... do you seriously think that the only reason there aren't more women in tech is because nobody offered them the job? There is no secret nation-wide cabal of hiring managers excluding women from positions. They're just not applying. Dealing with the reasons for that would be a lot more productive than wandering around college campuses with a quadrocopter looking for girls.
If you hire a woman that is 50% as capable of another male candidate, that's asinine and you're an idiot.
Women are found severely lacking in the tech sector, due to "bro-tard" style workplace and management. Not to mention, not many women graduate from the heavy tech degrees from universities.
Is this not why affirmative action was created in the first place?
No. Affirmative action was not created to allow for diverse workplaces. It was created to correct for differences in opportunity and implicit associations, etc...
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/07/14/high-price-of-being-born-female/ - Covers many topics on lack of women's income.
http://www.bls.gov/ore/abstract/ec/ec070130.htm - "White fat women need not apply. Where is the White Fat guy study?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty - Penalty any woman pays when they choose to have a child. Affects socioeconomic and educational basis negatively.
http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2009/06/18/the-motherhood-penalty-the-pay-gap-between-working-moms-and-childless-women/ - How about from the WSJ, instead of Wikipedia?
http://phys.org/news205501664.html - If you do have a child, or cannot get easy access to birth control, the poorer you are the worse your income disparity will be.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents - Scroll down.. Really?