I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit for the role.
Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes.
I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy.
I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work.
In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.
At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in.
As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary.
And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio.
Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.
why do you think the push to hire more women is the reason for the current gender balance in law hiring rather than a simple increase in the number of women choosing to pursue legal qualifications? there is a huge push to hire more women in tech yet it has done little so far to change the balance. there is certainly no hard barrier on women pursuing a tech career as there was for women pursuing a career in corporate law before the 80s.
There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.” Eventually, women came to see law as a career women could pursue because there were lots of women in the profession. There were other women to be mentors and role models and friends. Eventually, the need for affirmative measures evaporated.
Having done both, I just find it difficult to believe that substantive preference (rather than the preference not to be in a single gender environment) has anything to do with it. I’m surrounded by highly analytical left brained women who dissect mortgage backed securities for a living. I think they would’ve been great programmers. But the path to being a programmer starts with being the only girl in your high school CS class, and that’s a huge disincentive.
> There hasn’t been a huge push. What law firms did in the 1980s and 1990s was basically decide “we’re going to hire an equal number of men and women.”
If this is true, then there must have been a lot of women coming out of law schools in the 1980s and 1990s. Otherwise, law firms in general could never hire and equal number of men and women. It's statistically impossible.
Whereas there are only a very small percentage (<10%) of women now graduating with CS and software engineering majors.
you missed the biggest factor in explaining the balanced gender distribution - more women are qualified for and apply for corporate law jobs.
the vast majority of software engineering jobs have pleasant working environments than a typical corporate law job - "unwanted attention and hurdles" doesn't work as an explanation.
Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.
> But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today.
Is that not a counterfactual?
> Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent.
I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was:
Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'.
Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together.
I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really?
Does that not convey surprise?
I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question.
I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.
You get off on the wrong foot assuming I’m trying to prove the counterfactual. This is a discussion of gender disparity in engineering, why would I be trying to prove what law would’ve been like if there hadn’t been measures to address gender disparity?
Rather, I used a counterfactual to restate an epidemiological inference. “City A introduced a sewer system in 1845, cholera rates went down. City B did not, and cholera rates stayed high. Had City A not introduced a sewer system, cholera rates in City A would have stayed high.” Obviously you can’t prove that last counterfactual—but that’s besides the point. It’s just another way of stating the inference that sewer systems reduce cholera.
City A is law, and City B is engineering. More so than engineering, law was strongly associated with men, because of the nexus to business, politics, and public performance. And both fields long maintained an uneven gender ratio by, e.g., hiring women to be secretaries rather than professionals. Law took explicit measures to make up for that discrimination. Engineering hasn’t, not to the same degree. We may draw inferences from the comparison.
You're assuming with certainty that there was a causal relationship. Given that assumption you were comfortable in proclaiming the counterfactual to be true. You "knew" it was true because you "knew" the mechanics of the world, thus could predict the counterfactual truth-value.
Did you use something like Hill's criteria for causation[0]? To establish anything? Like in epidemiology? It's how they can make such statements.
I do take your point about how one can be somewhat certain of a counterfactual. You couldn't be though; because you've got no criteria by which to judge the causality.
I've witnessed this at least twice in my career. Both cases by "women", the "diversity-promoting" manager actually meant "mid twenties attractive female".
It makes me sick that people need to tip-toe on these issues and add the obligatory "not-sexist" appology to an obviously not-sexist text.
This is indeed a hidden problem in most of these conversations: you see in several fields an overabundance of good looking women, who have been hired by men for equality but over their probably (statistically on average) more qualified but less attractive sistren.
In our campus placement, one of my female classmate was asked a single question in a "technical" interview. Which was, "Are you willing to relocate to city x".
I won't make any conclusion as that would get me tons of downvotes.
> I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy.
This view is contradicted by the weight of evidence for unconscious bias in hiring.
[Edit] Although obviously I don't know exactly what their policy was... maybe they were hiring badly, but the evidence suggests that people (of both sexes) discount the abilities of people in gender-incongruous roles.
> I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
I agree with this (disclaimer: this is what my startup does) but my reasoning is that quotas and other active methods (a) generate resentment, even though they have been shown to raise the bar not lower it, and (b) require a lot of study to determine the 'correct' targets... and even then it's a gamble... so are clumsy and expensive to get right.
It's a complicated topic though, not well suited to sweeping statements.
People have tried fully anonymised hiring processes. The problem is that in tech women and minorities don't even apply, so it's attacking the problem too late in the process. When they do apply, there's stereotype threat to take account of as well, so even if the employer doesn't know anything about the candidate, that's not enough to correct the bias.
Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes.
I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy.
I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.