I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it?
Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).
> Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men?
The reverse of this situation would be a company that sells largely to men but is comprised of 3 male engineers and 47 female engineers making an effort to recruit or train new male engineers, while women continue to make up 70% of their new engineering hires.
I tend to agree. I thought the whole point of gender equality was to be blind, so to speak, of gender?
If you have to specifically hire female people, it says their quality is lower (otherwise you would just always hire the best person female or male), which is not something I am sure I can support. Women are just as capable of being the best. It seems like an insult to give anyone special treatment just because of gender. Isn't that what we are trying to stop?
I mean, being qualified is never the only piece of the "getting hired" puzzle, right? You want someone who fits well in your team, is generally interesting, is eager to learn, and possibly fills some other niche that you feel your team is missing. I think it's a fair question to ask, "Will this person provide a unique perspective within our team?"
It seems simply that Etsy is trying to fill a female niche and add female perspective. It's not like they're hiring random ladies off the street, their hires have gone to hacker school and are clearly capable given the opportunity. Software isn't written is silos where you don't talk to other people about what/how/why you are going what you're doing.
You definitely right that being the overall best is more complicated than being the best at one specific thing. However, doesn't the idea of "female perspective" reintroduce the exact same gender bias issues?
If you can justify hiring for "female perspective", what about the companies who only want "male perspective"?
I don't think Etsy is acting as though they want only the female perspective, just more of it than what they have. I'm sure there are other areas where they are trying to get more male perspective (e.g. at small liberal arts colleges, to a degree).
Etsy is obviously not starting to hire only women or even mostly women.
Teaching is an industry that openly seeks male perspective, but I'm not sure that is right either. Why can't men just reach the level of being the obvious choice for the job, without even needing to consider gender?
I think, as the article alludes to, men and women are less likely to consider certain careers/colleges/whatever. So if you ignored gender at a liberal arts school and blindly selected candidates, and the ratio was as skewed towards women as the tech industry is towards men, do you think men would be as comfortable there? Having a gender balance (as well as a balance on other axes that include more minorities) is good for everyone. Maybe that overall environment is better than an environment full of mega left-wing lady commies, or, in the case of tech, "hotshot" male engineers with poor social graces. These are all generalizations, obviously, but I think it's true to the overarching trend.
Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).