@Ghost said in Accounting for gender imbalances:
@Arkandel I've been in my current IT Ops group for over 7 years now, and here is my advice:
Build a team who can do the job.
What you're in is a Catch-22 with your politics. At the end of the day, IT is about skills and experience. It's a Catch-22 because if you take a female candidate who isn't as skilled as another male candidate, your team will suffer.
Ok, honestly, this was probably not what you meant to come across as, so forgive this minor rant.
But I'm getting really tired of the implication a lot of people in the tech field throw around that if a woman was hired into a technical role, it's because of 'politics', and that there's a man who could've done the job 'better'. I'm tired of people assuming that 'white dude' is somehow the default, and that any deviation from that needs to be justified.
I'm tired of women in engineering positions having to work harder than a man in the same role just to prove to guys out there that we actually deserve to be in the positions we were hired for in the first place. I'm lucky that I don't generally have to do this at my actual job; the 'talking over the woman in meetings' does happen, but the folks who do that are genuinely trying to do better, and have asked the women in the company to please call them out when they do it so they can be more self aware.
But I have dealt with that 'prove yourself worthy of your position' elsewhere. At my current job, I have dealt with it from clients sometimes. I am not the only one, either; every woman in the engineering department has had it happen to them at least once. It's not as bad as it used to be, but that attitude is still out there, and more common than people want it to be.
There's a fairly stark difference between "I'm hiring based on criteria that are not actually related to suitability for the job because I want to look fair" and "I'd like to ensure I am not unconsciously biased in my hiring, and I'd like to know how I can get more diverse candidates to apply in the first place." I read Ark's question as the latter. Which I firmly believe companies should aspire to. That's not politics, it's just good sense.
Because there is demonstrable value in diversity. There are studies about this, and I have observed it firsthand at work. If you have a team of all straight white dudes put into a conference room for an engineering brainstorming session? A group of people with generally similar viewpoints will consistently produce a smaller variety of ideas, because... well, they have generally similar viewpoints. Once you start introducing people of different backgrounds—people who, due to those backgrounds, often look at the same thing in different ways—a brainstorming session produces a wider and more varied set of ideas and approaches.
Similarly, a diverse engineering team means problems that arise during actual development of the particular device we're working on can be approached from several different angles, and we often find solutions in a diverse group that a homogenous one blows past.
The benefits diversity brings to our various engineering projects have been genuinely observable in ways we can measure; the reason the company wants a more diverse workforce is not politics, it's because we get more shit done and make more money because our clients are happier with our work than our competitors.
This doesn't mean you should go "Oh, here's a candidate that's a woman, we should hire her." or "We absolutely have to make certain our engineering department looks like a Benetton advertisement." But it does mean you should work on dealing with unconscious bias. And it does mean you should work on attracting more diverse candidates to apply in the first place, so that the pipeline offers more diverse options anyway.
Because, frankly, if someone thinks that hiring a woman means it was 'your politics' that forced it, because 'a man could do the job better'? The implication that the hiring decision even has to be justified as not politically motivated when hiring a woman, whereas it doesn't when hiring a man? That attitude's politically motivated, too. And those ones are shitty politics.
(ETA: Okay, turns out that was not a "minor" rant.)
