This blog post by Basecamp is excellent. What a fantastic company it must be to work for. It's too late now because I'm starting my own company and am fully dedicated to that, but part of the reason for doing so was the feeling that there weren't enough (any?) companies with these sorts of policies in the world. I'll add Basecamp to the small list of software firms I'd be willing to work at in future.
There are many good reasons to care. Off the top of my head:
* Having a diverse work force makes it less likely that you will be blind to problems caused by unintended side effects of your product that only affect certain groups.
* Having no women (or people of color, or people with disabilities, or...) on the workforce, will make you less attractive as an employer to talented people in these groups. Ultimately, you get to hire from a larger talent pool, if you make an effort to cultivate diversity.
* Making an effort to attract a diversity of people will make you uncover barriers of entry, that you might not have been aware of, and removing those has the potential to benefit everyone.
And finally, even if you believe strongly that your hiring practices are not the cause of the lack of diversity, and that the real problem is elsewhere (in the education system for instance), you can still choose to be part of the solution by providing proof that there is a desirable future to be had for a woman who chooses to go in to a STEM field.
The social justice diversity, equity and inclusion is a political stance that instead of seeing individuals see groups of "oppressed" and "oppressors" which is a recipe for a less productive work environment. These unchosen group identities are political tools and not descriptive of an individual.
Moreover, social justice uses activism to take over the organization to the point where it use as many resources as possible for activism. It is not unusual at this point for activist employees to ask a company to make bad business decisions for political reasons, so a policy putting political activism into the private sphere makes it clear that you are at work to create a long-term sustainable and healthy business.
What if someone was judged by the color of their skin or their gender by the system? There are plenty of studies that show how the LSAT/SAT for example, is biased in favor of whites. The school may say they only admitted those with the highest scores and didn't look at skin color, but skin color ended up built into the score.
So while the system should correct for this eventually, companies are attempting to correct for this issue now.
The truth is that we don't know if the 100% male engineering group is a result of perfectly executed meritocratic interview process or a result of systematic bias. It's probably wrong to make blind assumptions either way, but if we're going to make assumptions anyways then we should lean towards the latter.
Firstly, hiring is actually irrelevant to this because the gender ratios of most software companies are the same as the gender ratios of CS graduates, which is what you'd expect on average in a meritocratic process. A few firms like Google have higher numbers of women which they achieve by a variety of means both fair and foul, but the average company does match.
The 100% male group is a hypothetical - I've only rarely been in such teams myself and only when they were small. It's clearly possible if the team is, say, 10 people. If you get to 100 and there are no women I'd be wondering if there's something odd going on, but it's still explainable by chance, and it's very dependent on sub-field. For example if you're doing embedded programming for the oil or nuclear industries, then those industries are themselves mostly interesting to men, so you get "interest in software * interest in industry" and you can get lower numbers than pure software companies. This is often the case for industries that are hyper-competitive or risky, for instance, I've seen 100% male engineering teams a lot in the cryptocurrency space.
So if there's any debate or action to be had here at all, it's actually by universities, not companies, because company demographics follow CS program demographics.
For example, although MLK Jr. espoused being a good Christian, he did not follow the principles of being a good Christian when he cheated on his wife with multiple different women.
The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin:
https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
Facial recognition systems that don't work well on dark-skinned people:
https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately.
Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit."
That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.
Then I have to ask, is it then a political and right-wing stance NOT to ask these questions?
Should a woman only be hired because they're a woman, even if they're a poor engineer? That seems way more sexist than the alternative.
Given their (in relative terms) failure, one could say that this is a complex problem, and addressing one issue is unfortunately not enough.
> even if they're a poor engineer?
This is not something GP wrote. They wrote they had significant issues because, in a sense, they created a problem (hiring methodologies) in order to solve one that didn't previously exist (gender bias).
The cliche is that tech companies are aiming to change the world. Software has real impacts on humans. Maybe the group of people "changing the world" should be a bit more diverse than just Dudes.
To be fair I would expect more female engineers to show a benefit in the retention rates of female engineers so I think this initiative could be net positive for the company but I also doubt the people pushing for this are being data driven.
