undefined | Better HN

0 pointsJemaclus4y ago0 comments

Yeah, at my company, our CEO and half of our C-level execs are women, but less than 20% of our engineers are women.

To your point, every team in my org also has one or more... but it's not enough to have one in each team. More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. And when talking about people of color, the stats are even worse. It's less about whether we have any and more about whether our team composition reflects the population accurately.

To your other point, one of the reasons our teams are composed inequitably like this is because of exactly what you described: we have to take ANYONE who is qualified and accepts an offer, because otherwise we'd never even come close to our hiring goals! (Not that we ever meet those, anyway...)

0 comments

wdroz4y ago

> More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women.

You should try to match the pipeline, not the general population. For the bachelor in CS, women are only 18% in the US. Less than 20% of your engineers are women → normal outcome.

[0] -- https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

fatnoah4y ago

Correct, the pipeline is one of the biggest problems to solve, IMHO. When I actually looked at metrics, the makeup of my org was actually a fairly accurate representation of the pipeline as a whole, which was very encouraging.

It was an interesting state of affairs. When we were eventually acquired, I receive many comments praising the diversity of my org, and it was noted several times that, of the many dozens of acquisitions made by the company, ours was the first woman led company.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse