> as does starting with something blatantly obvious (dropping the photo requirement for applicants and blinding the names are two common options in my country

Unfortunately, very few efforts seem to focus on immediately applicable solutions like this that solve the problem (if there is one) fundamentally.

None of the Big Tech companies for example (Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft come to mind) currently do application blinding where possible, as far as I know. All of them however are very eager to promote movements like Girls Who Code because it's generally good PR and (I think) because it increases the available labor pool for them.

Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

But if I had to guess, I'd say these large companies are actually quite fair in their hiring processes. Discrimination at that step in the process seems to be more common at smaller or older companies. The worst, most blatant actual case I have seen was the IT dept at a medium-sized bank.

At FB and Google I'd guess "career advancement" is more susceptible to biases. As company tries to create "shallow hierarchies", the risk of competition devolving into the law of the jungle increases (but, as I said, only guessing. Have no experience with them).

> Blinding during interviews is obviously quite limiting – I probably wouldn't want to hire someone without having actually talked to them.

How about blinding during resume screening? Replace female or male names with a number or made up names. Phone screening even maybe, using some kind of audio processing. I have never heard of these companies using any such process.

Edit: Looks interviewing.io did such a process, here are the results – https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

There has also been a study showing tech interviews went less favorable for women when their voices were masked as male voices.

As for "Girls Who Code" as PR - does it increase the popularity of these firms with male coders, too? My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

>>My personal impression with Google is that they are not interested in hiring male coders anymore...

I can't think of many scenarios that would give you that impression. Did google personally reject you for being a man?

For the last two years I have only seen ads with exclusively female engineers from Google, for example the "I look like an engineer" series.

I haven't seen any effort to attract male talent. Of course having more women on the team will probably make a company more attractive to men, but I doubt that is the only thing they should bank on to attract men.

I think over the past two years I've seen a sum total of one video about working at Google, and it featured a woman and a man. From what you're saying I can only assume I stumbled on a super rare video. Is that accurate?

I'll include a link to my paper where I use the method of autoethnography to show how Google has turned into a misandryst megacorporation.

Just kidding - I didn't write a paper about it, nor did I conduct a rigorous study. Most of the Google Ads I have seen came via various Google Twitter accounts, like https://twitter.com/lifeatgoogle (Life at Google seems to be dedicated to hiring people for Google).

So my filter bubble might be to blame. I haven't seen the video you mentioned which features a man.

(Edit: I just scrolled through the first several dozen tweets from "Life At Google - I think there is definitely a bias to only show female engineers there.... However, it is of course only one Google Twitter account dedicated to hiring, I don't know how many others exist. Maybe it was created explicitly to target women and minorities, but then maybe they should somehow say so).

I'm still not sure why you had the impression that Google is not interested in hiring male coders anymore?

Have you looked at the life at google tweets?

Yes.

Interesting

> I'm not sure about the proportionality of the 20th "No, seriously, Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible terrible person!" - article.

Out of interest I googled the hits on HN for Holmes and 2016's other medical industry bête noir, Martin Shkreli. Holmes wins by 325 to 141, although I'd personally be hard pressed to say which of them was more terrible.

Not the same kind of story at all. Holmes first became famous (As a unicorn), then fell from grace. Shkreli never was admired, or was he? He was just scorned right from the start.

While that's factually true fail to see the causality. It's like: "These are completely different stories, she was born in Canada and he is an excellent tennis player".

One grabs peoples anttention more than the other. The original claim was because they are both in pharma, they should receive the same attention. But being in pharma is not the only aspect of their stories.

It's like arguing apples should be the same as oranges because they are both fruits.

You're either lucky or inexperienced to have never been in a professional environment by 2016 where you and/or other men had to grit their teeth because they couldn't criticise a woman's ideas because of your gender (and her's). We all know the tactic of emasculation you're using: "are you not man enough to handle competitor from women?!" As you can see by the other comments in this thread, you can see most men have learned to ignore the ad hominem in these cases and focused on rational cause-and-effect approaches.

I suspect if there is a bias toward criticising women who fail in technology, this might be a direct backlash to the many articles that fetishise women in technology.

That's not to condone the backlash, of course.

But perhaps we ought to stop focusing on identity politics - and start treating women as people, not tokens in our social engineering project.