You're misunderstanding the point here. It's not that women can't be or aren't as capable as men. In terms of intellectual performance, although I'd say women on average are more intelligent than men, and men vary more widely in intelligence to either end of the spectrum, things are more or less "50/50". Interest in technology isn't 50/50.

The problem is that we're turning this "50/50" split into some sort of magic number that solves diversity "problems", and we're only doing it in this one specific industry, and without any particular reason. What's the ratio of male hairdressers to female hair dressers? If I was interested in hairdressing, should I get a full scholarship to beauty school and preferential hiring treatment based on my gender and a focus on having an exact 50/50 split at the absolute best hair salons in the world? Why is this any different than any other industry? Why not equality across the board?

Somebody will come and cite pay, but there are other jobs that don't require as much education that pay quite well too. So why aren't at least focusing on those in addition to tech jobs? I bring up the dock worker example because it's a typical glass basement example that can be used.

The truth of the matter is that tech jobs are sexy right now. Lavish perks, great offices, fantastic pay, etc.... Nobody wants to advocate for equal opportunity for tough jobs and 50/50 gender ratios in those tough jobs.

I can't speak to gender bias in hairdressing because I know nothing about the hairdressing industry. I think it's reasonable for articles about the gender bias in hairdressing (if one exists) not to be posted in Hacker News, and for commenters not to be familiar with it.

If there is a gender bias there, and there's something I can do about it that won't be sticking my nose where I don't belong (I don't really want hairdressers telling me how to do tech recruiting), let me know, I'm glad to support it. But until then, I'm in tech: this is my field, and the one I care about improving. This is a tech forum. And the people running Lever are in tech.

Simple as that, it has nothing to do with the job perks or pay. If there were outsiders putting pressure on the tech industry and not the dockworking or hairdressing industry, you'd have an argument--but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

You're just cherry picking what you want to pretend to be knowledgable about. You don't have to be a hair dresser to discuss trends in that industry. Just like I don't need to work for the Department of Labor to discuss labor trends.

And the question is why is there so much emphasis on only technology to make the workplace 50/50, but not similar pressure on other industries that might be experiencing some sort of imbalance? Besides, why is it a good thing or a necessary thing that technology be 50/50? If you want to argue that we need gender balance in this one specific industry, then I want gender balance in every industry. Otherwise, I'm not on board.

This is an article about the CEO of Lever and hiring practices at Lever. It's being posted on a forum about the technology industry. You're discussing it with people who hire people to be software engineers and not to be hairdressers or dock workers. I'm not interested in "discussing trends," I'm interested in actually doing the right thing for my company when I make hiring decisions. I assume so is the CEO of Lever. I want gender balance in every industry, but tech is the one I'm hiring in. I assume the CEO of Lever would be thrilled to see gender balance in every company, but there's only one company where she gets to make those decisions.

When you vote, do you make yourself as knowledgeable about the political problems of every other city and country in the world as with the political problems of your own city and country? Would you refuse to vote for a particular candidate who promises to do good things for your city and your country, but is silent on improving the lot of every other city and country?

Well you should apply the same criteria to yourself then and stop discussing the technology industry. If you're going to say that I have to be as knowledgable about every other city, country, municipality, or whatever, then you have to be knowledgeable about every university on the planet, every company, every hiring practice, every law, and every social/cultural norm, and that's just to get started. It's impossible to have complete knowledge of any topic, technology or otherwise, so your stringent criteria here for what constitutes the ability to discuss something, politics or economic trends or anything else is stringent enough that you basically can't discuss anything.

Anywho

What makes 50/50 gender balance "right"? What makes that desirable? The only arguments I'm seeing from anybody revolve around two things:

1. Diversity 2. The population is 50/50

If diversity is the aim, you have to come with some pretty convincing evidence that diversity = 50/50 male/female split.

If it's population, then you need to explain why technology has to have this split and not every industry, or at least explain why this is unique to technology.

Er, the critique that you have to understand everything else was your critique, not mine.

Anyway, my argument for the 50-50 gender balance being "right" is that it's the null hypothesis. Absent specific data, one should assume that every industry should have a 50-50 balance.

This is basically 2, except that my confidence about that statement depends a lot on the existence of data that would disprove the null hypothesis. I have little data about other industries, so while I would say that, yes, every industry should have a 50-50 split, my confidence about such a statement is pretty low for almost all industries; I can easily be convinced that there are physiological or sociological factors that justify a non-50-50-split.

I have much more data about tech, so I make the same claim that tech should have a 50-50 split that I make about industry. However, I am much more confident in that statement because I've seen a lot of attempts to reject the null hypothesis that haven't panned out. I would have to see some evidence that's at odds with a lot of existing evidence in order to be convinced of a different split.

If you have a pool of applicants and ranked them in order of ability and drew x applicants out of the top of the pool of y individuals you would expect all things being equal to see the selected group had demographics similar to the group as a whole.

If you start with for example a group of people that is 75% male and select the top n workers. The top n will be 75% male and the only way to arrive at 50% female instead of 25% is to replace some of the more qualified males with less qualified females further down in the stack. The ones higher in the stack are by definition already taken.

This isn't saying that men are more qualified just that they make up a larger portion of the pool. Places that select a higher portion of males than the population suffer from the same deficiency.

You would only expect that if you believe that the pool of applicants has three times as many men as women, but the distribution of qualified men and women are equal.

That's an assumption, and not the assumption I'm starting from. I think that your pool of 75% men and 25% women does, in fact, contain n/2 qualified men and (75% - n/2) unqualified men, and n/2 qualified women and (25% - n/2) unqualified women - that is, the number of qualified men and women is the same, but there are far more unqualified men in the pool. If your recruiting process has false positives (and everyone's does), you'll end up hiring much more unqualified men than unqualified women, as a result.

Mine is also an assumption, but it seems to line up better with the underlying null-hypothesis that, in the abstract, the same number of qualified men and women exist in the world.

No this is nonsense. All you have to do is look at the ratios of men and women pursuing programs like computer science at CMU or MIT or whatever. You have perhaps an equal number of potentially qualified men and women, but the number of men going to the training to make them qualified far exceeds the number of women.

First, the current gender ratio for MIT course 6 is about 40% women and 60% men; if you're getting significantly more men than that, you're getting less qualified men from somewhere. (If you want to set your target ratio to be the MIT or CMU enrollment ratio instead of 50/50, I'd also support that, but those ratios are much closer to 50/50 than most companies are.)

Second, I went to MIT for computer science. I TA'd a bunch of classes. There were quite a few students who were barely scraping by, and they were mostly men. This might be politically incorrect to say, but it's true. The fact that you see 60/40 enrollment ratios at MIT doesn't mean that MIT has 1.5 times as many qualified men as women in course 6.

This doesn't tell you how many women are employed as programmers because its one school its one course and further it doesn't account for people that choose not to stay in the profession or whom started out in a practical manner rather than in school.

The National Girls Collaborative Project said that woman received 57% of all bachelors degrees but only 18% of computer science degrees http://ngcproject.org/statistics further some sources say the ultimate percentage of female software developers is even lower, as low as 8%.

Women are succeeding at school but they aren't going into computer science and a greater percentage of them are leaving.

Your belief that there are just as many female developers as men is utterly unfounded and without merit.

The fact that you interact with a lot of female developers doesn't change the actual numbers and the plural of anecdote isn't data.

We have one side complaining that we need to erase the gender gap in computer science, another scoffing and saying girls just don't like computers. It probably doesn't help either case to pretend that there is no gap.

No not necessarily. I threw those schools out as examples, but we'd have to actually go and analyze pretty much every computer science graduate at every school over the last 30 years, plus self-taught, and look at how they perform against some really good metric that we've devised.

If you're looking at current ratios only, then you're ignoring the past ratios over the last, say, 20-30 years which would have been significantly more male-dominated.

I don't think there is any evidence supporting the assertion that more male applicants = more unqualified applicants.