Women: a depressingly necessary primer for Silicon Valley
Hiring and promoting women in the software industry.
At my first all-hands meeting as a Facebook employee, I watched a female engineer ask Mark Zuckerberg why women coders received more code review ‘fixes’ on average than males. To my surprise, Mark took the question very seriously and followed through on investigation.
An analysis of comments by gender revealed that male and female coders received roughly equal corrections, if you control for employee level. Junior coders tend to get more comments, regardless of gender.
This study also revealed women coders were disproportionately ranked as junior employees.
You can read these results two ways:
1.) Hooray, the analysis shows we aren’t discriminating against women.
2.) We’ve discovered a massive gap between men and women in senior technical positions.
Like most systemic phenomena, the lack of women in your office can be easy to dismiss. Male engineers often have more experience, or held more senior positions in other companies before joining Facebook. More men than women hold technical degrees, though this ratio is improving.
It doesn’t matter what your argument is — maintaining blamelessness won’t lead to more equal representation. Only action can create change.
Hire Women Early
WHEN you hire female employees matters. It can be harder to hire a woman into a male-dominated team. The culture of the company is already formed.
Culture is collective. Culture is the sum total of individual employee behaviors and tacitly formed group norms. It is much easier to form positive norms if you hire women in the early stages of a company.
Here’s an example of why WHEN matters so much:
a.) A female early hire hears a a disturbing joke, everyone laughs. She feels uncomfortable, but feels able to speak up because she’s in a room with the 3 founders who are co-deciding if this is the way the company is going to operate.
b.) The first woman hire in a firm of 20 hears a disturbing joke, everyone laughs. She feels uncomfortable, but unable to speak up because she’d be chastising 20 co-workers who obviously thought the joke was funny and permissible in the workplace.
Women employees fundamentally change company culture, but only if their voices are heard when forming social norms. It gets easier to ignore the trend and harder to reverse it the longer you wait to hire women.
“82% of men in startups believed their companies spent the ‘right amount of time’ addressing diversity, while almost 40% of women believed not enough time was devoted” — Level Playing Field Institute, 2011
Not Just Ratio: role and level matter
Representation of women in the workplace isn’t just a numbers game. I’ve heard startup founders brag about gender balance, only to reveal that their female hires occupy overwhelmingly non-technical, non-decisionmaking and junior roles.
“Look at our awesome office manager! She’s created this amazing company culture!”
In this particular episode, there was a beer pong match in full swing on the sticky office floor beside me. A few engineers were still coding in the corner — they’d be there all night and be congratulated for burning the midnight oil. The largely male staff invited female friends over for near nightly happy hours.
In a company with only 3 women, the conspicuously female office manager was perversely lauded for enabling the culture they had already formed: frat house status quo.
A female employee isn’t the solution to culture problems — unless they’re allowed to share in the process of forming culture.
No Path to Follow
At Facebook, I was delighted to see many many women in my workplace. It was empowering to work on mixed teams. Occasionally I attended a fully female product meetings. There was free bias training and women support groups.
So when I talked about the problem of female representation at the company, people were often confused.
“But you have Sheryl Sandberg! She’s the COO!”
Great. But there are still far too few women in the levels between junior staff and Sheryl Sandberg. The ratio is worse in more technical roles.
Even in companies that care, this discrepancy impacts culture — it is hard to chart a path to leadership through mid-level ranks with few women. Mentorship opportunities by senior women are scare. It is hard to copy a trajectory that has never been achieved.
A study of the technical workforce in Silicon Valley found that the odds of being in a high-level or leadership position was 2.7 times greater for men than for women (Simard et al., 2008).
Comfort At the Expense of Diversity
At Facebook, I was the primary researcher on a re-design of web navigation. I was told I could not attend a review with the VP because “there were already a lot of people attending” and “they wanted it to be comfortable for him.”
Fair enough.
I walked by the glass walled office as this meeting was taking place. The VP did appear comfortable — surrounded entirely by men. While product teams are diverse at Facebook, the decision-making meetings that clear products for launch were still overwhelmingly male.
Fine. Maybe it was strategic.
But I draw a line at agreeing that EVERY man in the room there had more to add than the woman who performed the research they were presenting.
I spent six months trying to convince myself that my gender had nothing to do with the decision. That illusion became harder to maintain when peer feedback from the team trended into subjective disapproval of my tone, confidence and aggressiveness — traits valued in my male peers. Curiously, in reviews that objected to my personality there was little reference to the quality of my research.
Being in the room matters. Being able to present research in front of the people that could advance my career matters. Involvement in decision-making isn’t a victory lap, it is the whole opportunity.
How the hell are we supposed to lean in when we’re on the other side of the glass?
Bridging the Confidence Gap
Systemic issues, like salary and position discrepancies, are difficult to overcome. A woman who is automatically assigned to a junior position or passed over early on in her career faces an uphill battle being taken seriously in the future.
Choosing the ‘more experienced’ or ‘higher level’ coder can make sense at face value. Choosing the ‘more confident’ applicant can feel right.
But choosing a male over a female almost every time comes at a high cost to the company.
It makes no sense to hire a less competent employee for a role. Unfortunately implicitly biased hiring practices often over value traditionally male characteristics and under value female traits.
I’m not criticizing. I’m asking you to fix it.
Men are more likely to overstate their abilities in an interview. Women are more likely to understate or downplay achievements. Men are more likely to dive into a problem confidently. Women may ask more questions to ensure they understand the problem before starting. Men are more likely to apply for jobs above their ability level, catapulting them ahead in their career.
This 2016 report by the National Institute for Women & Information Technology breaks down ways interview processes inadvertently skew towards male candidates: practices like interrogative code defense, an all male interview panel, or over-relying upon referrals from male colleagues lead to fewer female hires.
Hiring Women is Hard
Yep. And necessary.
The elephant in the room is the candidate pipeline. Especially for startup jobs, tech applicants are overwhelmingly male. It is hard and expensive to track down qualified women and convince them to apply for positions.
Once women are in the interview chair, implicit bias and the confidence gap may derail her. If you really want to hire the best person, check in on your emotional responses to each candidate and separate that from their ability to do the job.
Signs She/He is the Right Employee for You
- They ask a lot of questions. In an interview setting, it is common to feel more confidence in an applicant that charges forward boldly with their interpretation. In day-to-day work, it is much more important for an employee to fully understand the scope of the problem they’re working on. Asking questions in an interview is a strength, not a weakness.
- They seek mentorship. It is okay to want a code-god who seems to know the answer to everything. But overstated confidence is not something you should hire for. Women are more likely to seek mentorship in their positions — a sign of interest in advancement and a more accurate reflection of an interviewees understanding of your technical stack. Encouraging an employee to seek mentorship and feedback will lead to better business outcomes than placing value in ‘having brass balls’.
- They have the best solutions. After sitting down with your candidates, take a moment and set aside your impressions of personality, confidence, and competence. Instead, intentionally compare the quality of their responses head-to-head. “Culture fit” can be a part of your hiring process, but think hard about letting the best solution walk just because you can’t imagine how they’ll fit in with your group.
- They are committed to doing the job. Taking into account past professional experience and level is standard. But qualified women often enter the field in more junior positions, advance through the ranks more slowly, and do more unpaid or academic projects before starting to seek professional work. Previous rank as a filter function is a lazy way to make decisions, and could land you a lazy employee with a shiny CV at the expense of a woman who would have worked herself to the bone for your company mission.
- They challenge your definition of culture. Filtering through candidates for the most familiar feeling will leave you in an echo chamber. Intentionally seeking out diverse experiences is the only way to ensure your culture can be a fit for everyone. If you “can’t see how they’d fit in here” or “you think they wouldn’t like how we do things” it is you who have the culture problem. Not them.
Try this: go out of your way to source a few female candidates for your next opening. Just email a woman and ask her if anyone in her network would be interested in the job. When you interview her, check in on your emotional responses.
It could be that simple.
- *Note: hiring and advancement bias trends are especially true for people of color. I will address those stats in a future article.
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