Comment by sfteus
2 months ago
> These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.
We track these, but don't establish guardrails on that fine grained of data.
In your example, it would be balanced by a likely over-representation in urology by male doctors. But when looking at doctors overall, the demographics tend to balance out, with the understanding that various factors may affect specific practices.
To give you a more solid answer, in our data we see that men are a bit overrepresented in our platform engineering roles, while women are within our data science and ML roles. General backend/frontend roles are fairly balanced. Overall engineering metrics roughly fit out guardrails. We look at the same for management, leadership, sales, and customer support.
I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen. I can also say that of those dozens, I think I've only advanced 2 candidates to the hiring committee. So we seem to err on sending a candidate to interview vs trying to prematurely prune the pool down.
> To give you a more solid answer, in our data we see that men are a bit overrepresented in our platform engineering roles, while women are within our data science and ML roles. General backend/frontend roles are fairly balanced. Overall engineering metrics roughly fit out guardrails. We look at the same for management, leadership, sales, and customer support.
So you have a slightly more than 50% women in data science, a field that's 15-20% women [1]. Likewise, software development is ~20% women. But your frontend and backend roles have 50/50 men and women. You're achieving results representative of the general population but you're obtaining a very large overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the workforce. We're talking overrepresentation by a factor of four or five.
All of the fields you listed ~80% male. This isn't like a hospital that's equally comprised of urologists and OB/GYNs. It's like a hospital exclusively comprised of urologists, but somehow hires 50% women.
> I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen.
Discrepancy is a relative statement. What is the gender breakdown of the candidates you've interviewed? Remember, if the software developers you're interviewing are 50/50 men and women, that is representative of the general population but it's a 4x overrepresentation of women relative to their representation in the field. If by "no discrepancy" you mean "no discrepancy relative to the general population" it sure sounds like female applicants have a much better shot at getting interviewed. If you're seeing 50 / 50 male and female interviewees in a field that's 80% male, you really ought to question whether recruiters are using gender as a factor in deciding which applicants to advance to interviews.
Is your company's goal to achieve representation equitable with respect to the general population, even if it means applicants from one gender are significantly disadvantaged in interviewing? Or is it to give equal employment opportunities to candidates, regardless of their gender? It sure sounds like your company is pursuing the former. I would highly suggest pushing for more transparency in the application to interview pipline if you care about gender equality.
1. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/women-in-computer-data-scie...