surely it is not the people who make hiring decisions (who already add bias to favor women over men)
That's not true, though. As much as people like to shout about political correctness gone mad, I'm yet to see any actual evidence of a bias towards women in hiring.
But then, I am debating this with someone who has the username 'pervycreeper', so I'm not entirely sure if I'm being trolled or not.
> The main challenge comes when we actually do get a female candidate. We don’t discard a single one on resume. We see all of them. We discard about 80% of guys on resume. But even so, we get to see 4 guys to 1 girl or so. In the interviews, we help the girls shine, because we actually want to hire them, but then, one of the other 4 guys shows just an amazing performance, for whatever reason, truly impressive, like he has done many more things than the girl (and than the other candidates), can show more amazing code, personal projects, etc. And we think: “If the girl was a guy, she would not be on the race with this guy, just like the other male candidates are totally discarded now”. Should we let this amazing coding guy go? It’s not easy to find amazing coders either, you know?
And it makes sense that someone would vent such things anonymously or not at all, considering the skewering they'd get from the media if they even suggested anything of the sort publicly.
As someone who's experienced teaching programming classes for girls, I can wholeheartedly say that trying to recruit candidates who are actually interested in the area is quite difficult. The program I worked for eventually had to move away from being a 'programming' course, to more of a 'digital arts' course just so that we'd get enough applicants to justify continuing it. And this is in the bay area, the tech/liberal capital of the country. So I can totally see this happening in the workplace too.
>I'm yet to see any actual evidence of a bias towards women in hiring.
Anecdotes aside, it is the official policy of most companies, usually under the Orwellian title "non-discrimination policy" or "diversity policy" or some such. This is before we factor in any personal crusades that the hiring officers may or may not be engaging in.
That's not true, though. As much as people like to shout about political correctness gone mad, I'm yet to see any actual evidence of a bias towards women in hiring.
But then, I am debating this with someone who has the username 'pervycreeper', so I'm not entirely sure if I'm being trolled or not.