Getting beyond hiding your gender: Paths for women to work in tech
Women who want a career in tech should obscure their gender online, says a provocative Wall Street Journal column.
John Greathouse, an investor and serial entrepreneur who teaches at the University of California-Santa Barbara, was writing about the power of online first impressions in hiring. He called many people in the business community 鈥渋ntellectually dishonest,鈥� saying they do not embrace cultural and gender diversity as they claim to. The answer, he suggested, was for women to strip their online profiles of gender-identifying information, going photo-free and using initials instead of names.
The post sparked outrage from all quarters. Readers took to Twitter to , which one described as an 鈥渙nline burka鈥� and another suggested was 鈥渆ffectively telling all women, including impressionable young girls, to be ashamed of their gender online.鈥�
The public response may have pushed the author to via Twitter on Thursday.
Criticism of having to hide who you are to get ahead is understandable 鈥� but does Greathouse鈥檚 advice open up conversations about better paths to progress?
The tech industry's gender equity problem is well-documented. The number of women graduating with computer science degrees has gone down dramatically as the tech industry has grown: While 37 percent of graduates were women in 1984, today they make up . Just 4 percent of college freshmen are interested or involved in computing programs.
Some of these struggles are societal: Young girls may be taught that engineering isn鈥檛 for them, or an absence of role models may make a computing career seem too far out of reach.
Other issues are institutional. A study of open-source software-development website GitHub found that women are more likely to have their work accepted than men 鈥� but .
Among tech industry leaders, diversity is slowly increasing 鈥� a 2015 study from the University of California-Davis found that women held 15.5 percent of the seats on corporate boards in the software industry. Coding clubs like Girls Who Code and mentorship schemes such as she++ help get women into tech and support them in the industry, as 海角大神鈥檚 Karis Hustad reported in 2014.
Broader systemic change is needed, argued Cathy Belk, president of JumpStart, Inc., a Cleveland-based nonprofit that supports small businesses and encourages job creation. Writing in Fortune, she criticized Greathouse鈥檚 suggestion that women obscure their identities, saying that 鈥渢he onus falls on the person or the institution responsible for the bias鈥� to change their attitude. She pointed out that bringing women on-board enhances a company鈥檚 bottom line: According to Google For Entrepreneurs, 鈥淲omen-led tech companies achieve 35% higher return on investment, and, when venture-backed, than male-owned tech companies.鈥� If businesses see diversity as being in their best interest, it will happen over time, she wrote.
鈥淭he only thing smart, capable women need to do is . Keep working hard, keep innovating and keep coming up with new ideas. You don鈥檛 need to change. It鈥檚 the industry 鈥� which is supposed to be based on innovation 鈥� needs to change,鈥� Belk concluded.
The imperative to forge a career means that women may not be able to wait for society or the industry to catch up. Greathouse briefly referenced the shift to 鈥渂lind鈥� orchestra auditions, which helped achieve near gender balance in a previously male-dominated sphere, suggesting that using initials was one way to . But, as Kieran Snyder, CEO of Textio, an 鈥渁dvanced machine learning platform for writing鈥� pointed out:
One answer? Interviewing.io, an online platform that lets companies . The hiring process may begin with a test, like asking an applicant to solve a problem or write a line of code. Founder Aline Lerner told NPR:
鈥淥ne of the things that came up was if you can hear somebody鈥檚 voice, it鈥檚 going to be, in most cases, very easy to tell what their gender is. So we were trying to think of .鈥�
Her solution: voice-masking software that can make women sound like men and men sound like women. So far, the interviewing platform has been used by tech companies Uber, Dropbox, and Twitch, among others.
Blendoor, which launched in beta at South by Southwest in March, is another "blind audition" company being tested by the likes of Twitter, Google, and Airbnb. In fact, there's a bumper crop of startups jockeying to be the go-to tool for making hiring more democratic, 海角大神 reports.
They may tackle the problem in many different ways, but the operating principle is the same: Making structural tweaks to the screening process for job candidates is a more effective way of ensuring a diverse workforce. Placing the onus on even the most well-intentioned hiring managers to overcome their own ingrained biases or, even more likely, avoid falling back on already-established social connections to make a hire, is less so.
... 聽鈥淚 don鈥檛 know if we should get rid of them entirely, but r茅sum茅s as a first-pass filter should be completely done away with,鈥� Aline Lerner, creator of Interviewing.io, tells the Monitor's Schuyler Velasco.
But Kaya Thomas, a junior at Dartmouth and 鈥渢he only black woman studying computer science in the class of 2017,鈥� told NPR she was concerned that, if a company uses the software, 鈥渢he company will become complacent鈥� and stop actively trying to create diversity.聽
Focusing on the skills necessary for a job means companies with blind recruitment practices almost always end up with more diverse workforces, according to Azmat Mohammed, director general of the Institute of Recruiters.
"It's quite an exciting thing for a company to do, to completely rethink how it's going to hire based on the things it needs, because ultimately the business wants to do better," Mohammed told FastCompany. "That's the whole point of all this: to hire better people, the right people to ."
