Opinion: Our approach to diversity screws it up for women in tech. Here’s what we can do instead

Photo credit: Pixabay.

We must stop messing it up for the amazing women in tech.

I ran cross-functional engineering projects, managing 20 to 30 men (mostly engineers) at Google. I was the only woman in the team most of the time. Men who reported to me liked and respected me. Men who managed me also liked and respected me.

Before you get all worked up about what I say here, I’ve had my exposure to gender biases—subliminal and deliberate—and I wrote some thoughts for my fellow women in tech. Go read that to set your mind at ease if you have to.

This post is to highlight how sick I am about our approach to diversity and what we could do instead to dramatically improve the situation.

Hiring from a male-dominated talent pool 

In the copious hiring I did at Google, 97 percent of the people I hired were men. I wrote reams of appeals to the hiring committee to make cases for cross-functional candidates who would be great assets to Google, even though the typically male-dominated software engineering interview crew did not find these candidates up to snuff. I had a 90+ percent success rate changing the hiring decision for these candidates. Almost each one of these hires made an amazing difference to the company.

It’s not like I wasn’t trying to hire women. But I was working with a candidate pool composed of mostly men. Try looking for software engineers with experience in sensors and wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did.

Leaving Google

I left Google to build UrbanAMA. As a female entrepreneur, I wanted to build a company that had a diverse team. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve failed miserably so far.

We tried hard but again found ourselves with a male-dominated (98 percent) candidate pool. We are an early-stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. However, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. I’m now back to being the only woman in the tech team.

With that said, I’m proud to say that our freelance journalists in the company are predominantly women. But on the point of diversity in tech within the company, it’s a miserable state of failure so far. And that’s not because we didn’t try.

My daughter hates Python

I’m a mother of two kids —a seven-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl. They both generally have a reasonably good grasp of math and logic. You could say they are biologically meant to be fluent in math and analytics. With a mom who scored an 800 in GRE analytics and a dad who scored an 800 in GRE quants, anything else would be unexplainable.

This summer, we got into beginner Python. My son can’t stop taking on problems while my daughter has declared that she hates it. She’s very ready to take on Photoshop and create filters and stickers for my company though.

Case in point: Sometimes, girls do gravitate more toward creative rather than logical problems either naturally or due to their environment. I’m doing my part to start encouraging my own kids early. We need more of it.

Confession: I have told my daughter it isn’t optional to learn coding and that she must stick with it until she’s good at it, and then she can choose not to do it. (Parenting advisors, stop rolling your eyes now!)

What diversity attempts are achieving

So what do we do instead?