Former Female CTO at Google: Stop demanding a male-female ratio in tech teams!

Vidya Narayanan is a former Google technology manager who has led cross-functional engineering projects with 20-30 people (mostly engineers). Most of the time, she was the only woman on the project/team and earned the affection and respect of her male colleagues. The reason for writing this article is that she is fed up with the current male-to-female ratio requirement and wants to discuss how to improve the situation.

The author | Vidya Narayanan translation | Xie Jianfen

I’ve been involved in a lot of recruiting at Google. At the time, I wrote a number of requests to the hiring committee, seeking out well-rounded candidates that other male interviewers thought would be a bad fit, but I believed that as a woman, MY judgment was better in some areas, and that these candidates would be a great asset to Google.

I was able to convince the committee in the vast majority of cases, and almost every employee hired as a result did well in the subsequent job.

Remarkably, 98+% of them are men. It’s not that I don’t want to hire women, but the fact that the candidate pool is 90% male — don’t be so quick to disagree, just search the resumes of engineers with sensor, wireless, and hardware experience — I can’t increase the rate of women anymore.

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I left Google to start UrbanAMA. As a female entrepreneur, I wanted to build a gender-diverse team. Unfortunately, I have not succeeded so far.

We tried very hard. You know, we’re still an early stage startup, and we’re not paying the market average, but we’re still offering a lot of good pay to women who do well in interviews.

However, when they join the company, they don’t perform well, and instead of being a booster, they make the team lose energy. Eventually we let them go for the sake of the company. So now I’m the only woman on the [technology] team.

While I am pleased with the women in other positions at UrbanAMA and they are doing a great job, we have to admit that we are still doing a terrible job of diversifying our technical team despite our efforts.

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I’m also the mother of two young children — I have a 7-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter — who are both good at math and logic, which you could argue they were born with (because they have a mom who got a perfect SCORE in GRE essay and a dad who got a perfect score in GRE math).

This summer, we started teaching them Python. The son was interested and kept asking questions, but the daughter said she didn’t want to learn. Instead, she was happy to learn Photoshop and make new filters and stickers for UrbanAMA.

Sometimes girls are more interested in creative questions than logical ones, either by nature or by environment. Encouraging kids to get started has done my part, but I have more to do than that.

I told my daughter she had to learn how to code until she had learned enough before she could choose whether to continue or not (parenting experts should stop rolling my eyes).

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Having gone through various attempts at gender diversity, I have found that the obsession with gender diversity and the current approach is actually damaging to female techies.

What does that mean?

We were unhappy with the gender ratio in technology, so we made some rules to hire more women. However, there were far more men than women in the candidate pool, and because of the long period of lack of earnings, we had to lower our recruitment requirements to get enough women.

But the poor performance of the female hires has reinforced the belief of those already opposed to gender diversity that women can’t do tech jobs. They even generalize this conclusion to the whole field of technology.

These opinions will get out there and the world will know. Feminists would be outraged. So advocates of gender diversity rose up again, and once again instituted rules to hire more women. So, trapped in a vicious circle…

We’re hitting hiring targets with the banner of gender diversity, but we’re actually doing a disservice to the truly talented women in tech. I’m sick of it.

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I’m not against gender diversity, I’m actually against the status quo:

  • Wage and income inequality between men and women;

  • Potential bias against women in tech (from “you’re a woman, so you can’t be an engineer” to “You’re a woman, and your gender is likely to keep you stuck at a lower level”);

  • Workplace sexual harassment;

  • The girls’ club and boys’ club are mutually exclusive.

What I object to is the imposition of gender diversity in an already male-dominated field. This can be a problem for us.

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So what should we do?

We should go to the root: encourage more female students to study engineering!

Part of my time at UrbanAMA was working with young girls from high school and college, encouraging them to study computer science and earn engineering degrees. I’ve had plenty of women tell me stories of how badly they’ve been treated on campus (even at an elite institution like UC Berkeley) and thank me for my support and encouragement. I think those are the things we need to change.

If the number of women in technical education increased, the gender diversity problem in technology would be solved.

I urge the outstanding women of technology to use your influence with young girls to inspire and mentor them as they stumble at the crossroads of technology disciplines.

We also have men who really want to help us who are scared off by radical feminists who would love to support and develop women in technology, but who are put off by our “gender diversity campaign” that tries to address the symptoms rather than the root cause.

We should guide those who are willing to help; And those who don’t respect female tech people, we just ignore them.

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I understand the frustration women face, such as not being recognized for programming skills that may be above the average of their colleagues. But instead of complaining, try to be positive and find a solution. Sometimes it can be effective to make misogynists feel bad about themselves. What can we do?

  • Go out and talk to female freshmen and sophomores about the benefits of choosing the tech path;

  • Conduct mentor activities;

  • If you’re a manager, make sure your women are treated and recognized as they should be.

  • Show men and women how to detect and correct potential biases;

  • Getting male volunteers to go out and talk to other men can be much more effective.

Create a better future for female technologists!

Original address: https://medium.com/the-mission/im-an-ex-google-woman-tech-leader-and-i-m-sick-of-our-approach-to-diversity-17008c5fe999

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