How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers

I wonder how long it will be before other companies start doing this.<p>At his confirmation hearing, when Alan Greenspan was asked why Townsend-Greenspan employed so many women (&#62; 50%, compared to about 5% in finance at the time), he replied that since he valued women as much as men, but other firms didn't, he could get more work for the same amount money by hiring women. Now, of course, the difference has mostly been arbitraged away, but it took decades to get to this point.<p>At the time, people gave many reasons sexism couldn't possibly exist in finance; naturally, more men went into finance because women just <i>didn't like</i> finance, and more men had senior positions because simply <i>didn't want</i> senior positions, and so on and so forth (oddly enough, those same reasons are given today, in discussions of sexism in CS and engineering).<p>In 1987, Townsend-Greenspan shut down, after thirty successful years, because Greenspan became chairman of the Fed. Now, twenty-six years later, the gender gap among MBAs is much smaller than it used to be, but it hasn't disappeared. I hope it doesn't take fifty-six years from the founding of Etsy for someone to be able to make a comment like this about programmers.<p>I'm afraid it might be a while, though. In discussions about the topic here on HN, the top comment is often something along the lines of how there obviously isn't any sexism in the field, or if there is any, it's rare, and certainly not a systematic problem, and how it's simply impossible that the highly skewed male:female ratio in the field is due to sexism. That's usually followed by a paragraph on how any attempts to address the issue are an insidious cause of reverse sexism.<p>The top comment in the previous thread on this topic was a comment about how everything Etsy is doing applies equally to all people, not just women, despite a large body of research indicating that, on average, women are treated differently in the workplace [1], and how some simple changes can neutralize many serious problems [2].<p>[1] Perhaps someone else can supply a reference to a well-known study that I can't seem to look up. When men react with anger, or act authoritatively, that's seen neutrally or positively, but when women do the same, it's seen negatively.<p>[2] <a href="http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511" rel="nofollow">http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18511</a>

<i>Want cognitively diverse teams? It’s not as simple as hiring more female technologists.</i><p>I'm sorry, is the author implying that men and women approach engineering problems differently (i.e. they think differently)? Is there any evidence of this? I thought "essentialism" was anathema in contemporary diversity circles.<p><i>Eighty percent of Etsy customers are female, but the company itself used to be known in startup circles as engineer-centric and something of a dude-fest</i><p>So the fact that eighty percent of Etsy users were women despite having an all-male engineering team apparently means that you have to hire more women engineers to attract female users? Again I'd love to see evidence that once a core of female engineers were hired significant changes where made to the site that could only have come from a "woman's intuition" (natch). It seems to me that having a female dominated user base in spite of an all male engineering team disproves the assertion that you need hire women to achieve "cognitive diversity".

Recently I watched a documentary in which a researcher told of how he was ridiculed for studying happiness, even though nobody saw anything wrong with studying depression. Then I saw a documentary where a handful of really skinny people were put on a ridiculous diet and their physiological changes were tracked.<p>Instead of trying to figure out why there aren't MORE women in science, math and engineering disciplines, perhaps we should be talking to the ones who are already there? It seems to me that if we've really had to jump over extra hurdles and deal with lower wages, there has to be something very compelling that keeps us here.<p>We think these answers are obvious. Maybe they aren't?<p>ETA: I interviewed with Etsy in 2010 or 2011. It seemed as if I did very well, but it wasn't a career move that warranted relocating the home to Brooklyn. At the time, I thought they were just excited by me, as a professional. I'm feeling a bit sad that it might have just been a "hire more women" drive instead. Bleh.

I'd like to see some numbers on how having 500% more female engineers made Etsy ship a better product - which is what I imagine customers ultimately care about. The idea that diversity is good for its own sake in every possible situation is taken as an axiom - which I'd like to see proven.<p>It seems like the idea of meritocracy - that the best professional for a given job is based on competence is substituted with one of diversity. Ie that in any group of size n, the personal qualities (gender,race,sexual orientation) of N+1 person joining the group is just as (or more important) that his/her core qualifications.<p>For example - why does company have to have engineers that mimic its customer base? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to have people whose job it is to figure out what customers want and then tell engineers to code it up?<p>Now - I am not saying that diversity is bad, rather that it's presented as a given, with no numerical justification.

I find this policy of intentionally hiring female over male programmers as highly disturbing. Etsy already proved that female programmers are not needed to successfully sell to females. Is there some sort of magical difference between male and female programmers that I am unaware of? Why throw out equality to promote it?<p>Would anyone be OK with the reverse policy? Could a company that sells to 99% men systematically exclude more qualify female leads to only hire men? Could a company that only sells to white people refuse to hire minorities? The Internet would be up in arms organizing boycotts in the case of the later (not to mention civil suites).

The article doesn't really say <i>why</i> they wanted more female engineers, other than "it was vital to the product."<p>I'd like to see more women engineers, and I applaud Etsy's initiative, but it seems unlikely that adding a few more super-junior (freshly-trained) women developers to their staff is going to meaningfully change the product in the near term.<p>I suppose (hope) that these women could help prevent anti-female product boo-boos, like the time Microsoft offered "bitch" as the equivalent to "male" in a Windows XP Spanish localization.

Doesn't this seem a little sexist? I only hope they give men the equal opportunity to women and don't start "paving the way" to make it easier for women to get a job there than an equally good man. Avoiding sexism isn't about hiring an equal number of men as women. It's about hiring the best for the job regardless of their gender.

It's great to see Etsy hire more female engineers! But really, they had so few female engineers to begin with (3) that the 500% figure is a bit sensationalist

This is a really great plan for hiring top talent in a way that's not immediately obvious. There is a lot of talk of 'sexism' in the tech world, but from my experience, many top male engineers are going to prefer working in a team with a few more females. If the article is correct then this proves this further - they were able to hire some big names simply by having those extra female engineers.<p>Training up female engineers is also positive as the main complaint about 'diversity in tech' is putting less competent female engineers before more competent male engineers to meet ratio targets. (I'm not saying that females are less competent, but female engineers are harder to find.) By training up female engineers first before giving them the jobs, they are hopefully making sure that their female engineers are just as competent as their male engineers.<p>Basically it's a win all around, and is much better than just hiring any female engineer regardless of skill to make quota.<p>"Less headhunters, more hacker school" - Good call, good call.

At that rate, in just over 20 years every woman in the world will be a software engineer at Etsy.

You know, gender aside, this is what more companies should do; there's an enormous demand for skilled engineers out there, yet very few companies that acknowledge there just may not be any more in the market and they need to create said skilled employees themselves.<p>The problem for employers is that trainees and interns are a risk; you need to screen them beforehand, and then you take a gamble about whether they'll get up to the required skill level in six months or a year to be up to par to the rest of the company's team.<p>I heard about a major consultancy company's success in attracting interns as potential future engineers (Ordina iirc), they said the success rate was about 1 in 20. Which, for smaller companies (&#60;100 people) is simply not enough.<p>The article itself states they hired eight people from Hacker School, which is daring and commendable. I'm curious as to how those people will develop themselves in the coming year.

Large previous thread on HN from 45 days ago here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177994</a>

Work, after all, is mostly about getting shit done. If there is a shortage of female engineers they are probably overvalued which also means I could hire equally good or better men for less money.<p>Does the little gain of prestige make up for the huge potential loss of opportunity?

What a sexist goal Etsy had, to hire 500% more female(???) engineers. Why engineers are separated by gender? It's 100% sexism.

So, they had 4, and now they have 20 female engineers. That sounds like quite a small sample size and quiet a lot talk about that.

500% more female engineers = 500% more risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.