The original process the OP describes is exactly what many affirmative action opponents think AA does, that is only consider one demographic and ignore all the others.

If you want to open opportunities for women, you post the job notice in places where women will see it. That will get you qualified candidates, and if you find a women who is the best person for the job, you hire her.

edit: spelling

Wanting to increase diversity is a good thing, so kudos for that. However you should -never- -ever- -ever- indicate a preference towards a race, gender, sexual orientation or religious affiliation. Did I say ever? Ever. Ever. Ever. It's discriminatory, it's demeaning and it's illegal.

If you want to increase diversity then, well, don't just say 'I need women!', rather go to where the diversity is.

There are a ton of groups, meetups, community boards that would love to know you are 'hiring' not that you are 'hiring <insert minority>'. For example: http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/

You can't create a gender-specific role in your company and then hire for it.

What you can do is gender-specific lead generation. Create a role that's not gender specific, then market the role (news flash: tech hiring is marketing) using women as a target market.

This process doesn't guarantee you women for your roles. At your scale (and ours) there's nothing you can do about this. You're going to have more men than women. When you hit the scale of, apparently, Etsy, you can start to see demographic shifts in your company that correspond to how you market your openings.

The problem is that this is discriminatory. If you are not hiring based solely on qualifications, and instead on gender, it is discriminating. If you were to switch the genders and say that you are only hiring men, it would be clearly sexist. However, if you do not accept well qualified men who would fit the job, it is seen as "breaking gender barriers". You should be hiring based on the applicant's experience, education, and how they fit in with company culture.

If you are worried about a gender gap, you should be looking at why fewer females apply. Once you remedy this, you will be able to consider an equal amount of applicants, and you should then choose them based on their experience instead of their gender. The title of this article makes it out as if people are trying to stop you from hiring women, when in fact, you are instead trying to justify discrimination.

No, it turns out that hiring someone because of their gender is discriminatory.

Disqualifying all male candidates due to their gender is discriminatory, just as disqualifying all female candidates due to their gender is discriminatory.

Um, your wife and co-worker are right. This is not how to hire women.

Also I find it interesting that you were considering a woman for job as a UI designer. Why not another engineer?

Here is a potentially better way to do it. Is your female co-worker comfortable presenting in public? If so, have her give a technical talk with cool demos and say you're hiring. That's not a bad way to find potential employees. And if there are women available, seeing a female face of the company will make them more interested.

But if she comes back with a smart guy, hire him. Because you're looking for a good employee first, and not a woman first.

How about you just keep hiring the best person for the job, but take care to be reflective and ensure you are fairly considering the female candidates... maybe make sure your female engineer is on the hiring committee?

Put another way, rather than trying to explicitly seek awesome female employees, just make sure the awesome female candidates don't slip through. I think execs often mistakenly think they can fix cultural issues by fiat, when what is really needed is dedication and time.

I think what constitutes imbalance also needs to be defined. If 10% of qualified engineering candidates are female does having 10% of your engineering staff be female constitute balance? I think the case could be made it does; however, in relation the birth ratio of our species is it certainly imbalance.

Build a work environment friendly to men and women.

Advertise your position for a designer.

Make sure that the ad is seen in plenty of places where women designers may look. Do as much outreach to women as you want to. Speak to women tech meetups. Pass your job position along to professors likely to know qualified students and let them know the position is open to everyone, but you'd like to hire more women in general and are having problems reaching out to women. Use facebook, linked in, pinterest, to reach out to women developers.

Ask your #1 employee if she is interested in speaking to schools, meetups, conferences. Sponsor her speaking.

Interview qualified candidates.

Then hire a qualified candidate apt to do well at your position.

Also, let it be known you are always interested in good candidates, regardless of their specific expertise. Then when you find good candidates, make a position for them. This works well with your outreach and internship program.

(Other activities: sponsor outreach to high school girls, sponsor women in tech conferences, sponsor outreach to all high school students, create internships (and advertise those internships all across campus))

I think most people got this topic wrong, maybe because of all the promotion of women in IT, which mostly is good.

If I was a woman, I'd rather apply for someone looking for a developer, than someone looking for a woman - because then I knew I was hired because of my skills and personality - not my gender.

In legal terms, this is pretty much what you can do. You can hire a "person" not a person of a specific gender.

I'm not sure I get it. The author asked his only female employee and his wife for feedback and the feedback was categorically negative yet he decided to proceed regardless?

I appreciate the intention but I don't think an 'honest' blog post is going to quell the controversy his tactic will undoubtedly drum up.

So he ends with "I’m hiring a female UI designer". That's illegal, and he's shouting his intent to break the law.

Discriminate. If you have five candidates, all qualified, with marginal differences, take the one that has been historically discriminated against.

That is the only way to build a culture (industry-wide) where there is a diverse group of people making hiring decisions. Once that happens, diverse bigotries will tend to cancel each other out, and the lack of a visible glass ceiling in the profession will encourage more people to try to join it from discriminated against groups.

Marginal discrimination by feel and intuition is mostly voodoo anyway. Thinking Person X is the best person for the job because he worked on a project at Company Y that you thought was interesting isn't necessarily picking the best person for the job (unless the project is directly applicable to what you're hiring them for), but it is necessarily compounding any prejudicial hiring practices from Company Y that may or may not exist there. In addition, at the margins is when people are chosen because they went to the same school as you, or they share your hobbies.

Have a qualification line, and above that line, pick the most historically disadvantaged. If you're still not getting any diversity, examine your qualification line (have I only considered people who went to private universities?) or market your interest, as this blog does well:)

Consider advertising your jobs at less male-dominated college campuses? RIT is one of the worst offenders in this regard. I think that'd be a start.

Rather than such heavy-handed techniques trying to solve the surface problem, ask yourself these two questions: (i) what is the reason I want a female employee for this position? Just citing the gender imbalance in the company is not enough and is a weak argument, you have to explain that the additional effort in hiring a woman for this position is well-spent. This is the easy part, since this questions has been debated to death on HN and other forums.

The more important question is: (ii) Why is it hard to get a female interface designer (I have no clue but am assuming it is so) and what can you do to solve this problem? Trying to hire female programmers/designers is good but is an indirect method. Why don't you take your cool gear to your local middle schools, high schools, etc. and meet with future female programmers, to motivate them into this field.

I am reluctant to use a reference to sports, but the NFL has a good model in regard to coaching and race. Using their protocol teams identify and interview African-American candidates. The protocol does not require hiring them. The Football League in the UK is talking about something similar.

The problem the NFL model solves is the networking problem. The process of interviewing is recognized as valuable because it expands the industry's knowledge of the talent pool and provides a basic opportunity for less well connected candidates to present their credentials.

This means that even if a candidate doesn't get this job, they are on the radar screen for other jobs. Hiring decisions are still based on merit while the known talent pool diversifies over the long run.

If you're hiring someone because of their gender, race, etc., that's discriminatory.

However, you're also going to be judged by the statistics, which is to say, if you don't discriminate, you're going to be seen as discriminatory.

Someone write Congress and have them fix this please :)

As far as solutions, recognize that there's a reason most businesses like to hire people they know. They already know the people are capable and will fit in with the team, rather than "rolling the dice" with an unknown who might be perfectly competent but impossible to work with.

What that means is that you have a networking problem. You need to meet enough people so that if you decide to hire someone for a position, you immediately know some candidates. This means that some of them will be women.

I recommend going to the professors, campus organizations, or other authority figures that people already trust. This enables you to meet people without the somewhat creepy idea of showing up and trying to "recruit women" with some weird geek stunt.

Even better, consider your existing network: your employees. Have a dinner or drinks session where you encourage every employee to bring a friend "who might someday want to come on board."

I can't help you with the inherent paradox of being discriminatory in order to avoid being seen as discriminatory. But with more people on your mental rolodex, you'll have a better choice of finding someone who's a fit, and more of those will be women and other protected groups.

My response to the title is "duh". Setting out to hire a woman is, by the very definition of the word, discriminatory. For the moment, drop the legal aspects of the word "discrimination". Think more along the lines of hiring a designer versus a dev. That's discriminatory, too, but in a perfectly legal sense. In the end, though, one has made a distinction between those that design and those that write code. But if one needs a designer and not a dev, that discrimination needs to be made. Discriminating by gender, however, is not only of questionable legality, it can also make for a bad hire if one discriminates for gender above all else.

Looping back to the topic of hiring women, it was good that he sought the feedback of his wife and his employee. Despite his noble goals, it sure struck me as creepy. "Do you have a vagina? Come work for us!" I read the article, but maybe I missed the part where he asked himself how the workforce got out of balance to begin with. I'm going to guess (given the attitude that he conveys) that he didn't set out to create a boy's club of brogrammers. Advertising in the wrong places? Maybe something in the interview process was more discriminatory than he thought? Something in the company that subtly doesn't appeal to women? An industry predominantly populated by those with penises? Look to identify problems like that, rather than running around where the girls hang out and blatantly recruit for chicks.

Find out where tech women are hanging out and make your job opportunities known there. If you are only going to where tech men are, then you are only going to get tech men applying.

Nobody screamed discrimination when Michael Bay cast Megan Fox in Transformers. After all, what man could provide her sex appeal?

I see your problem, and agree with your viewpoint that this PC culture we've developed might have gone a little overboard, however I don't think this is a case of that. You need to focus less on the gender, and what the gender provides.

"WANTED: Graphical Designer, has work consistent with a feminine point of view and can provide alternative perspective to a predominantly male industry"

IANAL, but I feel like that gives you enough legal ass-covering to say any male didn't qualify. Could probably be worded better though.

e: formatting

The correct way to go about this is to advertise to the entire population, but make a conscious move to have it geared towards women more (e.g. advertised more heavily in women-dominated areas).

Then you hope the best candidate is a women.

I always see these arguments as very very myopic. If I need a developer, then I hire a developer. I am very much discriminating against accountants, because they don't fit the qualifications that I am looking for. But no intelligent person would ever frame it that way. If you're a 10 to 1 ratio, then you need to diversify, and you would discriminate against men the same way you discriminate against accountants. The enlightened individual realizes very quickly that diversity is the goal because it works better.

The plan is to go to a college campus with a toy helicopter equipped with a camera and fly it over a field where a bunch of young women are sunbathing in various states of undress. If someone comes to tell him to stop it, he's going to launch into a rehearsed speech about how he wants to hire a woman for a made-up-sounding job.

The absolute best outcome here is that someone breaks his helicopter and he goes home. It's probably more likely that someone calls campus security or the cops and he spends the night in jail.

This is the stupidest, most socially-myopic plan I've seen on Hacker News since... well, since last night's "Very Short Response Expected" post.

edit- looks like this post got flagged off the front page, which is not surprising, but while I'm disappointed that fewer people will see how stupid you are at least it might save you from an EEOC discrimination charge.

Back when I was dating, I had a really hard time meeting "qualified candidates" (i.e. interesting people not enamored with the TV show "The Jersey Shore"), say nothing about ones who were single and interested in dating me. I signed up on a bunch of dating websites, I filled out all of the profiles with minute detail (thinking it proved I wasn't some shallow person interested in a quick hookup), paid very close attention to the content of the profiles I read, and had a process for interviewing people all designed to show I was truly interested in them, and to whittle down to the perfect candidate.

After reading your article, I realized it is exactly the same way we try to hire people. We go out on job websites, fill out the job profiles, crawl through resumes and try to interview the perfect candidate. Dice.com, Monster.com, LinkedIn.com, they're the same exact thing as Match.com, eHarmony.com, and OkCupid.com.

And shock and horror, it doesn't fucking work in either case. I've had the same exact experience in hiring.

There were three things I learned through this process, in both spheres: 1) One got just as good of results from random selection as from HR-based, profile-based, direct-effort candidate searches. Actually, the random selection was better because it didn't take anywhere near as much effort. 2) Boiling people down into numbers and rankings and trying to figure out which one was "better" than the others made me physically ill. 3) The only way to find "the one" was to know them already. I quit trying, I expanded my circle of friends, I completely and successfully changed from an introvert to an extrovert, and eventually the stars aligned.

Now, that sounds like a system you can't count on, "stars aligning". But really, I think it is a system you can count on more often than anything else. For one thing, you know the "stars" will eventually "align". "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" -- Seneca. Opportunities are presented to you on a daily basis, you just aren't prepared for it.

I bet, with near certainty, you've met an amazing female designer/engineer already. You have probably met several. And you have probably met several that are interested in working for a company like yours. You just didn't know it, because you weren't engaging people in conversations AS people. You were trying to hire them.

You were trying to turn them into Human Resources.

> You should be hiring based on the applicant's experience, education

I find it concerning that we so easily discount this discrimination. Someone who is equally capable of doing the job with less experience and education should have an equal chance at the job, no?

Now, perhaps someone with more experience is statistically better for the job, so you might want to look for that, but what if men are statically better for the job? I don't think it is right to say one is discrimination and the other is not. In both cases you are making prejudicial judgements about people through categorization.

At some point practicality takes over and you have to make judgements about people without knowing who they really are, but its not clear to me why the varying levels of treatment are happening.

That's a fair point. It's hard to pin down why fewer women apply. Is it cultural, social, our industry? Are these things that a single company can sort out or change? How would you encourage or solve the problem of too few women applying, without crossing the ethical, gray, broad boundary of discrimination?

That's not how it works.

An accountant will not have the qualification to get the job done and that's why you are not considering them, it's not discrimination.

Discrimination is when you ignore someone or treat them differently based on an attribute that is seemingly non-relevant to what is required to get the job done.

Gender, race, religion is often one of those attributes.

There may be cases where one of the above attributes is so crucial to the job that it is not discriminatory to consider them. For example a church will not accept an 'atheist bishop' and in that case that is not discrimination.

But if you apply for a fastfood job and get rejected because you are an atheist, then that is discrimination.

In the case of the author, it would be wrong to treat female applicants differently or only look for females or ignore the male applicants. In my opinion the right approach would be to do the things that results in getting more female applicants so that there will be a higher chance of the best applicant to be a female.

> If you're a 10 to 1 ratio, then you need to diversify, and you would discriminate against men the same way you discriminate against accountants. The enlightened individual realizes very quickly that diversity is the goal because it works better.

In a professional work environment, how does gender diversity work better? In over 30 years of programming, dealing with a wide range of types of code and many languages, I've yet to run into a situation where having female-written code would have made any difference.

I can see it making a difference in a non-professional environment where work and social life are heavily intertwined. That's why, for instance, it is important at schools where most students live at the school and the school is where most of their social activity occurs. Things get uncomfortable when you have 15-20% females in an environment where people are both colleagues and boyfriend/girlfriend candidates.

That was the situation at Caltech when I was there. Since then, they have balanced things more, and are now something like 40% female. They did this without discriminating. What they did was work hard on getting qualified females to apply. The actual admission process, though, was kept gender blind.

It's not illegal to discriminate against accountants. It is illegal to discriminate against someone because of their gender.