Okay a big prefix first. I know there should be diversity at work place and 100% agree we should hire more women in software engineering. Now what i want to know is when people say women bring in a different perspective, what does that mean? Asking specifically for software engineering domain with women hired in as software developers / principal engineers.
I’ve always been perplexed by this. We’re told men and women are the exact same in every meaningful aspect, but simultaneously told that we need to hire more of women for their perspective. Doesn’t that seem like we’re saying we’re all the same, but we’re really not the same?
Yeah I’m starting to think we’re fed some feel-good dog shit on that one. I believe in NOT excluding people based on their gender or ethnicity. But if you don’t get any women to apply for a job, you can’t leave the position unfilled while you repost the job 5 times until you get a female candidate. Nor can you hire her when she’s got a communications degree and you’re hiring data science new grads. She has to meet the same educational and experience standards as a male hire. Else, you’re making it painfully obvious you’re trying to push a token hire through the gates.
Even tho women and men are the same (just like whites and blacks) their EXPERIENCES in the world differ because men and women are treated differently
Women experience the world differently than we do. And from that, flows a different perspective. I work with tech and non tech women on a regular basis and where I found an extreme difference in perspective is on documents and the wording of things. It’s hard to describe: less of a technical difference; more holistic; and about things I never would have considered.
No two people perceive the world the same way, regardless of sex. We’ve got to stop viewing people as statistics and start evaluating each person individually for the uniqueness that they bring.
Based on what I've read, while men and women may perceive the world in the same way, we process the world differently as a result of evolution. I'm not going to try to go into the details of those differences because I'm not a neuroscientist, but based on what I understand we use different algorithms to process the same problems... it doesn't mean either sex is more effective in tech overall, it just means that we are different... With all of that said, I personally think that the benefit to hiring a diverse team of SDE is to have more well-rounded and bulletproof code. Assuming that everyone is working together well and are being managed correctly, their differences should eventually translate to a healthier product.
Wow, really?
Yikes.
I think you forgot one important part. It's bringing perspectives "for our customer experience". A lot of product decisions are often made by internal subjective opinions through the end to end development process. You want to ensure there are diverse perspectives in our decision making process in order to build better products.
So the design of products need to be diverse in gender, but actual implementation to a spec doesn’t need to be?
Thats an excellent point and it makes sense for hiring women too in product based roles like product managers, tpm etc. but for software devs, this information doesnt describe why a womens perspective is different from a mans perspective
I don't know what different perspective women can bring but in general women programmers tend to be less needlessly cocky compared to the men. I am not saying they are not but the probability is lesser compared to men. All other things being equal,this makes it slightly easier to work with them.
Empathy and emotional maturity. Men, engineers especially, are remarkably bad at _caring_ how others experience the world around them.
Most noob programmers are type a nerd mamma boys. They need their mommies to settle them in the workplace, hence woman are needed.
Products envisioned, developed and tested 100% by a select group of people will always miss something- a use case, a potential market, an experience . Case study simple facial/smile recognition: https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/609664/googles-new-ai-smile-detector-shows-how-embracing-race-and-gender-can-reduce/ The shares and disparate experiences we have as people are so nuanced- just Imagine what else we missed and will miss. That will translate to $$$$$$$
If there are no women in the group men start playing alfa games and valuable opinions aren’t heard if they are not coming from the top of this artificial hierarchy. Same with female only teams. It takes a lot of maturity to avoid this unhealthy dynamic in the team, but having a mixed team helps a lot to prevent it from happening.
Glamor
Really? That’s what you think..I feel so sorry for you