This is a (slightly) tongue in cheek riposte to endless emails I get from people trying to hire me, and the things I notice which contribute towards the marginalisation of women. During the pandemic, when I was looking for the job, there only seemed to be three jobs in the entirety of Cambridge. However it seems recently things have changed and everyone is hiring. This means I have been having the pleasure/pain(?) of reading quite a few messages with job adverts from people attempting the recruit. In addition, since we’re hiring too, I’ve been reading other job adverts to pick up ideas for our own job advert. It’s left me with a lot of food for thought about what the tech industry is doing wrong and this is where this article came from.

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“We offer a competitive salary”

I read this as: we’re going to pay you as little as possible and try to get away with it by calling it competitive. Like many people, a salary is not so much about how much it is, but rather how fair it is. Women and minorities, on average, ask for less money and are offered less money than white men. This is further compounded by pay rises being percentages of current salary leading to chronic underpayment of women, which leads to a situation where women do the same job but for less.

I can speak from personal experience that this is not nice. This happened to me many years back at the beginning of my career: I asked for less than I could have, and discovered later that new people were being paid significantly more than me to do the same job as I was. These were people I was helping as I had more experience than they did. It’s not a nice feeling; you feel worthless and - to be blunt - pissed off. It leads to long term resentment and low staff attrition. Salary ranges should be transparent, and paid according to market average for a role.

“Our technical test is Star Wars themed!”

Ah that old chestnut! Here we have that assumption that all software engineers are nerds who love nothing better than some sci-fi and a bit of D&D. Well I’ll have you know that whilst I do enjoy Star Wars, I consign my interest to watching it every few years when it happens to be on tv. And there my interest ends. This stereotype of engineers being nerds is pervasive, and leads to people seeing those who do not meet it as somehow less competent than those that do. Stereotypes are how we as people understand the world without having to analyse in depth every single situation we come across. Very useful to help you to rapidly respond to a situation; it’s why you avoid the loud, brash man at a bar because he’s more likely to be out for a fight than the women in the corner. However, in certain situations, such as this, they are a net negative; it’s why someone credited my design of a data infrastructure to my male colleague (who had no contribution to it). It is because they do not see a female as someone who can be competent technically as it is so far off the stereotypical image of what someone technical is. These memories stay with you.

Finding the best person for a job is so much more than a list of skills, and it is time that this is appreciated more. It brings a net benefit to both companies and applicants.

“Required Skills [insert ~50 skills…]”

This particular one I find hilarious. In every job I’ve been offered I have not met all the desirable skills. Sometimes I have only met half. But I still get offered the job. Why is this? Because the employer doesn’t want every skill really. They want someone who can pick new skills up as needed and has all the necessary knowledge to learn as they go. This however is far from a harmless practice; by doing so you’re actively filtering out potential female candidates by doing so because men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. The top reason for this is “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.”.

“We want to hire 50% women engineers!”

This is the worst job phishing email I have ever had. Way to make me feel like you only want me to fulfill your diversity targets. Haven’t come so close to writing a scathing reply in a long time. If you want a brilliant software team, there’s only one way to do it: hire the best people for the job regardless of sex, ethinc background or sexuality. The fact we have so few from diverse backgrounds isn’t going to be helped at all by this attempt to hire 50% women. The only way to make that a possibility is to address the multifaceted cause behind it of stereotypes, sexism and lack of role models. I suppose the decision had good intentions behind it, but it was ill thought out.

Closing Thoughts…

I want to end on a positive note that all of these are easy fixes, unlike the persistent dearth of diversity. Try acknowledging you don’t need all of the listed desirable skills, give a salary range, and add in the perk of flexitime so that those with families can work around that. Every little action you do has an impact even if it doesn’t seem like it. If we make one step up the lack-of-diversity mountain each day it may seem like nothing, but in time we will get to the top.