“I agree we need to have a team that understands the product needs of more than just the young male user, but we just can’t find them,” said Ankur Jain at the first board meeting of his startup Humin in May 2013. This is the same explanation that all Silicon Valley companies — both large and small — provide, to justify their dearth of women technologists.
I advised the Humin team to network with women’s groups and look harder. And that is what it did. By broadening their search process, they found a depth and breadth of female talent, especially among developers whose original background was in engineering fields beyond computer science. Today, six members — one-third — of Humin’s engineering team of 18 are women. Two of the women have a Ph.D.
This is why I look at Google’s gender data with disappointment and don’t buy its excuses.
Google’s gender-diversity should be better than Humin’s, not just 17 percent. Consider that women comprised 37 percent of the computer science class of 1987. Because of the unfair hurdles they face, women are getting discouraged from studying computer science, and the percentage had fallen to 18 percent by 2012. But about a quarter of today’s pool of highly experienced software developers is female, and a company such as Google — which has its pick of the crop of new graduates as well as experienced engineers — should have far greater diversity.
PBS Newshour: Fixing Google’s gender gap shouldn’t be so hard - Vivek Wadhwa
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