I work at a place where there are about as many women as men. Of those there is one white woman that I can think of, a couple Asian and a lot from India. I think there are more Indian women than Indian men here.
Maybe there is some HR effort at gender equality, but if so it isn't obvious, because the women they have hired seem to be competent, some extremely so.
However, unless you go to the trouble of hiring immigrants, or are in an area where a lot of immigrants are located, you are going to have trouble having a gender balanced workforce because there aren't as many white women going into such technical fields as white men.
We have had decades of Affirmative Action, hiring preferences, and discrimination lawsuits. While things have gotten more diverse than they once the fact that to get a diverse technical workforce we need to import it from other countries tells me that those "solutions" aren't addressing the major problems.
There is something seriously wrong with the fact that we live in such a technologically advanced society, yet we have to import so many technically trained people from other places. This is true for both men and women, but especially true for women.
It's not that women don't make good engineers. I've worked with enough talented women engineers to know better.
I think it is good for Google to acknowledge that there is a lack of diversity, but barring any evidence showing that they actively discriminate, I don't think that it is likely that the problem lies with Google.
I also think that the problem goes back to our primary and secondary education systems, so there aren't going to be any quick fixes. However, that makes it more urgent that we find a way to improve things.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
