http://anitaborg.org/news/research/

I think it would be good for the company to have a diversity statement and to publish it prominently, but I can’t speak on behalf of the whole company in this regard. For the moment, I’m focusing on my own department and my own hiring, where I can take an active role personally.

I think such a local approach is likely to be applicable to many other companies, where there is organizational inertia to overcome in creating or changing company policy.

I could certainly speak more publicly about my department and what it’s like to work there, and our goals for diversity at that level. Perhaps some testimonials from the current team would be useful in this regard.

And yet, if you’re speaking peaking to me as an (imaginary) potential job-seeker, all that gets you is “well, they’re probably better than some”. Having worked in some crappy environments, I look hard for whatever evidence I can find about a company as a work environment… and I see nothing at all about the work environment or your desire for diversity on the careers site, which in my mind translates to “business as usual”. And, again, that’s an organization that I have a long relationship with and already think well of.

Don’t assume that of course everyone knows you wouldn’t do anything assholish. Don’t assume that people will think that because Ubuntu represents something cool, working for Canonical will be idyllic — a lot of women, queers, and I assume other non-white-nerd-guy candidates too, have had bad experiences with working in places where the ideals sound just fabulous — including open source itself taken as a whole. You could start with putting your diversity commitment in every single job listing on your site, for example (if you don’t have one, Dreamwidth’s is excellent and cc-licensed): my current employer does something similar by not only saying “$ORG is an equal opportunity employer” (standard for U.S. job listings), but also adding something like “we are strongly committed to diversity and actively seeking to increase the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of our staff” and that makes me damned proud even when I’m annoyed by the realities work. It’s the difference between “they won’t deliberately screw up” and “they really want to do this right”, and it’s not the kind of thing you can just assume people will trust you about — or even if they do, it’s a gesture of support up-front to have it there explicitly.

Obviously, I’m only speaking to the “attract more applicants” part of your equation. But the more you do to make it clear that you really mean it, organization-wide, the easier it will get to get diverse applicants over time.

Linden Lab is hiring for a variety of positions here in SF, Boston, Singapore, Davis, Mountain View, Virginia, and Brighton UK. We offer a family friendly set of benefits, and have a higher than normal number of females in executive and engineering positions. Plus, very strange inworld meetings where everyone can fly.

Another option is to put open source projects into your “experience” section right along with the jobs. I’m not sure how well this goes over on a paper resume since the expectation is often that volunteer stuff shouldn’t be lumped in with paid experience (even though the learning is no less valuable). On the other hand, the way LinkedIn presents this sort of thing is really nice — it makes it very, very apparent if you’re involved in a lot of community projects.

If folks aren’t buzzing around the AO3 and Dreamwidth talent pools, however, I can’t imagine why not.

You are so damn right, and that didn’t occur to me. *headdesk* Yeah.

ETA: I posted this to try and encourage DW/AO3 developers to list their experience where people can find it.

The catch here is that male feral techies often establish their bona fides through working on open-source software. For all the reasons this site and its sister wiki are documenting, this isn’t necessarily a fruitful method of finding female feral techies. (If folks aren’t buzzing around the AO3 and Dreamwidth talent pools, however, I can’t imagine why not.)

One way is to look right under your nose. I was hired back in the day to do data-entry in a custom Access database. The unit’s IT folks discovered that I was a quick learner and unafraid, and so when it was time to re-customize the database, they decided to turn me loose on it, with concomitant title change and pay raise. Everybody won: I got more money and a better résumé; IT got to offload a rather unpleasant job (Visual Basic argh) onto someone who understood the problem domain very well.