Women 2.0 Β» Squareβs Jack Dorsey Tweets Picture Of 13 Male Interns β And Lunch Of Sandwiches With Crusts Cut Off
Louise Donnelly-Davey stashed this in women in Tech
Stashed in: Silicon Valley!, Women, @jack, Square, Awesome, Sandwich!
ha ha .. thanks Adam - I wanted to see that close up ... Yep- plenty of twitter action going on around this one.. especially from myself and Christine :) The biggest problem is that Jack obviously did not see anything wrong with "this picture" .. in the first instance. That is scary in 2012.
In his eyes the best people were picked for the job. He's likely proud of how gender-blind the selection criteria were -- that everyone was chosen on their merits.
But it's hard to believe in any process that selects zero women.
Jack apologizes and declares "we need to do better": https://twitter.com/jack/status/220305872402911232
And that is the thing Adam, that he will be proud of the "process"- and will no doubt not recognise that the process must have a fundamental flaw to produce these results :)
I do not believe the apologies, that may sound harsh but it is hard to change something, or "do better" when you refuse to acknowledge a problem in the first place or you are not even aware of what that problem is.
Jack Dorsey β@jack
@bbosker we made offers to female candidates & they chose other opportunities for various reasons. We continue to make offers; a priority.
Clearly not much of a priority when the result is 13 male interns :(
Well, the next question is why all the women they made offers to turned them down.
Perhaps there's something about working for Square that is unappealing to women?
During the time I've been at PBworks, about 1/2 of our interns have been women (including Jessica Mah way back in the ancient days). 13 to nothing is not something that happens if you want to make gender balance a reasonable priority.
One interesting side note; David Weekly is working on a service for sharing with extended family. He ran Facebook ads with the lines, "Do you want to be a good aunt?" and "Do you want to be a good uncle?".
The aunt ad got 89 clicks. The uncle ad got 1. Yikes.
That's a really good point, Chris.
It suggests that something is wrong with the *culture* of Square that something like this would happen.
As for Weekly's aunt/uncle experiment, it sounds like the aunts care enough to click. It makes me wonder why the uncles don't.
I saw that new service Chris - I wonder if it had anything to do with where their ads were shown ? And what the ads looked like ? Are females more inclined to click fb ads for instance ? Anyone have any stats ?
David told me that the ads were targeted exactly the same way: Men or Women in the US, 21-64, with a college degree.
There was more traffic available for women than men (about 1.5 to 1), but the click numbers were very surprising to him.
7:20 PM Jul 03 2012