Pleased to have been invited (and accepted) to join as an #Editor the Editorial Board of the #journal #Law #Ethics & #Technology via #China #University of #PoliticalScience & #Law

elspub.com/journals/law-ethics…

I posted this on LinkedIn a couple of years ago, but some recent posts made me think it was worth reposting on a platform that people actually read.

No, you don't need to hire more women

You can't solve any problem until you understand the problem that you're trying to solve and diversity and inclusion (D&I) is no different. I was Director of Studies for Computer Science at Murray Edwards (an all-women Cambridge college), have been Chair of the Microsoft Cambridge D&I Committee and sat on the D&I Council for Microsoft Research (worldwide), so this is a topic that I find myself discussing a lot.

A lot of the D&I-related conversations that I've had over the last few years have begun with someone telling me that their group needs to hire more women (or members of some other under-represented group - feel free to mentally substitute any other such group as you read this post) and asking me how to do it.

The number of women in an organisation is very rarely the underlying problem. It is a trailing indicator of an underlying problem, a spot health check, not an optimisation goal. If hiring more women is really the most important requirement, it's easy to solve: walk into any unemployment office and you'll find around half of the people there are women looking for jobs. Of course, most won't have the skills that you need (that, after all, is why you have a hiring process involving CVs, interviews, and so on) and hopefully that gives you a hint that just hiring people because they are women isn't actually the right solution.

It's very easy to set up metrics about number of women in each organisation and drive evaluation of culture based on that. This can often make inclusion worse for your company. Imagine being a woman in an all-hands meeting when someone in a leadership position puts up a graph of the number of women in the org and congratulates the leadership on the fact that it's going up. Your first thought will probably be something along the lines of 'was I hired just to meet some quota?' Your second (more worrying) thought may be 'do all of my co-workers think I was hired to meet some quota?' Now, you're immediately second-guessing your own competence and expecting other people to think you're underqualified.

So why should a company care about the number of women in a group? If just hiring more women doesn't solve the problem, that suggests that what we really want to do is hire and retain the most qualified people; if a particular group is underrepresented, that may be because your hiring and retention favours or disadvantages some people for reasons other than competence. If the best candidates are self-deselecting before you even get them to interview, that's a problem. If the best candidates are being filtered out because HR doesn't really understand the job, or because your hiring process magnifies implicit biases, that's a problem. If the best people are leaving because of your team culture, that's a problem.

When I've talked about D&I, I've often been approached by people afterwards saying that D&I is great, that helping disadvantaged people is nice, but that they need to focus first on business impact. This misses the point. Companies don't engage in D&I activities to be nice or to help people. Companies engage in D&I activities because hiring and retaining the best people has a greater business impact then hiring and retaining the best out of an arbitrary subset of the candidate pool. It's important to keep that in mind with diverse hiring: you are not doing diverse candidates a favour by hiring them, they are doing you a favour by allowing you to benefit from their skills and unique perspectives.

Various studies have shown that teams with diverse perspectives do better. It's easy to focus on a single dimension here but a team of male, rich, white, Eton-educated, Oxford PPE graduates will not get much benefit if they start hiring female, rich, white, Eton-educated, Oxford PPE graduates. Diversity of viewpoints comes from a large number of axes, including education, interests, gender, ethnicity, and so on. Optimising for a single dimension will not give you the desired results.

Even though the root problem for your company is not the number of women that you employ, that statistic is still an easy metric to give us a quick culture health check. In the last few years, the number of women graduating from computer science degrees in the UK has remained at around 20%, so at first glance you should expect an organisation that hires computer science graduates to be about 20% female.

That high-level stat doesn't tell the whole story though. As a middle-class white boy, there are a lot of conversations I never had. No one told me I shouldn't be interested in computers because they're a girl's thing. No one called me a race traitor for being interested in mathematics because it's not a white thing. No one told me 'boys can't code'. No one ignored me as a possible candidate for extra classes in a STEM subject because I was a boy. In my time at Murray Edwards, I heard stories like these from countless (female) STEM students about their time at school.

Any woman who even made it into the first year of an undergraduate computer science programme overcame far more obstacles than someone like me. By the age of 18, they've already shown a passion for the subject that let them push through these barriers. The fact that many will have left the field in spite of their aptitude is a separate problem that schools need to solve. As an employer, are you more interested in the candidates who care deeply about the subject, or the ones that coasted through looking for a well-paid job? If it's the former, then you should probably expect more than 20% of your candidate pool to be women. A lot of under-represented groups are far less under-represented in the top 10% of a field than in the field as a whole. That still doesn't mean that's the metric that you should optimise for, just a suggestion of where your ballpark culture health check should be.

So why is your group less than 20% female? It might be simply a small group. For a team of five people, assuming that 20% of the qualified candidate pool is female and that you hire at random from that pool, you have around a 33% chance of being an all-male team. If you're hiring for a particularly rare skill set, there's a good chance that this will be higher: you're relying on candidates being available on the job market at the same time that you're hiring. The same probabilities work with respect to the available candidate pool: if there are only three qualified candidates on the job market at any given time, there's a >50% chance that they'll all be male. Groups that can hire speculatively (bring in competent people as they become available, rather than needing to hire someone this month) have a big advantage here, by being able to hire the most competent people when they're available.

Does your hiring process favour a particular group? I'm not going to go into detail here because there's a staggeringly large amount of research on this topic. Whoever designs your company's hiring process needs to read a decent selection of this research and consciously design the process to minimise implicit bias. If no one has done this for your company then there's a very good chance that implicit bias is the dominant factor in hiring outcomes. This isn't limited to decisions made by humans. Amazon famously tried to use machine learning for hiring based on their current employee profiles and it learned that being male correlated strongly with being a good hire, so used that as the key metric.

Do your culture or your HR policies favour retention of a particular group? The biggest single improvement that you can make for retaining women is, somewhat counter-intuitively, to improve paternity leave. If you offer six months maternity leave and six weeks paternity leave, then a mother in your team will be four and a half months behind a father. Worse, every manager of a team will have a higher expectation that women on their team may disappear with short notice for longer than men. There are lots of other subtle ways that team culture can favour groups, such as promoting people who speak a lot in meetings and so on.

Gender breakdown isn't the only misleading metric. A lot of gender pay-gap reporting is nonsense because it shows that men and women of the same grade are paid the same, but doesn't account for promotional velocity or the relative expertise of people at a particular grade. If you're using any such metric then you need to be very careful that you treat it as a diagnostic indicator, not as an optimisation goal.

Having a particular group under-represented in your workforce is almost certainly a symptom of an underlying problem but if you try to treat the symptom without treating the cause then you will fail.

Seychelles to hold rerun presidential election after no outright winner
https://www.africanews.com/2025/09/28/seychelles-to-hold-rerun-presidential-election-after-no-outright-winner/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Africanews @africanews-euronews

Seychelles to hold rerun presidential election after no outright winner | Africanews

With no outright winner in Seychelles’ presidential electio n, the country will hold a rerun vote between the two main contenders, the electoral authority said Sunday.

^Africanews

「私たちがここでしているのは、人間性がまだ残っていること、そしてすべての手段が尽きたときにも立ち上がろうとする人々がまだいると示すこと」

「ですが、これは最後の手段です。本来、この任務は存在しなくてもよいはずなのです」

「ガザに近づくほど事態がエスカレートし、攻撃が増える危険性が高まります。ここ数週間、私たちの任務に対する攻撃が激化し、複数の船が損壊しました。

ドローンを使って爆発物や化学物質、正体不明の物体を船やその周辺に投下するという、私たちを脅し、パレスチナと連帯する人々を沈黙させて怖がらせ、さらにパレスチナ人を非人間化しようとする必死の試みが続いています」

グレタ・トゥーンベリさん「恐れているのはイスラエルではなく、人間性を失ったように見える世界」
huffingtonpost.jp/entry/story_…

グレタ・トゥーンベリさん「恐れているのはイスラエルではなく、人間性を失ったように見える世界」

ガザへ支援物資を届けに向かう「グローバル・スムード船団」への妨害と攻撃が続く中、政府が船団への支援を表明する動きもある。

^{國﨑万智（Machi Kunizaki） (ハフポスト)}

BREAKING: Chinese leader Xi Jinping is planning to press Trump to formally state that the U.S. “opposes” Taiwan’s independence, per WSJ

#news #finance #economics #stocks #options

credo valga la pena conservare quel podcast, lo trovate anche qui
grafton9.net/tmp/raiplay-centr…

ricordatevi: quando trovate qualcosa di interessante sul web, scaricatelo, copiatelo, diffondetelo. e conservatelo a casa, offline.

• Sensitive content
• Parola filtrata: nsfw

Clicca per aprire/chiudere

#nsfw #nudity #nude #female #girl #bigtits #breasts #titsnthat #titjob #tits #cumshot

Check the profile for more 18+ content

Weapons is interesting. I will say I heard Katya's cackle through the entire movie.

Not horror, very thriller.

We released Kaidan 0.13 🎉

kaidan.im/2025/09/21/kaidan-0.…

Shutdown Meeting On for Monday, OPEC+ Likely to Boost Crude Again, More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-09-28/shutdown-meeting-monday-opec-likely-to-boost-crude-again-more?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Podcasts @podcasts-bloomberg

Fix some TROMjaro recent issues - forum.tromjaro.com/t/fix-some-…

#linux #tromjaro #arch #manjaro #xfce

Fix some TROMjaro recent issues

I am trying to release a new ISO but there are some issues with it. So it may be delayed. In the meantime here are some things that need manual interventions.

^{TROMjaro Forum}

Caivano, proiettile a messa a don Patriciello: fermato un uomo, scorta rafforzata. Meloni: criminali
https://www.lastampa.it/cronaca/2025/09/28/news/caivano_proiettile_a_messa_a_don_patriciello_fermato_un_uomo_scorta_rafforzata_meloni_criminali-15328417/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Pubblicato su Le notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo @le-notizie-dall-italia-e-dal-mondo-LaStampa

Caivano, proiettile a messa a don Patriciello: fermato un uomo, scorta rafforzata. Meloni: criminali

Azione intimidatoria verso il parroco che si batte contro la camorra

^{La Stampa}

Perfectly explains the shit I get from jerk fedi.

[they claim it's their right to bother others but know they would face repercussions IRL so have staked out that space online where anonymity is possible. what annoys me is how this became intertwined with people with conservative opinions but who aren't assholes. of course wokeism is partly to blame here too]

youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA?si=lCPNVD…

Magnificent 7 Is Passe. This Group of AI Stocks Can Replace It
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-28/magnificent-7-is-passe-this-group-of-ai-stocks-can-replace-it?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Profiles @profiles-bloomberg

“Server admin, you are. Edit your instance’s details in the map, you must.” – Master Yoda

fediversemap.com/en/server_adm…

#fediverse #mastodon #admin #server

Discover Fedimap - Your Gateway to the Fediverse

Join the rebellion with Fedimap—explore the galaxy to find your hidden rebel base (Server).

^{fediversemap.com}

🥩 Gryll Kloob

some.pics/68d937aee57af #photography

Il Sassuolo supera l'Udinese, 3-1
https://www.agi.it/sport/news/2025-09-28/calcio-sassuolo-udinese-risultato-33377538/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Pubblicato su Sport @sport-Agenzia_Italia

Another day, another… “Three people were killed and eight others injured after a person on a boat fired shots at a waterfront bar in the coastal #NorthCarolina city of Southport, a city spokeswoman told ABC News” #GunViolence abcnews.go.com/US/3-dead-8-...

3 dead, 8 injured after shoote...

3 dead, 8 injured after shooter in boat opens fire on North Carolina waterfront bar: Official

Someone on the boat opened fire on the American Fish company, an official said.

^{Darren Reynolds (ABC News)}

Xtro from 1983 is a ooey-gooey gorefest sci-fi/horror flick that is one I actually like quite a bit. Xtro II: The Second Encounter sucked.

Read the review from February at wp.me/p9XNnZ-5Zs

#blog #review #90s #xtro #sciencefiction #horror

Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991)

Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review descending down from the stars! In 1983, Xtro came out to little fanfare and a lot of negative reviews. It found itself on the infamous Video Nasties list in…

^wp.me

Igreja Matriz de Mértola - Portugal 🇵🇹

Originally a late 12th Century Mosque was converted into a Church after Christian reconquest of Mértola in 13th Century.

Easterners renovated it late in 15th Century. In 1506, Duarte de Armas painted chapel's minaret and timber roof truss. In mid-16th Century, Pedro Dias and Fernão Pires documented building changes, including replacing minaret with belltower and adding merlons to troofline. Belltower ornamentation is 17th-18th Century.

#archaeohistories

silent sunday morning

#streetphotography #strassenfotografie #urbanphotography #fotografie #photography #fotografia #kassel #tree #sunrise #silentsunday #nikonphotography #nikon #germany

Hand held moon shot with the 70-200mm lens from the dirt at Legacy Fields in Tracy.

#photography #moon #moonPhotography

#52WochenFotoChallenge 2025/39 Überbewertet

Ja, so eine Aussicht ist wirklich überbewertet. Statt dessen gibt es grüne Schallschutzwände.

#photography #fotografie

"I'm a wizard, mind you!" 🪄

Seems like I've finally found an approach to watercolours that doesn't feel confusing or overwhelming. It mostly came down to keeping my tools super simple and easy to manage!

#watercolor #dnd #doodle #art #mastoArt #creativeToots #traditionalArt

voller worte: ach nee, oder? voller-worte.de/ach-nee-oder/

#Blog

ach nee, oder?

Eigentlich könnte ich ganz viele ach nee sagen. Virtuell und ganz real im Leben! Du bist falsch da reagierst du über du bist so schroff und viel zu gradeaus Das ist falsch das ist nicht richtig unf…

^{voller worte}

"And I say heyeyeyeyyyyyyy, heeeey ey ey"

#adhd #adhdmeme #meme #adhs #tdah

#SilentSunday

A #butterfly (#PontiaEdusa? #PontiaDaplidice?) enjoying the #morning sun

#Schmetterling #Resedafalter #WestlicherResedaweißling #easternBathWhite #BathWhite #ButterflyMonday #Schmetterlingsmontag #InsektenSamstag #InsectSaturday #stillerSonntag #Morgenrunde #morningWalk #Morgen #autumnVibes #Herbst #autumn #autumnal #fall #fallVibes #Natur #nature #countryside #rural #peaceful #serene #sunrise #Sonnenaufgang #Morgensonne #morningSun #goldenHour #goldeneStunde #Biederitz

Non è più solo questione di gusto. Dietro ogni sorso di vino o birra si nascondono meccanismi biologici precisi: tannini che chiudono i canali dell’acqua nella tua bocca, RNA del lievito che crea torbidità su richiesta, solfiti che alterano il tuo microbiota intestinale, e ora persino un test rapido che rivela se quella birra “senza glutine” lo è davvero. La scienza non brinda più in silenzio: osserva, misura, svela. E ci chiede di bere con un po’ più di consapevolezza.

futuroprossimo.it/2025/09/nuov…

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

Charlie Kirk memorial fountain.

👉👈🥺

My world in 1 photo

.

.

.

.

#betergejatdanslechtbedacht #streetphotography #myworldinonephoto #youbringonthesun #youmakeitshine #leeuwarden #photography #gabekamphuis #visualstoryteller #photovisionary

here’s how putin is saving russian-ukraine citizens from the kiev regime:

2014–2021 (8 years of “protection”): ~13–14k dead (~1.5–2k/year)
2022–2025 (3 years of “special operation”): hundreds of thousands dead

so yeah, clearly all about saving people

#Politics #Russia #RussiaUkraineWar #ukraine #Putin

Clearing out old stuff from the kids’ rooms:

Me - I read this book to you every night, you loved it. I could recite it from memory.

Them - I’ve never seen that book before in my life.

i have just done my monthly taxes. since mid august (when i had to stop sales to the US*), my income has plummeted and i'm now making around 1/6 (if that) of what i was making before. we cannot survive on this.

if what la poste says is correct, i'll find out tomorrow whether i can realistically resume shipping to the US anytime in the foreseeable future. if i can't ... ...
i don't even know.

*as a result of trump's tariffs and the removal of the de minimis exemption. my work is technically exempt, but unless i can find a feasible/affordable shipping option, and one that allows for the exemption (not all do), i'm doomed.