# Diversity is more than a hiring quota

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# Diversity is more than a hiring quota

Restored from Instagram stories · 10 December 2023

there are some additional notes I'd add to the pictures we posted in the previous section.

1. as most people know, hiring in our co. was always a choice where every FTE in our co. had a vote and it needs to be unanimous

2. never took for gender or any other DEI requirement. it was plain simple. pass the test, appear for interview.

but few days before I was checking our stat.

we have 20+ people in our venture studio now.

60:50 - ratio of men to women
50:50 - ratio of men to women in engineering

and 80% of our team are engineers. it was a surprise for us that we actually managed to build an engineering team where half of them were women.

something that doesn't just easily happen.

and every one of them? passed our infamous L1 and L2 tests.

so, as our team's diversity is rapidly increasing - we could see that it really did affect our products and how we talked with people.

it shaped our experiences in how we could talk to people and find better ways in solving problems.

our products became better and we were able to research and see how it's useful and how it impacts different users.

we didn't have certain biases - which would have been there if it was an all male team.

---
so you could understand why companies want to hit on diversity when they hire.

it's not because they want to hit a quota on hiring, but because of the impact it does on their products and services especially when it's catering to the large population in a society.

however there are few troubles.

so I've been full time CEO for around a year, hired my first chief of staff - built the team, and I've been continuously learning.

one of the biggest problem is - i have seriously zero freaking clue of how I built a gender diverse team without implementing policies to shape that.

never had any quota. never had policies. and equal number of men and women have always applied to our tests/hiring programmes

it all just happened naturally - which large teams put policies and quotas to fill in, (which actually leads to substandard people filling in)

so until and unless i have figured how to exactly choose great people to be in our team systematically and also ensure its diverse, i wouldn't be able to have much say in it.

this growing diversity started other problems.

you finish your studies in a boys school, or in all boys college, applies to women as well.

or even if you are in a co-ed institution, most men and women rarely talk. most because of rules by organizations or if you talk, it's spun off as a romantic story by your peers.

people don't realise this has an adverse effect in workplaces where men do not know or have zero clue on how to talk to women.

most come off as a creeps, or avoid women altogether in all discussions, or will make things more awkward than it should be - leading to unhealthy workplace attitudes.

worse? they'd abuse without even knowing that it's abuse. or blatant sexual harassment takes place.

assimilation in our team has never been a problem, but we do conduct regular scenario based experiments on what is harassment and what is not - and this is a comprehensive  training that allows us all to have a healthy environment.

although the government has made it mandatory to have POSH in companies, most startups have zero clue on setting those up.

or have zero clue on how you can continuosly educate your employees on how to do that.

this has been one of our efforts in our pondy startup community to share our learnings to other companies as well.

if you do think your organization needs it and you are a decision maker - reach out to my CoS and he'll be happy to share you resources so you can conduct in your workplaces to make your workplaces more inclusive.

yeah, so the bottom line is - men not knowing how to talk to women normally without involving romance is a huge problem in workplaces.

and women silently endure huge amounts of harassment in most workplaces in one way or the other which might start from a simple comment.

and men have zero freaking clue that the comment that they passed as a joke is completely insensitive.

or - they super treat women making them downright uncomfortable when all they ask is to be treated equally.

-- best part? if you have a healthy working environment, you'd be able to function normally, crack the same jokes among each other.

and also truer part? i am super scared of what might happen when the team size grows and how to handle this at scale.

and it's safe to say i have zero idea. and I am figuring things as it grows

so, kudos to the HR teams at various companies who are doing a good job. i know you guys receive a lot of shit hate, but I guess you guys need a lot of credits in managing workplaces - especially in larger organizations.

phew.

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