I mean, there's one of two possibilities -- either in fact there's something about people who are very similar to me that makes them the most qualified OR there's a lot of talent being overlooked and missed and my company is missing out here.
The third and more likely option is that you're sampling from a population that looks mostly like you. If software developers are 90% male and men and women are equally competent, you should still expect to hire 9 times more men than women even if you could pick the best candidates every time.
But where did you get this measure of the population from? I'm skeptical that "population of software engineers I'm familiar with" is equal to "total universe of software engineers." And of course the "equally competent" -- well, if we're already deciding ahead of time that we know who's competent and who's not, I think that might be part of the problem, no?
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The third and more likely option is that you're sampling from a population that looks mostly like you. If software developers are 90% male and men and women are equally competent, you should still expect to hire 9 times more men than women even if you could pick the best candidates every time.
But where did you get this measure of the population from? I'm skeptical that "population of software engineers I'm familiar with" is equal to "total universe of software engineers." And of course the "equally competent" -- well, if we're already deciding ahead of time that we know who's competent and who's not, I think that might be part of the problem, no?