My sense is that most responses here are only to the title of the submission (the actual article title is "Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case").
Skimming through said actual article, it looks like the "against men" hiring discrimination is ~completely driven by this:
"...In female-dominated occupations such as cleaner, childcare provider, preschool teacher, accounting clerk, and enrolled nurse, positive employer response rates were much higher for women than for men. This is in line with earlier findings in different countries..."
Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".
It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if men were clearly the (sole) group being wronged by that.
(Or do millions of men quietly aspire to jobs cleaning up dirty toilets, dirty diapers, and dirty bedpans, and I'm just ignorant of their dreams?)
This is pretty dismissive of the men who want to work in what you consider low status crappy jobs. There are plenty of men out there who expressly go to school with the goal of being an educator, for example. The discrimination those men face is very real.
It's ok to admit that there are some areas society has decided men shouldn't work in. It doesn't diminish the struggles of anyone else
I can speak for myself and some of my male friends and say that there have been quite a lot of us who would have loved to become e.g. a kindergartner or a nurse.
While some actually did, they would not exactly say they "love it" anymore because of low pay and other harsh working conditions. I did not pursue this dream any longer because I realized that it is hard to find a woman when the majority of women prefer to choose men with high status and income (I do not want to generalize or be sexist here but I have the feeling that most women share this preference).
> The discrimination those men face is very real.
Yes, definitely. I can somehow understand how parents might be uncomfortable with a male kindergartner going to toilet with their child but there actually are men who can do this without being aroused or harassing the child.
Yes and no. For instance - there's generally a big gap between "go to school with the goal of being an educator", and being a preschool teacher. At least in the U.S., the latter tends to offer far lower status, pay, job security, etc. than being (say) a 7th grade teacher.
Between the low desirability, high turnover, and "we must fill the opening" nature of most bottom-end, female-dominated jobs, I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs. Apply a bunch of time, especially when unemployment is low, and it's pretty likely that you'll be hired because they had no acceptable alternative. Or (say) a preschool wanted to have one male teacher, to be a social role model for little boys. Or (I have seen this done) a bookkeeping dept. wanted a couple males, to dial down the social drama that they experienced with a all-female clerkforce.
And for those concerned less about individual rights (to get the job one really wants, etc.) than about the larger-scale social downsides of discrimination, making it more difficult for men to obtain some types of low-status, low-pay jobs is a "pretty weak poison".
> Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".
What an absurd interpretation. It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if women having an advantage in certain jobs is somehow a downside, just because these jobs are "low status." It's not as if a man who gets rejected as a cleaner is going to instead become a FAANG engineer.
> Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".
That reflects an outmoded view of the labor market. These are good jobs for people who lack a college degree. Lots of the women in my wife's family have similar jobs. It's not like their brothers--i.e. men from similar educational and class backgrounds--are becoming doctors instead of nurses, or college professors instead of preschool teachers.
Yes, to a degree. But there are quite a few male-dominated fields with similar career prospects - semi-skilled building trades, road construction, sanitation work, truck driver, etc., etc. And there are often male niches within the female-dominated jobs - for adult patients who may be infirm, any decent-sized health facility will need some larger & more muscular workers (very likely male) on every nursing shift.
Yes - the title here was so egregiously editorialized that I'm not even going to revert it.
Submitters: breaking the site guidelines like this will eventually cause your account to lose submission privileges. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and note this one:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
It takes a certain sort of mindset to ignore the fact that there are many male dominated roles that are low-status, low-pay and "crappy". Not to mention that men dominate fields where the work is physically dangerous; front-line military, forestry, oil rigs, sea fishing, construction and mining.
I think this requires major introspection, it relies on the idea that representation is only important in higher paying jobs when that still means exploiting yourself for a corporation
It's incredible the amount of mental gymnastics you do when men are being denied whole careers simply because of their gender and you still somehow try to spin this as women being the real victims.
During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well. But what bothers me more is the ageism. The number of times an old person has been rejected from a job is too damn high. The reasons have always been "he may not work well with young people", "seniority complex", "he is over qualified" etc. Most of the times, they were more than qualified. I fear when I am into 40s or 50s, I will face the same discrimination.
After age 40 I did a coding bootcamp to change careers.
Another guy in the camp was doing the same. We compared notes on interviews. One day he gets a call back from a recruiter and he put the recruiter on speaker phone. She told them they liked him but chose someone else because (drum roll) culture fit.
He asked what she meant by that and she outright said: "The other person is younger. You're old." We were shocked and he pretended he didn't quite hear her... she repeated it word for word. I don't think she even realized it was illegal.
The other guy never made a complaint, he needed a job and I could hardly blame him not wanting to put up a fuss / fight over a job at a place he didn't want to be a part of anyway ... it was shocking to hear it made that clear.
Long run we both got jobs and are doing well, but man... that call sticks in the back of my head anytime I think of job hunting.
Would be interesting to compare this across areas. My impression is that eg Finance (another popular destination for mid-career switches) is far more open in that regard. Experience, even if it's in a different field (as long as it's a technical role or one that will give you a rich set of contacts) seems to generally confer seniority. Would be interesting if someone could weigh in.
I entered the industry in my early 30s and remember getting a really helpful piece of advice from a meetup talk. Enthusiasm for learning and the technology is a counter for most of the ageism in interviews. It will stop people from assuming you're set in your ways, a curmudgeon, out of date, or anything on those lines.
The "culture fit" excuse is a tough one, though. That framing can be used to unknowingly discriminate in all kinds of ways.
I think due to the massive influx of people into this profession, the median age is still pretty low, but I think this will stabilize, and the age pyramid will look more even. As good, productive people will get older, recruiters will realize that people don't go senile at 40.
I reckon that someone in their 40s or 50s could probably make enough to retire from recording interview rejections and suing for discrimination. I've heard it happen a couple times myself as a junior employee, and had to tell hiring managers that what they were saying was illegal.
> During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well.
At my work recently, we interviewed a white male and an asian female for the job. To my knowledge, this is the first female applicant we've gotten because they generally get snapped up by higher prestige/visibility roles. I've interviewed many people before, and the manager will request feedback about the applicants and use whichever had the highest score on a rubric. This time, the manager simply asked "please tell me if anyone has an objection to hiring [asian female]". I was shocked at my manager's language, as it implies the default action is to hire rather than to not hire (the latter being typical in companies). The white male was not discussed at all in my presence.
I'm strongly considering tipping off the white male applicant that he was discriminated against and that he may want to consider legal action. This is one of a number of what I consider discriminatory behaviors my employer (large company you've heard of) has displayed. Companies need to be fearful of engaging in all types of discrimination, not just ones that are culturally-sanctioned, and follow the law.
Please let them know, but do so as anonymously as is possible. Consider an email from a proton burner address via VPN, printed letter mailed from somewhere other than where you live (maybe even from your office if there are no cameras). Depending on the size of the company, discovery during a lawsuit like this can get insanely detailed and expensive.
I've also seen similar behavior on interview loops. I also would love for there to be fear of engaging in illegal discriminatory behavior for companies.
However, as an individual person, the cost/benefit equation on whistleblowing just seems so so bad. It just doesn't seem worth it as an individual. If these illegal things are going to be pushed back against, it seems like it'll need to be a coordinated/collective action.
I'm almost 50. I've been working in tech since 1996, and at this point, despite being a strong and seasoned engineer, I'm getting comments like, "it's different now", or "back in your day", etc, and the very young engineers fresh from school are the ones throwing this around. Those with a few years of experience under their belt don't.
It's really disheartening, but it's also my job to train these bozos and turn them into good engineers, which they most certainly are not coming fresh from school.
I hope these people are in the minority. I'm 21, I have my first internship coming up in the summer, and I am ecstatic to learn from engineers more experienced than me, no matter what age.
Yes and no to fresh engineers being good. I’ve met many fresh engineers that integrated and soon outperformed their older peers in a couple months. My first engineer position I went from new hire to lead on most projects in about a year. I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers (expect one he was amazing and I learned a lot from him). There a lot of good and bad engineers and experience doesn’t make up for bad engineers.
I'm sure there is ageism from younger devs, but be sure not to confuse it with respect. In my experience, younger devs (like me at the time) were always excited to learn from older devs.
Recognizing seniority is hard. Computer Science is a field were a teenager in front of a computer quickly feels like a god. You can do anything!
But getting that out of their thinking takes time. And that is IMHO what you experience. It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.
I am in my early 40s as an architect arguing with our mixed-age teams to give me the necessary rationale before making stupid "it's different now" decisions.
I'm in my 50s and haven't seen it in that overt form. Maybe a silicon valley thing? I've only worked on the east coast. On the other hand, I have missed out on jobs because of culture fit concerns that have an age component: I'm not sensitive enough. Not mean, but not as...nurturing?...as companies seem to now expect. Things were definitely more rough and tumble when I got into this field and I really do prefer that, so I can't deny, I don't fit into modern company cultures as well.
It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more. So like, seeing that type of application is in an indication that the person's first twenty years of career haven't yielded the kinds of achievements and contact network that have bumped them out of the hustle and into the world where they no longer beg for jobs because they're being actively head-hunted.
Obviously, there are loads of reasons why this might legitimately be someone's situation, including midlife career-, locale- or industry-changes. But it could be another vector for bias.
> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.
I really wish people would stop this. I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time. My friends tend to come from outside of work and they're not software devs. It definitely is age-ism adjacent; having to "network" to get a job is much harder after you get older.
Maybe, but this feels like making excuses for something that is part of a big and obvious pattern.
FWIW, ageism is the one form of outright and open discrimination that I have witnessed in tech companies. None of the unconscious bias, microagession, dog whistle, tone stuff. Just straight up insulting people in the open to their face for their age. And I’ve seen it done to justify crappier technical solutions. The problem is real and out in the open. No need for elaborate excuses.
> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.
This is akin to saying, "by 23, you should have moved out of your parents' house, otherwise, what's wrong with you?": it renders the speaker's presumptions into judgments.
> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.
I think that is an assumption made by people who have had a single smooth career trajectory, but it often does not hold water.
Making a career change in your 30s or 40s is a thing. Honestly, I think it’s one aspect of the US that makes the economy robust and resilient.
Having made a bad career choice (e.g., former employer) is also a thing. I know that there is one place a friend of mine worked at that was basically a real-life Dilbert documentary. The specific work she did was right up her alley, but the organization was just an absolute train wreck. The few good people (including her) in that org left as quickly as they professionally could. Sadly, that was her second bum employer in a row, so all of her previous work contacts were not recent.
I wish more people would be open-minded to these possibilities.
I'm in my 40's have been with the same company (FAANG) for over a decade. I'd say a majority of the management (including engineering) is in their mid-30's to 50's. It looks like the entirety of the senior management in engineering in my org is in their 40's.
There are fewer individual contributors in their 40's, but I know several (some moved from manager back to IC, others stayed IC).
Maybe this is a bigger issue at startups, where the founders are in their 20's?
All the DEI brochures I have seen show young good looking people with different skin colors. There are no disabled people, no ugly people, no fat people, no old people.
I share these concerns as well, my advice to anyone that will listen is to save everything you can because this industry chews people up & spits them back out a lot faster than you would expect. And if you want longevity you had better try and get into management at a larger corporation.
I'm 50+, and perhaps I've just been lucky...but its not been an issue for me. I got my last job 18 months ago and I'm looking now. I think a lot of what people think is ageism, is wageism.. but that's just a hunch.
In my experience, if you work in areas with enough demand - its not an issue (eg you work the 'ends' of tech - really old or really new). If the demand isn't there, they probably don't want to pay for a senior employee when a fresh college grad could do it for half the cost ?
Anyway - fear not for your 40s or even your 50s!! Old geeks never die...
Off topic, but this is the first time I’ve seen your username. I would love to compare sometime how we both came to such similar kinda odd usernames, haha.
Another point to where the crypto space shines, for compensation.
Most of the experienced people were involved in some major fuckup not long back. Just roll a new ident and build. The market is insatiable. A segment of the market thinks they want to “doxx” every builder, but they don’t matter.
As I have gotten older, my pay has continued to increase. "Over qualified" means that I want too much money. (I don't apologize for that. I bring more value than I did 20 years ago. Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.)
Also, if you've got someone with 20 years experience, and they're willing to accept the same pay as someone with 5 years experience... are they really willing? Or are they going to bail for more money at the first opportunity? If you hire them, you have to worry about how long they'll stick.
So "more than qualified" can be a real thing, not just a discrimination thing.
BC (Before COVID), I was having trouble finding a qualified person for a role on my team (Operations, not Engineering). I was getting a lot of candidates apply that looked the same on paper but weren't good fits (they claimed to be technical but weren't that technical, poor communication skills, etc.).
So I went in the tool and looked through the discard pile and found more diverse candidates that hadn't been presented to me. One looked amazing—over a decade of directly relevant experience, Oxford grad, etc. I asked the recruiter why she hadn't given me that resume and she said "She's overqualified, she's got 15-20 years experience."
I was livid and said "I don't care if they have 20 years experience, I want someone who is qualified!" We ended up hiring her and she's been absolutely wonderful, and is still on the team ~5 years later.
I don't think the recruiter was consciously discriminating against the candidate, but there were definite implicit biases that she wasn't aware of.
Implicit bias training is now required. I personally found it to be very helpful, and try and be aware of my own biases. I always hire the candidate that I think will be best for the job, but try and always find a diverse group of candidates to talk to. It's a better process, and makes for a better (and more diverse) team.
I’m somewhat sympathetic toward your POV, but the average tenure in this industry is like 1.5 years or something like that. It’s not like young people stick around for a long time, and I would wager that older people are more likely to stick with a company (the older people I know are more likely to talk about “company loyalty” than my age cohort).
I had interviews with people that were overqualified; I told them it is their choice if to take the position or not. I learned that overqualified people tend to leave after a few months to something more interesting.
Also "I want too much money" is a thing if all you need is a low level tech and the applicant is an expert in the field. It is not worth paying for expertise that you will not need. For example I hired a guy to do some very boring, routine cleanup in some databases; if I would hire a real DBA and pay double, what for? In this case I pay for the work and result, not for the expertise.
But to be fair I always tell the applicants what is the situation and give them the choice. I know it is a very rare case in the industry.
More than just wanting too much money, they think you are going to be bored going back to gruntwork and if you are bored you'll be looking to switch jobs again in a year.
The sad thing is someone like that would probably produce a better product thanks to their years of experience, and even possibly become a mentor to the rest of the team, but that's not the kind of thing recruiters think about.
>>Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.
I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'. And, as you said, there is always the fear they will leave tomorrow for 2x the money...
> If you hire them, you have to worry about how long they'll stick.
That needs to become outdated thinking, since most people but particularly the younger ones, don't stick around any job for more than a year or two max regardless.
I joke with my age-peers that I'd bring up ageism in our DEI outlets in my current company, but I'm afraid they'd decide to kill us and use us for fertilizer if I speak up ;)
Dark humor with an underlying truth. Ageism isn't seen as an "ism" by anyone except those over the age of 40.
Remote work helps a lot in that case. I got my current remote job, which was specifically advertising for young developers, without mentioning my age. They know I'm an old fogey now, but that was after I had proven myself.
Yes, I had to severely abbreviate my resume. But no misinformation passed my lips or fingertips. The insurance paperwork, with age related info, all went through a third party.
And working remotely suits me down to the toes. On the internet nobody has to know you're a dog.
My company appears to be extremely concerned with discrimination and inclusion. Been there less than a year, and I had already three trainings on the topic.
The emphasis is very clearly on certain minorities. There's not a single "senior" on the training material videos/pictures and the issue of ageism is barely mentioned. There's clearly no will to hire older employees. I wonder what I could do about this at my level. I'm 45+ and already feel out of place and just "tolerated", don't want to raise any attention on me.
I'm curious if the ageism bothers you more because you know that will impact you specifically or is there another reason?
I agree ageism is total crap, but so is all forms of discrimination - it just seems that we will all ending up aging whereas the other forms are limited to minority groups who probably get the double whammy of minority + age.
If a 70 year old wants to churn out the same amount/quality of React code I get from everyone else on my team, I really couldn't care less
When it comes to more senior roles, it may not only be ageism, but naturally there are much less open positions and many more people down the pyramid fighting for them
Second this. I helped a guy get into a programming career in his mid-50s. He was/is really sharp but it took forever for somebody to give him an opportunity. He shined when he finally got it but there was a real struggle.
Most of the age discrimination I've ever seen has been anti-Boomerism, not specific fixed ages. i.e. it was "people over 30-40" 20 years ago, and now is basically mainly against people in their 60s+. I've never (as far as I can tell) experienced age discrimination, and I'm >40 now. There may be passive age discrimination (incompatible schedules for people with families, etc.), but most of the companies I've interacted with have been explicitly pro-family which goes against thag.
From perspective of fairly young hiring manager (25y old) it really depended on candidate.
If you changed industries and you want to come in, more than fair. If you have 10+YoE and I know we don't play that much, why would you want to work with us? I am bit wary if those people are teachable.
Please don't take it offensively, I just want to understand better philosophy of people who do only lateral moves for 8+ years (not becoming seniors, not becoming highly paid).
If the case is "not everybody is looking to dedicate their life to work" then its more probable that I will hire young person, as they just might put extra effort, as they maybe haven't chosen the philosophy yet.
If I were a senior manager and I heard that coming from you, you'd hit the unemployment turnstile faster than you could blink. You're being paid to determine whether they can do the job well and are a good team fit. If you don't understand that, then you aren't capable of conducting a quality interview, and you shouldn't be in that position at all.
You might also hire a younger who turns out to not work on bugs because it's beneath them. Or they only want to work on new projects because they went to some uppity college and it would just be wasting their education to work on "old tech".
I've seen those. They suck to work with just as much as an older who is set in their ways.
Honestly, age has nothing to do with either. It's personality.
But for the record, my first hire was 10yrs older than me, my last one is probably 10yrs older as well. So I still value experience of people who are longer in the industry
I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me.
- pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male
- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white
man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.
- people championing all women teams as a win for diversity
- women getting a salary premium to help companies boost DEI "representation"
I think eventually this will be shown for what it is, but it will take a long time. Personally every tech founder I know thinks it's bullshit but won't say it in public.
At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.
Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.
Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.
Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.
Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.
This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.
This is plainly illegal according to the Civil Rights Act, but the courts have watered it down repeatedly. Hopefully the Supreme Court picks up these cases and confirms that Civil Rights Act meant what it said when it said:
>It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. (b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
>- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.
Not surprised to hear people saying this, but am surprised that nobody brings that up as a plainly racist/sexist thing when it is said. Bystander effect?
I have observed some people pushing back, but it's rare. I know there is a fear of dissent to the DEI dogma. Particularly if you're a white man. If you're a minority you have more leeway to dissent and it will be fine you'll just be ignored or perhaps have someone read the pro-DEI talking points to you. After Damore firing most people just think it's not worth it I would guess, why risk it? And if you're a founder why risk a campaign against your company when you need to raise funding etc.
The only person who would gain anything by saying that would be a white man, who would just be told that his opinion isn’t important because he’s a white man.
I sat next to a guy who once complained that our new Pakistani CTO fired our black coworker for no reason (he was a top performer but was called “lazy”) and then proceeded to fire 3 Indians and only bring Pakistani candidates to the final round of interviews. He was called racist for pointing this out by HR (all white women) and he was the next person to be fired and replaced by a Pakistani developer.
Moral of the story being that unless you already have another job lined up you shouldn’t even question things like this publicly as it can cost you your job.
Any time I've pushed back on that racism, the person has redefined racism so that what they are doing isn't racism any more. Typically that involves the phrase "systemic racism" instead, as if the need to qualify the type of racism doesn't invalidate their point.
Unsurprisingly, racists aren't willing to actually discuss racism and instead do whatever they have to in order to justify it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
They’ll just say racism and sexism only exist in a context of oppressed and oppressor. It’s all been carefully worked out by certain academic intellectuals, long before it vectored into the mainstream (apparently by way of Tumblr)
> pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male
is something I've done myself, not to hold anything against the applicants coming in but because HMs have a significant amount of control over the funnel of applications coming in. I want them hustling to encourage women, minorities, veterans, old-timers, re-inventors, people with nonstandard educational paths--people from ALL walks of life who are qualified, to get them to apply. I want it because I firmly believe that will make the engineering departments I work for more healthy.
> people championing all women teams as a win for diversity
I have been on many all-men teams in my career. I wouldn't consider it a specific diversity goal, but I do not think _one_ all-woman team is likely to put a dent in balancing, let alone over-balancing, the scales.
You divide candidates into such stereotypical categories why not throw all of that labeling away and get to know each candidate as unique humans with different skills/personalities and make judgements on those?
It's like you are judging a tasting contest by the color of icing instead of eating it.
> I want them hustling to encourage women, minorities, veterans, old-timers, re-inventors, people with nonstandard educational paths
I'm a vet. This is a band-aid and I'd discourage you from thinking this way because it's short term at best.
If you want to hire more vets then companies need to find where vets are. Some of us use our VA benefits and get a degree, others meet the stress of post-separation and collapse. Both will still end up in the field, but companies will not train or treat them the same. That's why companies are now doing that whole, "atypical background" search. Apprenticeship programs within companies would also strengthen vet (and other DEI category) numbers given the absence of an industry wide apprenticeship program.
It was always my opinion that if the goal is more diverse hiring then more diverse sourcing is required.
Lot of things are illegal but still happen everyday. The violation has to be known to lawmakers and they have to have the will and resources to enforce the penalty. That's not the case here.
As a white man in tech, I often ask myself “do we want to hire more white men?” When I’ve interviewed 5 white guys in a row, for a team comprised of mostly/all white guys, that kind of reflection is important.
I’m not trying to discount your experience in any way and it’s certainly possible that everything you’re describing was actually toxic but I don’t see over-indexing on diversity is as problem in and of itself.
Diverse perspectives are an asset, full stop, and representation matters. Our industry clearly does not know how to address this in a way that makes everyone happy so, in the meantime, if the only reason I’m passed over for a job is because I’m over-represented there, so be it.
Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup.
The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.”
All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.
I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
I can also attest to this, I just left a pretty well-known tech company who leaned hard into DEI in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. The exec team essentially set up quotas, with every race+gender group getting priority over white males. Execs were given bonuses if they increased the percentage of non-white male employees.
The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place.
For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.
> I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.
If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking.
I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them.
The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.
comparing to the population at large isn't the most valid thing to do. Many fields are dominated by women - nursing to name just one. Even within nursing, there are a lot of latino and phillipino nurses. by your logic, the largest ethnic group of nurses in a country like the US or UK should be white women.
HR department at a previous workplace was like that. All women, all friends, all worked with each other or were relatives of someone... their personal lives were entirely intertwined with work. Most weren't at work most days and this was when they had a no work from home policy years ago. Loud personal calls all day long.
I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting.
They would often take longer than their allotted meeting time in meeting rooms because after their meeting someone in there was crying ... why? Who knows... it was only known within that group. It just kept happening over and over... Along with folks storming down the hall all upset, again who knows why. Now stuff happens sometimes at work, no big deal, but running into these exhausting people couple times a week really takes a toll on you.
When were moving offices the tech support team was seated next to HR. At one point HR invited the both all of tech support and HR (at least those at that building) to a meeting to discuss why tech support wasn't "social enough" and "spent all day in their cubes", I duno maybe they're working... Thankfully that got cancelled quickly after a number of people (me included) noted to a VP that "No matter what the reason, there's no way this meeting ends in anything but a total disaster."
Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team and how much work they put into it and so on... I even left those events early because it's a lunch event and I don't want to eat veggie pizza only, I can only take lunch for so long.
> Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team
At some point we have to start recognizing that forcing employees to attend work parties and lunches and other events by using social shame tactics like this creates a hostile work environment.
My team goes through something similar with our sister company that's in the same building. Their product is made better by being ran by social types so their organization is entirely personable, outgoing, and very social. They constantly complain that we don't join them in multi-org events but none of us (including our manager) want to join them. If I had to consistently have small talk with a bunch of socialites, I would quit.
Sounds like an incompetent HR department. I've have experience with similarly composed teams, but they handled themselves professionally at work, and recognized that company events need to be sensitive to the needs of different types of people.
People who don't consider the needs of others are bad employees, regardless of their gender.
If the average person actually knew what these initiatives meant they would be against them. In practice what it does is make it so members of designated groups typically win by default whenever they & other candidates meet minimum requirements for a position. It’s not even good for the people who get promotions faster as a result imo because everyone around them knows things are rigged in their favor.
And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.
I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.
This is my observation as well. Most women don't want to be hired on account of some eng diversity target. It gets really toxic when a company is simultaneously engaging in this kind of discrimination while also harshly cracking down on anyone who points it out.
In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.
If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.
To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.
The rationale being promoted to the corporations by management consultants is that the company will make more money.
>Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.
This is why the Civil Rights Act passed when the congressman from Virginia (can't remember the name) tried to kill it by including women in the bill. A law designed to save the endangered black family was instead coopted to boost the career prospects of successful women, so I guess the poison pill worked despite the bill passing.
So what, let'em choose to work with whoever they want. If it's all women, so be it. Only men? Whatever. I don't wanna work in either of these organizations.
I think the best answer to these divisive, sexist or racist behaviors is to show them in practice they're dumb, kick their ass in the market.
An open-minded, welcoming organization is going to attract the best minds. Collectively, these people will kick those ideological-driven asses.
EDIT: my point is we cannot legislate change to these people's minds. The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society.
If I see a lot of racist behaviors against blacks, or latinos or whatever, I'd be glad to join them and work hard to kick these racists out of the game.
The challenge I have with this is that performance in "the market" does not correlate so easily with the kind of team composition the GP is talking about. And as someone who has worked for large corporations, these companies rarely seem to suffer that much from dysfunctional teams and rotten eggs in key places.
>"The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society."
I'd argue that changing minds does not need to be an objective of legislation. Sometimes there's just a behavior you want to prevent and it doesn't matter if people truly agree with the reason why.
Sure there are. Just not a blatantly sexist culture -they don't fit into-. There are plenty of male dominated companies, with male dominated recruiting teams, that still hire mostly males.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's okay either way, I'm just disagreeing with the idea 'most men' won't participate in such a culture; most men (oftentimes unwittingly) do.
> That excuse might have been entirely accurate though. Most men are indeed not willing to participate in such a blatantly sexist culture.
Right, but that's exactly the sort of problem that these inclusivity initiatives are designed to tackle (they aim to forcibly change the culture to the point that it is no longer prejudiced). That this one was doing the opposite is highly ironic.
I've worked in 2 companies that were majority white and asian women. The degree by which they explicitly favored women and minorities probably bordered on illegal, but you'd have to be stupid to bring it up to anyone. Yay, diversity!
It isn't irony, it is hypocrisy. And they have considered it. When you put the thumbscrews on them, they say things like "You can't discriminate against men" and talk about punching-up versus punching-down, etc. They have a bunch of thought-terminating cliches in place to deal with this already. They will talk about the "larger context" of society, and "every day is already men's day."
There's a pretty funny picture of the HuffPo team at one point and it is just ... young white women. That's it. That's your diversity.
Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?
If so, this should be exploitable by a competitor. Assuming you don't have the bandwidth to directly work for or advise a competitor of this type, you might still be able to benefit as an investor.
If not... I have a hard time getting worked up about this. It's contrary to the dominant narrative, but if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job, I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses, because it's not like there's currently a shortage of those.
[additional note, in response to comments: I agree that this behavior still constitutes an injustice. However, among the numerous injustices in the world, one has to prioritize what to fight. My main point is that, as a practical matter, there are plenty of instances of biased hiring that ALSO reduce overall economic efficiency; let's fight those easier and more broadly profitable battles first.]
,,Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?''
No, if money is used politically. In a free market you would be right, but with the amount of money printing going on, we're not living in a free market.
> if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses
So your only metric for biased hiring practices being problematic is business performance??
> All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.
> I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
They were likely thinking of it in terms of “righting wrongs” in the overall sense by increasing the percentage of women in the company.
Publicly, everyone will swear up and down that “diversity” doesn’t mean “fewer whites/men”, but in practice, it’s how those “ideal” demographic ratios are achieved.
I’ve seen the same anecdotally. Marketing in particular at multiple companies was all white women whereas other departments (even stereotypically non-diverse departments like engineering) where a mix of genders and races.
It was reinforced every time there was a self congratulatory post in the company wide channel referring to the “marketing ladies” great work.
My favorite is when, during a quarterly DEI meeting, the DEI team would show a slide with the pie chart for "diversity when hiring last quarter" - "We hired 70% women! Yoohoo! we're super diverse!" :)
A lot of tech companies prioritize hiring women (whether officially or not) in roles like HR and admin to make their overall diversity numbers look better.
Can confirm, my last company's HR department was 100% women, but it still didn't offset the 90%+ male engineering department enough to satisfy DEI targets
Read the summary. The finding was driven by female-dominated professions. Presumably things like teaching or nursing. Definitely not tech. Research was also done only in Sweden. I've never seen a US tech company that wasn't overwhelmingly white and male.
It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis. I provide some data points having lived in several countries that may offer some insight. Draw your own conclusions.
I got my undergrad degree in Iran (a relatively conservative society with an ultra-conservative even anti-women government), where the ratio of women to men in our computer science class was roughly 60/40 in favor of women. The ratio was similar all across the board in STEM and non-STEM fields as more women were admitted and graduated from universities than men. To get admission in Iran everyone has to go through the same standardized test nationally. Women were scoring better and better in the nationalized test than men every year until they passed men the year I went to school. (The trend continued later even prompting the government to introduce legislation to cap the ratio of women at least in certain programs.)
When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.
I let you judge what caused this discrepancy. But I hope we can all agree the issue is much more complicated than some want to make you believe.
It's because in poor and conservative countries women must choose a high paying job if they want to escape oppression and arranged marriage.
However, the more egalitarian and wealthy a country is, the more women are free to choose which job they like most and they are not so interested in Engineering it seems.
EDIT: Ha, looks like this is just a Jordan Peterson false claim. Women seem to be strongly represented in science and engineering in developed countries. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/women-in-science/
"It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis".
You proceed to answer with a random unsourced assertion that seems to go against current sociological studies.
So I'll answer you with another unsourced hypothesis: you're a man, and you just justified your position in the industry by waving your hand and saying "they don't want it anyway!".
They are not interested in engineering you say? Would you mind giving me an hypothesis off the top of your head as to why that is? I'm sure you'll have a very interesting assertion here aswell.
"Woman does not wish to turn aside from her higher work, which is itself the end of life, to devote herself to government, which exists only that this higher work may be done. Can she not do both? No!" -Lyman Abbott (1903)
or that society is pushing women against science in all countries but in developing countries this is countered by the need to get a high paying job. in wealthy countries you can live comfortably with a regular job so women are just expected to do that. no one is encouraging little girls to choose science; there is no need
>I got my undergrad degree in Iran (a relatively conservative society with an ultra-conservative even anti-women government), where the ratio of women to men in our computer science class was roughly 60/40 in favor of women [...]
>When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.
There are very concerning patterns developing at the moment in the DEI space. DEI efforts, and often those leading them, are increasingly the most biased and close minded parts of the organization. Spreading selected stereotypes and often solving concerns about “discrimination” by being very biased and inequitable.
For example at my last company a report showed that slightly fewer of a certain minority were promoted. This was pointed out and discussed extensively. However when someone pointed out that the same data showed that there were zero of the same minority in performance plans and that everyone on performance plans was a white male, the conversation was shut down. As in it was incredibly important we address this very minor statistical gap on one end, but when the same data suggested that we might be biased against older white males the same DEI department (which had no older white males by the way) shut the convo down immediately.
DEI can’t just be about selected DEI that meets a certain biased definition that is, ironically, not inclusive.
If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot.
This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a pronouns pin and writing them off immediately just as much as seeing an old white man with a camo mouse pad and assuming the worst.
Don't do either of these.
You'd be surprised what differences can be bridged if you approach those different from yourself with patience, love, and toleration.
Remember, it's not really toleration if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept. It's not an impressive moral feat to extend welcome to those who you already felt were on your side.
My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.
At some point, it's federalism live-and-let-live or it's war, kinetic or memetic.
> My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.
Alternative? The people who promulgate the messages are quite aggressive about imposing their values on everyone else.
Genuinely asking: Is there a limit as to viewpoint diversity that should be tolerated in perceptions of diversity? eg. Should viewpoint diversity be extended to welcoming "women shouldn't have the right to vote" or "black people are not human beings"? If so, how does one value an opinion and also the opinion that some opinions are worth less than others?
> If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity
Viewpoint diversity is already included, that's the whole "capitalist take" for why diversity is good for business. With enough different viewpoints informed by different life experiences you uncover solutions to problems a heterogeneous group wouldn't have thought of. So obviously it's not even an issue, right? This is already something that's already done. Well no, because "you know what I mean" -- the literal phrase viewpoint diversity as it's applied in real life is a dog whistle designed to dress up "people don't want to work with the guy who thinks his bigoted takes are just alternative views" in words that the "blue tribe" uses. You people like diversity, right?
> if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept
Look, if you or people who know are actually getting discriminated against because of camo, boots, pickup trucks, hunting as a hobby, or wanting lower taxes. that's just straight up prejudice. Working in the midwest that kind of thing would be crazy since that's like half my coworkers. But again, in real life these kinds of thing only come up when the subtext is "you call yourself tolerant but don't tolerate my intolerance, you hypocrite!"
No doubt I'm sure there will be plenty of disagreement abound in this thread, so to make the discussion easier can we please make the abstract more concrete. I am sincerely open to being way off base so please hit me with all your personal experiences and the views that haven't been tolerated. I am primed and ready to be righteously mad on y'all's behalf.
Viewpoint diversity is very, very important. But for a large contingent of the workforce, their viewpoints are already represented in the numerous implicit and ideological supports that our society has developed, without them even needing to be present: this is called "hegemony".
If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. But one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you. Your status is not threatened by people of different backgrounds coming together and critiquing the processes and pathologies that dominate today (and that white men typically grow up in, and so are already comfortable navigating to the point they assume that it is the natural way of things). It will make everything better for everyone if we take the time to put effort into including (injecting) the diversity of viewpoints that you find so valuable, and that is precisely the aim of DEI.
I work at a FANG that is ramping up DEI efforts. Their recent campaign was about being diversity conscious and having less "white culture" (whatever that means).
The thing is, this same company is hiring mostly for India, my coworkers and manager are from India, when they aren't they'll be from China, and occasionally from Europe. We have like 4-5 white guys in an org of +50. employees in the US.
At this point (aside from hiring women), hiring white/black people is how we'd rebalance the diversity of our team yet for obvious reasons you can't say that out loud...
50 people in a FANG doesn't sound like being anything close to large enough to be representative of the whole org by random chance. Enjoy being the weird corner case?
Sadly this battle is lost. I understand affirmative action and the need to do it if there has been some systematic bias preventing outcomes but this has become such a touchy topic that how it is done is not debatable lest you be seen sexist.
I have sat in hiring debriefs where the criterias used for selection have been very subjective but no one will want to acknowledge that they are trying to do positive bias to do affirmative action.
More effort is put on taping things at the end of the funnel rather than fixing things at start, if there are things that need fixing. When metrics of managers and DEI employees are measured on short term impact, why would they not take the easy way out.
I don't think it's "lost." At least with regard to racial preferences in the workplace, they remain unpopular even among the very groups they seek to help: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe... (Black people oppose "taking race and ethnicity into account ... in order to increase diversity" 54 to 37, and Hispanics oppose it 69 to 27).
Separating people into groups and giving preferences and demerits based on skin color is social engineering mainly being championed by the same people who have always favored social engineering: affluent, college-educated white people. Those folks hold a lot of power in some circles, but are routinely defeated at the ballot box: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/526642-hispanics-shock...
After conducting an interview, before I had a chance to write my review (which was customary, while it was fresh), I was sat down by someone more senior than me who said, explicitly "we are hiring this person." There was a "wink wink" dynamic to it. This person was pretty inexperienced, but a woman. This never happened with any of the male candidates. We hired her.
Unrelated, it turned out to be a horrible fit for her, because she went way out on a limb to move to the area and take the job, and the company shut down a few months later. She was now in an expensive city with no contacts or prospects.
I think DEI efforts can greatly vary. I know that we've worked really hard to ensure that we don't disadvantage anyone -- but it's harder than it sounds. DEI is often dealing in zero sum spaces.
For example, most of the staff is white males. We try hard to hire the best person for the role, but we've instituted a policy where we mandate interviewing underrepresented groups. Not that we will hire them, but that we will interview them. But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male. OTOH, most of our personal hiring networks are all white males -- so if we rely on speed to find the next good candidate it will almost always be a white male.
I personally think the middle ground we found is good. But still not perfect.
Interestingly the best way IMO to fix DEI is to align underrepresenting minority interests with poor white interests (obviously this doesn't work so well for things like sexual identity issues). The fact that poor whites and poor blacks aren't aligned on issues that impact them both creates a tough situation for DEI.
I'm a computer programmer. Since about the late 90's, virtually all of my coworkers have been Indians. Yet I keep hearing from the DEI group that white males are overrepresented (and that this is bad). I never hear from the DEI group that Indians (or asians) are overrepresented (and whether this is also good or bad).
> Not that we will hire them, but that we will interview them.
to the extent that the policy causes you to interview people that are obviously less qualified and won't get hired... damn, that's really bad news for the candidate.
Can you imagine that you're a Star-bellied Sneetch and waste day after valuable day of time interviewing for jobs that you won't get hired for, brought in because you happened to have a star-belly and not because you were among the most obvious fits for the job? Talk about being disadvantaged by systematic racism.
In the aggregate, sure, its still probably better for them to be extended the interview... but the wasted time chews up a chunk of that benefit.
Since your post expresses the view that you go through more interviews due to your laudably-motivated-diversity program than you would otherwise, which means you're also wasting more applicatints time than you would otherwise... perhaps you should suggest that you company pay a reasonable wage to ever person that makes it to an in person interview as a way of offsetting the negative externality?
I don't think it would be all that unreasonable once you consider the man-hour cost you're already putting in to interview the candidate, ... paying the candidate would have a similar cost to having one more person on the panel and would go a long way to make sure you're not burdening job hunters with your interviewing practices.
> But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male.
Isn't it equally obnoxious to everyone? I'm not sure why only the white males would be put out by the wait. The wait, while due to the lengthy interview process, isn't due to them being white males. Unless you interview the white males first for some reason.
So are you suggesting that some poor people have the wrong interests on certain issues and they need to fix that? Which issues specifically?
I do agree that we should try to be inclusive on interviewing. It's always good to have more candidates to pick from, as long as the process doesn't last too long.
Got hired at a place that apparently only hired anything except white men. Unless they were non cis.
Apparently an exception was made in my case because they were absolutely desperate for someone qualified to do the work.
Company meetings were mostly just complaining about straight white males. Figuring out ways to force the males to do extra work to make up for… I don’t even know.
Mocking their own customers constantly based on same.
Most toxic bigoted place I’ve ever been. That’s when I became aware of how dangerous woke culture was.
Grew up thinking to treat everyone as equals. Now I’m (nasty words) for that.
Fixed their technical issues and left fast as I could.
LOL as if politicians are going to solve this. There's already enough laws governing this stuff for companies or groups of people to self govern while having a reasonable DEI policy that doesn't harm anyone. It's a cultural problem and voting for trolls is not going to make it better but worse, as it will elicit a panic reaction on people that hold power and are scared by the trolls spewing vitriol about how everything is wrong with "X".
I don't like government bureaucrats and I don't like paying taxes for stupid bullshit like everyone else but thinking "voting republican" is going to change anything is as deluded as thinking that "voting not republican" is going to save us from the end of the world.
Coarse grained discrimination based on some visible attribute is fundamentally destructive to producing value of any kind, and always ends up with terrible outcomes for anyone that cares about anything but the metric of 'what percent matches this coarse grained attribute'.
We call it race when it's based on appearance markers we associate with race, we call it sexism when we base it off gender, we call it ageism when it is off apparent age, we call it nationalism when it is based off national origin.
And it's always wrong, and left unchecked, it is always destructive.
> That's a feature, not a bug. As Ibram X Kendi says, "the only remedy to past discrimination, is present discrimination".
Not only is this logically fallacious (has Kendi really considered every possible remedy?), but it is belied by historical fact. Chinese people were heavily discriminated against in America at one time. Today, Chinese people and their descendants are among the most successful ethnic groups in America, but have never received any sort of affirmative action program. In fact, Chinese people are still discriminated against (by e.g. Ivy League admissions offices) for being "too successful."
My experiences with DEI acolytes who follow the likes of Kendi, Crenshaw, Coates & DiAngelo is that they respond to these inconvenient facts with mystical assertions about successful non-white groups being "white adjacent" or beneficiaries of "white supremacy."
That Kendi quote is incredibly polarising, but makes sense when you think about his view of the world. The Kendi quote that helped me understand where he’s coming from was “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”
Some comments on this post mention the irony of diversity initiatives that discriminate. Kendi’s argument, I think, is that there’s no good reason for occupations to be skewed towards one race or gender or age or whatever, so additional / opposite discrimination simply undoes the initial bias.
I think that’s a challenging POV for a couple of reasons.
First, for those of us in well paid or high status jobs, like software development, it’s a POV that suggests “maybe you don’t deserve it quite as much as you imagine”. That’s a tough thing to consider, doesn’t feel great and probably isn’t going to be popular.
Second, it’s really hard (impossible?) to know the extent to which culture has affected distribution into occupations. But some people seem confident that our status quo is natural and fair and some people seem confident that it’s unnatural and unfair. When people with those different POVs talk to each other, they’re starting with a big gap in how they understand the world.
To actually comment on the topic at hand: the reason there's still male-dominated spaces is that women are weeded out far earlier than the hiring stage. See, for example, statistics about women in STEM and especially computer science and realize that hiring managers don't even have to be sexist for male-dominated fields to exist, even though they still are.
Women's representation in tech matches the graduation rates of relevant fields. Which matches the rates at which women indicate tech as their preferred field in high school and middle school.
I think it's in incorrect to say that they're "weeded out". That implies that women are being removed from the field, rather than exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.
>I think it's in incorrect to say that they're "weeded out". That implies that women are being removed from the field, rather than exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.
That's simply the language used when a freshman takes some intro courses, feels overwhelmed or disinterested, and then chooses to change majors early on. Very few freshman actually fail their classes and get ejected from the university, they just realize they are paying a huge premium to learn something they feel they don't want to or can't keep up with.
But yes, I agree that if we're focusing on the problem at the hiring lever you're way too late. But that's the mentality of publicly shared companies that simply want a good shareholder report next quarter. Investing in middle schoolers takes years to reap what is sown.
There is no free will. Society implanting ideas about which jobs you are capable of succeeding at is an especially obvious case of this. Why do you think women are going into different fields?
The assumption in the "weeded out" rhetoric is that girls are on their way into tech in equal numbers and diverted out by some experience or more nefarious dissuasion. This has not been sufficiently demonstrated and usually is presented without evidence.
It's unclear what people make of the fact that certain STEM disciplines, say Biology or other Life Sciences, have an over-representation of women. Curious why the "weeding" only occurs in certain STEM disciplines.
By choice or by force? N=1, but I still remember teachers saying "all the girls that should be in CS are going to math instead, they think CS is a boys' club" despite repeatedly catering 'women in tech' and such. According to some anecdotes I heard, this also changes outside Western countries, where women pick CS much more quickly.
>statistics about women in STEM
Actual statistics would show women aren't underrepresented in STEM as a whole, or not nearly as much as people claim. This discussion keeps being raised and they conveniently omit fields which are very much science, and have far more women than men coming in. Medicine, veterinary, agriculture, biological science are all fields women tend to compete or dominate to a certain degree. See https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio....
I wonder if all the “women in tech” programs simply serve as warning signs that there aren’t enough women in tech, and there’s a good chance a woman going into tech is going into an all boys club.
> "all the girls that should be in CS are going to math instead, they think CS is a boys' club"
One of my female classmates who took an intro CS as an elective hated how the class was run. Essentially half the class was already proficient in programming and were expected to solve the problems on your own without talking. This was different than my math classes which were more likely to have female teachers and we were to work in groups to solve problems (this was how precalc was done).
She said she felt scared by the expectation to already know these things before the class begun and all the silence while working.
I've been on both sides of this, having been in a male-predominant industry and then in a female-predominant industry. In the male world, there was plenty of "mansplaining" and in the female world - I was actually really surprised at how female colleagues approached me. There were hilarious moments of "reverse mansplaining" where a group tried telling me all about the industry I had just come from, when none of them had any experience in that field. I remember a moment too where I was offering a business opportunity that would benefit all of them, but they very clearly did not think I was qualified simply by being a male - but would have been totally on board if I brought in a female partner. On the other hand, there were places where they wanted my opinion because there were (to me) weird gender role things at play - something like "we need a big strong man to defend us here, so let's get his opinion."
Men and women approach things in very different ways that even now with 40 years of life experience continue to surprise me. I think some of the bias is not intentional, but rather a lack of awareness, and frankly acknowledgement.
Readit News
Skimming through said actual article, it looks like the "against men" hiring discrimination is ~completely driven by this:
"...In female-dominated occupations such as cleaner, childcare provider, preschool teacher, accounting clerk, and enrolled nurse, positive employer response rates were much higher for women than for men. This is in line with earlier findings in different countries..."
Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".
It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if men were clearly the (sole) group being wronged by that.
(Or do millions of men quietly aspire to jobs cleaning up dirty toilets, dirty diapers, and dirty bedpans, and I'm just ignorant of their dreams?)
It's ok to admit that there are some areas society has decided men shouldn't work in. It doesn't diminish the struggles of anyone else
I can speak for myself and some of my male friends and say that there have been quite a lot of us who would have loved to become e.g. a kindergartner or a nurse.
While some actually did, they would not exactly say they "love it" anymore because of low pay and other harsh working conditions. I did not pursue this dream any longer because I realized that it is hard to find a woman when the majority of women prefer to choose men with high status and income (I do not want to generalize or be sexist here but I have the feeling that most women share this preference).
> The discrimination those men face is very real.
Yes, definitely. I can somehow understand how parents might be uncomfortable with a male kindergartner going to toilet with their child but there actually are men who can do this without being aroused or harassing the child.
Between the low desirability, high turnover, and "we must fill the opening" nature of most bottom-end, female-dominated jobs, I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs. Apply a bunch of time, especially when unemployment is low, and it's pretty likely that you'll be hired because they had no acceptable alternative. Or (say) a preschool wanted to have one male teacher, to be a social role model for little boys. Or (I have seen this done) a bookkeeping dept. wanted a couple males, to dial down the social drama that they experienced with a all-female clerkforce.
And for those concerned less about individual rights (to get the job one really wants, etc.) than about the larger-scale social downsides of discrimination, making it more difficult for men to obtain some types of low-status, low-pay jobs is a "pretty weak poison".
What an absurd interpretation. It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if women having an advantage in certain jobs is somehow a downside, just because these jobs are "low status." It's not as if a man who gets rejected as a cleaner is going to instead become a FAANG engineer.
That reflects an outmoded view of the labor market. These are good jobs for people who lack a college degree. Lots of the women in my wife's family have similar jobs. It's not like their brothers--i.e. men from similar educational and class backgrounds--are becoming doctors instead of nurses, or college professors instead of preschool teachers.
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Another guy in the camp was doing the same. We compared notes on interviews. One day he gets a call back from a recruiter and he put the recruiter on speaker phone. She told them they liked him but chose someone else because (drum roll) culture fit.
He asked what she meant by that and she outright said: "The other person is younger. You're old." We were shocked and he pretended he didn't quite hear her... she repeated it word for word. I don't think she even realized it was illegal.
The other guy never made a complaint, he needed a job and I could hardly blame him not wanting to put up a fuss / fight over a job at a place he didn't want to be a part of anyway ... it was shocking to hear it made that clear.
Long run we both got jobs and are doing well, but man... that call sticks in the back of my head anytime I think of job hunting.
The "culture fit" excuse is a tough one, though. That framing can be used to unknowingly discriminate in all kinds of ways.
At my work recently, we interviewed a white male and an asian female for the job. To my knowledge, this is the first female applicant we've gotten because they generally get snapped up by higher prestige/visibility roles. I've interviewed many people before, and the manager will request feedback about the applicants and use whichever had the highest score on a rubric. This time, the manager simply asked "please tell me if anyone has an objection to hiring [asian female]". I was shocked at my manager's language, as it implies the default action is to hire rather than to not hire (the latter being typical in companies). The white male was not discussed at all in my presence.
I'm strongly considering tipping off the white male applicant that he was discriminated against and that he may want to consider legal action. This is one of a number of what I consider discriminatory behaviors my employer (large company you've heard of) has displayed. Companies need to be fearful of engaging in all types of discrimination, not just ones that are culturally-sanctioned, and follow the law.
However, as an individual person, the cost/benefit equation on whistleblowing just seems so so bad. It just doesn't seem worth it as an individual. If these illegal things are going to be pushed back against, it seems like it'll need to be a coordinated/collective action.
It's really disheartening, but it's also my job to train these bozos and turn them into good engineers, which they most certainly are not coming fresh from school.
But getting that out of their thinking takes time. And that is IMHO what you experience. It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.
I am in my early 40s as an architect arguing with our mixed-age teams to give me the necessary rationale before making stupid "it's different now" decisions.
Obviously, there are loads of reasons why this might legitimately be someone's situation, including midlife career-, locale- or industry-changes. But it could be another vector for bias.
I really wish people would stop this. I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time. My friends tend to come from outside of work and they're not software devs. It definitely is age-ism adjacent; having to "network" to get a job is much harder after you get older.
This is akin to saying, "by 23, you should have moved out of your parents' house, otherwise, what's wrong with you?": it renders the speaker's presumptions into judgments.
I think that is an assumption made by people who have had a single smooth career trajectory, but it often does not hold water.
Making a career change in your 30s or 40s is a thing. Honestly, I think it’s one aspect of the US that makes the economy robust and resilient.
Having made a bad career choice (e.g., former employer) is also a thing. I know that there is one place a friend of mine worked at that was basically a real-life Dilbert documentary. The specific work she did was right up her alley, but the organization was just an absolute train wreck. The few good people (including her) in that org left as quickly as they professionally could. Sadly, that was her second bum employer in a row, so all of her previous work contacts were not recent.
I wish more people would be open-minded to these possibilities.
Who the hell would want to work for an org that thinks this way?
There are fewer individual contributors in their 40's, but I know several (some moved from manager back to IC, others stayed IC).
Maybe this is a bigger issue at startups, where the founders are in their 20's?
Part of it is that FAANGs have explicit IC ladders, so you can advance without being forced to manage.
I'm apolitcal, personally, and welcome all points of view in my personal life.
In my experience, if you work in areas with enough demand - its not an issue (eg you work the 'ends' of tech - really old or really new). If the demand isn't there, they probably don't want to pay for a senior employee when a fresh college grad could do it for half the cost ?
Anyway - fear not for your 40s or even your 50s!! Old geeks never die...
we just 'exec' a new program! :-D
There aren't many such roles, but with remote work gaining popularity, they're becoming more of an option.
Most of the experienced people were involved in some major fuckup not long back. Just roll a new ident and build. The market is insatiable. A segment of the market thinks they want to “doxx” every builder, but they don’t matter.
Also, if you've got someone with 20 years experience, and they're willing to accept the same pay as someone with 5 years experience... are they really willing? Or are they going to bail for more money at the first opportunity? If you hire them, you have to worry about how long they'll stick.
So "more than qualified" can be a real thing, not just a discrimination thing.
So I went in the tool and looked through the discard pile and found more diverse candidates that hadn't been presented to me. One looked amazing—over a decade of directly relevant experience, Oxford grad, etc. I asked the recruiter why she hadn't given me that resume and she said "She's overqualified, she's got 15-20 years experience."
I was livid and said "I don't care if they have 20 years experience, I want someone who is qualified!" We ended up hiring her and she's been absolutely wonderful, and is still on the team ~5 years later.
I don't think the recruiter was consciously discriminating against the candidate, but there were definite implicit biases that she wasn't aware of.
Implicit bias training is now required. I personally found it to be very helpful, and try and be aware of my own biases. I always hire the candidate that I think will be best for the job, but try and always find a diverse group of candidates to talk to. It's a better process, and makes for a better (and more diverse) team.
Also "I want too much money" is a thing if all you need is a low level tech and the applicant is an expert in the field. It is not worth paying for expertise that you will not need. For example I hired a guy to do some very boring, routine cleanup in some databases; if I would hire a real DBA and pay double, what for? In this case I pay for the work and result, not for the expertise.
But to be fair I always tell the applicants what is the situation and give them the choice. I know it is a very rare case in the industry.
The sad thing is someone like that would probably produce a better product thanks to their years of experience, and even possibly become a mentor to the rest of the team, but that's not the kind of thing recruiters think about.
I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'. And, as you said, there is always the fear they will leave tomorrow for 2x the money...
*) I wanna see 'evil genius' next! :-)
That needs to become outdated thinking, since most people but particularly the younger ones, don't stick around any job for more than a year or two max regardless.
What's the difference between "over qualified" and "more than qualified"? ;)
They don't want someone that will leave in a year. They want them to stick around, without inflating their budget.
Dark humor with an underlying truth. Ageism isn't seen as an "ism" by anyone except those over the age of 40.
Yes, I had to severely abbreviate my resume. But no misinformation passed my lips or fingertips. The insurance paperwork, with age related info, all went through a third party.
And working remotely suits me down to the toes. On the internet nobody has to know you're a dog.
The emphasis is very clearly on certain minorities. There's not a single "senior" on the training material videos/pictures and the issue of ageism is barely mentioned. There's clearly no will to hire older employees. I wonder what I could do about this at my level. I'm 45+ and already feel out of place and just "tolerated", don't want to raise any attention on me.
I agree ageism is total crap, but so is all forms of discrimination - it just seems that we will all ending up aging whereas the other forms are limited to minority groups who probably get the double whammy of minority + age.
When it comes to more senior roles, it may not only be ageism, but naturally there are much less open positions and many more people down the pyramid fighting for them
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Please don't take it offensively, I just want to understand better philosophy of people who do only lateral moves for 8+ years (not becoming seniors, not becoming highly paid).
If the case is "not everybody is looking to dedicate their life to work" then its more probable that I will hire young person, as they just might put extra effort, as they maybe haven't chosen the philosophy yet.
I've seen those. They suck to work with just as much as an older who is set in their ways.
Honestly, age has nothing to do with either. It's personality.
I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me.
- pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male
- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.
- people championing all women teams as a win for diversity
- women getting a salary premium to help companies boost DEI "representation"
I think eventually this will be shown for what it is, but it will take a long time. Personally every tech founder I know thinks it's bullshit but won't say it in public.
At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.
Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.
Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.
Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.
Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.
This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.
>It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. (b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Not surprised to hear people saying this, but am surprised that nobody brings that up as a plainly racist/sexist thing when it is said. Bystander effect?
Moral of the story being that unless you already have another job lined up you shouldn’t even question things like this publicly as it can cost you your job.
Unsurprisingly, racists aren't willing to actually discuss racism and instead do whatever they have to in order to justify it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
- referral bonuses, but only for diversity hires
- hiring freezes, except diversity hires
Hiring freezes except diversity hires ... Sounds wrong.
> pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male
is something I've done myself, not to hold anything against the applicants coming in but because HMs have a significant amount of control over the funnel of applications coming in. I want them hustling to encourage women, minorities, veterans, old-timers, re-inventors, people with nonstandard educational paths--people from ALL walks of life who are qualified, to get them to apply. I want it because I firmly believe that will make the engineering departments I work for more healthy.
> people championing all women teams as a win for diversity
I have been on many all-men teams in my career. I wouldn't consider it a specific diversity goal, but I do not think _one_ all-woman team is likely to put a dent in balancing, let alone over-balancing, the scales.
> women getting a salary premium
ROFL, I would _love_ to see an instance of this.
It's like you are judging a tasting contest by the color of icing instead of eating it.
I'm a vet. This is a band-aid and I'd discourage you from thinking this way because it's short term at best.
If you want to hire more vets then companies need to find where vets are. Some of us use our VA benefits and get a degree, others meet the stress of post-separation and collapse. Both will still end up in the field, but companies will not train or treat them the same. That's why companies are now doing that whole, "atypical background" search. Apprenticeship programs within companies would also strengthen vet (and other DEI category) numbers given the absence of an industry wide apprenticeship program.
It was always my opinion that if the goal is more diverse hiring then more diverse sourcing is required.
Isn't this illegal?
Yes, but it's not actually enforced or prosecuted in these cases.
If you are white male, you are often not protected by these laws.
I’m not trying to discount your experience in any way and it’s certainly possible that everything you’re describing was actually toxic but I don’t see over-indexing on diversity is as problem in and of itself.
Diverse perspectives are an asset, full stop, and representation matters. Our industry clearly does not know how to address this in a way that makes everyone happy so, in the meantime, if the only reason I’m passed over for a job is because I’m over-represented there, so be it.
The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.”
All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.
I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place.
For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.
If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking.
I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them.
The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.
There are many more factors at play here.
I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting.
They would often take longer than their allotted meeting time in meeting rooms because after their meeting someone in there was crying ... why? Who knows... it was only known within that group. It just kept happening over and over... Along with folks storming down the hall all upset, again who knows why. Now stuff happens sometimes at work, no big deal, but running into these exhausting people couple times a week really takes a toll on you.
When were moving offices the tech support team was seated next to HR. At one point HR invited the both all of tech support and HR (at least those at that building) to a meeting to discuss why tech support wasn't "social enough" and "spent all day in their cubes", I duno maybe they're working... Thankfully that got cancelled quickly after a number of people (me included) noted to a VP that "No matter what the reason, there's no way this meeting ends in anything but a total disaster."
Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team and how much work they put into it and so on... I even left those events early because it's a lunch event and I don't want to eat veggie pizza only, I can only take lunch for so long.
At some point we have to start recognizing that forcing employees to attend work parties and lunches and other events by using social shame tactics like this creates a hostile work environment.
Managers who enable this are toxic as hell.
People who don't consider the needs of others are bad employees, regardless of their gender.
And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.
I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.
In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.
If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.
To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.
The rationale being promoted to the corporations by management consultants is that the company will make more money.
>Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organ...
It benefits the people who gain power and status by using virtues as a social weapon.
I think the best answer to these divisive, sexist or racist behaviors is to show them in practice they're dumb, kick their ass in the market.
An open-minded, welcoming organization is going to attract the best minds. Collectively, these people will kick those ideological-driven asses.
EDIT: my point is we cannot legislate change to these people's minds. The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society.
If I see a lot of racist behaviors against blacks, or latinos or whatever, I'd be glad to join them and work hard to kick these racists out of the game.
>"The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society."
I'd argue that changing minds does not need to be an objective of legislation. Sometimes there's just a behavior you want to prevent and it doesn't matter if people truly agree with the reason why.
That excuse might have been entirely accurate though. Most men are indeed not willing to participate in such a blatantly sexist culture.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's okay either way, I'm just disagreeing with the idea 'most men' won't participate in such a culture; most men (oftentimes unwittingly) do.
From GP: >The recruiting team was all women
I guess this is what you get when you outsource hiring.
Right, but that's exactly the sort of problem that these inclusivity initiatives are designed to tackle (they aim to forcibly change the culture to the point that it is no longer prejudiced). That this one was doing the opposite is highly ironic.
There's a pretty funny picture of the HuffPo team at one point and it is just ... young white women. That's it. That's your diversity.
Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?
If so, this should be exploitable by a competitor. Assuming you don't have the bandwidth to directly work for or advise a competitor of this type, you might still be able to benefit as an investor.
If not... I have a hard time getting worked up about this. It's contrary to the dominant narrative, but if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job, I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses, because it's not like there's currently a shortage of those.
[additional note, in response to comments: I agree that this behavior still constitutes an injustice. However, among the numerous injustices in the world, one has to prioritize what to fight. My main point is that, as a practical matter, there are plenty of instances of biased hiring that ALSO reduce overall economic efficiency; let's fight those easier and more broadly profitable battles first.]
No, if money is used politically. In a free market you would be right, but with the amount of money printing going on, we're not living in a free market.
So your only metric for biased hiring practices being problematic is business performance??
> I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.
They were likely thinking of it in terms of “righting wrongs” in the overall sense by increasing the percentage of women in the company.
Publicly, everyone will swear up and down that “diversity” doesn’t mean “fewer whites/men”, but in practice, it’s how those “ideal” demographic ratios are achieved.
It was reinforced every time there was a self congratulatory post in the company wide channel referring to the “marketing ladies” great work.
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I got my undergrad degree in Iran (a relatively conservative society with an ultra-conservative even anti-women government), where the ratio of women to men in our computer science class was roughly 60/40 in favor of women. The ratio was similar all across the board in STEM and non-STEM fields as more women were admitted and graduated from universities than men. To get admission in Iran everyone has to go through the same standardized test nationally. Women were scoring better and better in the nationalized test than men every year until they passed men the year I went to school. (The trend continued later even prompting the government to introduce legislation to cap the ratio of women at least in certain programs.)
When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.
I let you judge what caused this discrepancy. But I hope we can all agree the issue is much more complicated than some want to make you believe.
However, the more egalitarian and wealthy a country is, the more women are free to choose which job they like most and they are not so interested in Engineering it seems.
EDIT: Ha, looks like this is just a Jordan Peterson false claim. Women seem to be strongly represented in science and engineering in developed countries. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/women-in-science/
So I'll answer you with another unsourced hypothesis: you're a man, and you just justified your position in the industry by waving your hand and saying "they don't want it anyway!". They are not interested in engineering you say? Would you mind giving me an hypothesis off the top of your head as to why that is? I'm sure you'll have a very interesting assertion here aswell.
"Woman does not wish to turn aside from her higher work, which is itself the end of life, to devote herself to government, which exists only that this higher work may be done. Can she not do both? No!" -Lyman Abbott (1903)
>When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.
also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
For example at my last company a report showed that slightly fewer of a certain minority were promoted. This was pointed out and discussed extensively. However when someone pointed out that the same data showed that there were zero of the same minority in performance plans and that everyone on performance plans was a white male, the conversation was shut down. As in it was incredibly important we address this very minor statistical gap on one end, but when the same data suggested that we might be biased against older white males the same DEI department (which had no older white males by the way) shut the convo down immediately.
DEI can’t just be about selected DEI that meets a certain biased definition that is, ironically, not inclusive.
If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot.
This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a pronouns pin and writing them off immediately just as much as seeing an old white man with a camo mouse pad and assuming the worst.
Don't do either of these.
You'd be surprised what differences can be bridged if you approach those different from yourself with patience, love, and toleration.
Remember, it's not really toleration if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept. It's not an impressive moral feat to extend welcome to those who you already felt were on your side.
My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.
At some point, it's federalism live-and-let-live or it's war, kinetic or memetic.
Alternative? The people who promulgate the messages are quite aggressive about imposing their values on everyone else.
Viewpoint diversity is already included, that's the whole "capitalist take" for why diversity is good for business. With enough different viewpoints informed by different life experiences you uncover solutions to problems a heterogeneous group wouldn't have thought of. So obviously it's not even an issue, right? This is already something that's already done. Well no, because "you know what I mean" -- the literal phrase viewpoint diversity as it's applied in real life is a dog whistle designed to dress up "people don't want to work with the guy who thinks his bigoted takes are just alternative views" in words that the "blue tribe" uses. You people like diversity, right?
> if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept
Look, if you or people who know are actually getting discriminated against because of camo, boots, pickup trucks, hunting as a hobby, or wanting lower taxes. that's just straight up prejudice. Working in the midwest that kind of thing would be crazy since that's like half my coworkers. But again, in real life these kinds of thing only come up when the subtext is "you call yourself tolerant but don't tolerate my intolerance, you hypocrite!"
No doubt I'm sure there will be plenty of disagreement abound in this thread, so to make the discussion easier can we please make the abstract more concrete. I am sincerely open to being way off base so please hit me with all your personal experiences and the views that haven't been tolerated. I am primed and ready to be righteously mad on y'all's behalf.
If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. But one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you. Your status is not threatened by people of different backgrounds coming together and critiquing the processes and pathologies that dominate today (and that white men typically grow up in, and so are already comfortable navigating to the point they assume that it is the natural way of things). It will make everything better for everyone if we take the time to put effort into including (injecting) the diversity of viewpoints that you find so valuable, and that is precisely the aim of DEI.
The thing is, this same company is hiring mostly for India, my coworkers and manager are from India, when they aren't they'll be from China, and occasionally from Europe. We have like 4-5 white guys in an org of +50. employees in the US.
At this point (aside from hiring women), hiring white/black people is how we'd rebalance the diversity of our team yet for obvious reasons you can't say that out loud...
I have sat in hiring debriefs where the criterias used for selection have been very subjective but no one will want to acknowledge that they are trying to do positive bias to do affirmative action.
More effort is put on taping things at the end of the funnel rather than fixing things at start, if there are things that need fixing. When metrics of managers and DEI employees are measured on short term impact, why would they not take the easy way out.
Separating people into groups and giving preferences and demerits based on skin color is social engineering mainly being championed by the same people who have always favored social engineering: affluent, college-educated white people. Those folks hold a lot of power in some circles, but are routinely defeated at the ballot box: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/526642-hispanics-shock...
Unrelated, it turned out to be a horrible fit for her, because she went way out on a limb to move to the area and take the job, and the company shut down a few months later. She was now in an expensive city with no contacts or prospects.
For example, most of the staff is white males. We try hard to hire the best person for the role, but we've instituted a policy where we mandate interviewing underrepresented groups. Not that we will hire them, but that we will interview them. But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male. OTOH, most of our personal hiring networks are all white males -- so if we rely on speed to find the next good candidate it will almost always be a white male.
I personally think the middle ground we found is good. But still not perfect.
Interestingly the best way IMO to fix DEI is to align underrepresenting minority interests with poor white interests (obviously this doesn't work so well for things like sexual identity issues). The fact that poor whites and poor blacks aren't aligned on issues that impact them both creates a tough situation for DEI.
I'm a computer programmer. Since about the late 90's, virtually all of my coworkers have been Indians. Yet I keep hearing from the DEI group that white males are overrepresented (and that this is bad). I never hear from the DEI group that Indians (or asians) are overrepresented (and whether this is also good or bad).
to the extent that the policy causes you to interview people that are obviously less qualified and won't get hired... damn, that's really bad news for the candidate.
Can you imagine that you're a Star-bellied Sneetch and waste day after valuable day of time interviewing for jobs that you won't get hired for, brought in because you happened to have a star-belly and not because you were among the most obvious fits for the job? Talk about being disadvantaged by systematic racism.
In the aggregate, sure, its still probably better for them to be extended the interview... but the wasted time chews up a chunk of that benefit.
Since your post expresses the view that you go through more interviews due to your laudably-motivated-diversity program than you would otherwise, which means you're also wasting more applicatints time than you would otherwise... perhaps you should suggest that you company pay a reasonable wage to ever person that makes it to an in person interview as a way of offsetting the negative externality?
I don't think it would be all that unreasonable once you consider the man-hour cost you're already putting in to interview the candidate, ... paying the candidate would have a similar cost to having one more person on the panel and would go a long way to make sure you're not burdening job hunters with your interviewing practices.
Isn't it equally obnoxious to everyone? I'm not sure why only the white males would be put out by the wait. The wait, while due to the lengthy interview process, isn't due to them being white males. Unless you interview the white males first for some reason.
I do agree that we should try to be inclusive on interviewing. It's always good to have more candidates to pick from, as long as the process doesn't last too long.
Apparently an exception was made in my case because they were absolutely desperate for someone qualified to do the work.
Company meetings were mostly just complaining about straight white males. Figuring out ways to force the males to do extra work to make up for… I don’t even know. Mocking their own customers constantly based on same.
Most toxic bigoted place I’ve ever been. That’s when I became aware of how dangerous woke culture was.
Grew up thinking to treat everyone as equals. Now I’m (nasty words) for that.
Fixed their technical issues and left fast as I could.
I don't like government bureaucrats and I don't like paying taxes for stupid bullshit like everyone else but thinking "voting republican" is going to change anything is as deluded as thinking that "voting not republican" is going to save us from the end of the world.
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That's a feature, not a bug. As Ibram X Kendi says, "the only remedy to past discrimination, is present discrimination".
We call it race when it's based on appearance markers we associate with race, we call it sexism when we base it off gender, we call it ageism when it is off apparent age, we call it nationalism when it is based off national origin.
And it's always wrong, and left unchecked, it is always destructive.
this is probably the dumbest sentence I have ever read in my life.
Is present slavery the only remedy to past slavery?
Not only is this logically fallacious (has Kendi really considered every possible remedy?), but it is belied by historical fact. Chinese people were heavily discriminated against in America at one time. Today, Chinese people and their descendants are among the most successful ethnic groups in America, but have never received any sort of affirmative action program. In fact, Chinese people are still discriminated against (by e.g. Ivy League admissions offices) for being "too successful."
My experiences with DEI acolytes who follow the likes of Kendi, Crenshaw, Coates & DiAngelo is that they respond to these inconvenient facts with mystical assertions about successful non-white groups being "white adjacent" or beneficiaries of "white supremacy."
Some comments on this post mention the irony of diversity initiatives that discriminate. Kendi’s argument, I think, is that there’s no good reason for occupations to be skewed towards one race or gender or age or whatever, so additional / opposite discrimination simply undoes the initial bias.
I think that’s a challenging POV for a couple of reasons.
First, for those of us in well paid or high status jobs, like software development, it’s a POV that suggests “maybe you don’t deserve it quite as much as you imagine”. That’s a tough thing to consider, doesn’t feel great and probably isn’t going to be popular.
Second, it’s really hard (impossible?) to know the extent to which culture has affected distribution into occupations. But some people seem confident that our status quo is natural and fair and some people seem confident that it’s unnatural and unfair. When people with those different POVs talk to each other, they’re starting with a big gap in how they understand the world.
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To actually comment on the topic at hand: the reason there's still male-dominated spaces is that women are weeded out far earlier than the hiring stage. See, for example, statistics about women in STEM and especially computer science and realize that hiring managers don't even have to be sexist for male-dominated fields to exist, even though they still are.
I think it's in incorrect to say that they're "weeded out". That implies that women are being removed from the field, rather than exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.
That's simply the language used when a freshman takes some intro courses, feels overwhelmed or disinterested, and then chooses to change majors early on. Very few freshman actually fail their classes and get ejected from the university, they just realize they are paying a huge premium to learn something they feel they don't want to or can't keep up with.
But yes, I agree that if we're focusing on the problem at the hiring lever you're way too late. But that's the mentality of publicly shared companies that simply want a good shareholder report next quarter. Investing in middle schoolers takes years to reap what is sown.
If we accept this as true, fields dominated by women should receive the same grace.
There is no free will. Society implanting ideas about which jobs you are capable of succeeding at is an especially obvious case of this. Why do you think women are going into different fields?
It's unclear what people make of the fact that certain STEM disciplines, say Biology or other Life Sciences, have an over-representation of women. Curious why the "weeding" only occurs in certain STEM disciplines.
>especially computer science
By choice or by force? N=1, but I still remember teachers saying "all the girls that should be in CS are going to math instead, they think CS is a boys' club" despite repeatedly catering 'women in tech' and such. According to some anecdotes I heard, this also changes outside Western countries, where women pick CS much more quickly.
>statistics about women in STEM
Actual statistics would show women aren't underrepresented in STEM as a whole, or not nearly as much as people claim. This discussion keeps being raised and they conveniently omit fields which are very much science, and have far more women than men coming in. Medicine, veterinary, agriculture, biological science are all fields women tend to compete or dominate to a certain degree. See https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio....
One of my female classmates who took an intro CS as an elective hated how the class was run. Essentially half the class was already proficient in programming and were expected to solve the problems on your own without talking. This was different than my math classes which were more likely to have female teachers and we were to work in groups to solve problems (this was how precalc was done).
She said she felt scared by the expectation to already know these things before the class begun and all the silence while working.
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Men and women approach things in very different ways that even now with 40 years of life experience continue to surprise me. I think some of the bias is not intentional, but rather a lack of awareness, and frankly acknowledgement.