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Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

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Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#31

Post by mfoy_ »

pwinnski wrote: post #22
mfoy_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a simpler and better claim would be that: When managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often decide based on factors not purely related to the productivity or value of the employee. ---- That, and as an employee in a stack-ranked organization, you know you need to be competitive. Not in terms of productivity but in terms of "in the eyes of your manager"-- Perception is more important than p…

That's one possibility, but a recent HBR study[0] suggests that we lean on "reasons" like that more quickly than we should. [0] https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-study-used-sensors-to-show-that-me...

So you're saying it's not the system, or at least not solely the system, and that the managers are almost certainly biased?

I can appreciate that. It's almost certainly true. Most people are biased.

The point of my comment wasn't argue differently, or to defend Uber or their managers, but to show how choosing a sexist system is the same as being sexist, in effect.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#32

Post by Will_Parker »

api wrote: post #12
nnfy wrote: post #9

I think there is a growing problem in our society, or at least what appears in media, wherein any systematic discrepancy is blamed automatically on some kind of discrimination, without consideration of the possibility for consistent differences in merit between subpopulations.

This is a correction of the previous tendency, which was to take the default assumption that all discrimination was in fact rational and a reflection of consistent differences in merit between sub-populations. We've gone from assuming that discrimination is probably rational to assuming discrimination is probably irrational. You could argue that we've over-corrected, but my own subjective experience leads me to disag…

There are still some major irrational points that I see:

- Bias (conscious and not) is assumed to be a problem mainly perpetuated by white men, when reality is that, for example, women may have as much or more bias toward women than men do. I.e. the factor of women enforcing gender roles among themselves is dismissed.

- The success of white men in startups is assumed to be caused by them excluding others, rather than because they share a culture with each other from an early age with a lot of positive characteristics. Saying we excluded girls from programming and chess teams, or from spending long hours alone at a computer instead of socializing, is at least an oversimplification.

- Men being attracted to things and systems and tinkering vs socializing and people is real. It's more than a standard deviation (i.e. differences between groups are more than differences between average individuals), it starts hours after birth, it correlates to pre-natal testosterone levels, it happens across species. Scientifically it's a slam dunk and it is a pretty plausible hypothesis for why women are poorly represented in coding positions, compared to other equally demanding jobs, e.g. doctors and lawyers where women are doing just fine.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#33

Post by jknoepfler »

cloudwalking wrote: post #20

Many of my friends have stopped using Uber in favor of Lyft. Is this a real trend, or just something I see in Silicon Valley tech circles?

I uninstalled uber when the shit hit the fan. I won't ever reinstall it, and I actively suggest others do the same. I won't support a company that sounds like a sorry mix of aws corporate culture and /r/incels social culture

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#34

Post by tptacek »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, yes. Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking.

How? Edit: The parent post was edited. Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual sexism), or is it harder to see?

The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#36

Post by BinaryIdiot »

cloudwalking wrote: post #20

Many of my friends have stopped using Uber in favor of Lyft. Is this a real trend, or just something I see in Silicon Valley tech circles?

I know I have but not because of their business practices (which I agree they've done some not good things). Lyft is $3 - $4 cheap, consistently, for me in the East Bay. I know for a ride the pricing of either is pretty decent but some days I need to take several rides so I try to save money wherever I can.

Most of the people I know who use or drive either because they seem them as commodities and don't really care. They just pick the better priced or closest one.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#37

Post by moduspol »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

Probably not, but your lawsuit risk is a lot higher if it's sexist against the wrong sex. It's probably easier to just make your performance review system sexist against the correct sex.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#38

Post by [deleted] »

Will_Parker wrote: post #14
mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, even if you meant to be trolling. It was never the case that suing required iron clad empirical evidence. Civil cases in the United States use the "preponderance of evidence" standard, not the "iron clad" standard you just made up.

And "preponderance of evidence" means 50/50 plus a feather.

[deleted]

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#39

Post by mfoy_ »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #10
model_m_warrior wrote: post #6

Lol, lame reasoning. What happened to iron clad empirical evidence before suing? Oh I guess that was never the case, eh?

You are correct, even if you meant to be trolling. It was never the case that suing required iron clad empirical evidence. Civil cases in the United States use the "preponderance of evidence" standard, not the "iron clad" standard you just made up.

Even criminal cases don't need "iron clad" empirical evidence. Only "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt"... so like... 95%-ish.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#40

Post by [deleted] »

moduspol wrote: post #37
SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

Probably not, but your lawsuit risk is a lot higher if it's sexist against the wrong sex. It's probably easier to just make your performance review system sexist against the correct sex.

[deleted]
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