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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

#51

Post by SamReidHughes »

eridius wrote: post #49
SamReidHughes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.

But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time, and are they producing code that's up to the quality standards of the team (which could be measured by tracking whether they're introducing new bugs).

You can do that, and it sounds like a good idea as a backstop for subjective evaluations, but if this metric becomes important to the process, then people fight over estimates and game the bug tracker.

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

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

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

It's possible to create one that fewer people will complain is sexist, and for which there will be less justification for such complaints.

One where no one ever will complain? No, but so what?

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

#53

Post by dragonwriter »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #48
eridius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you rate employees using objective metrics, then you can avoid sexism. The problem with stack ranking is, as the article said, it forces managers to use subjective measurements to rank employees because they're forced to put the employees in a particular order (instead of saying two employees performed the same). Once you start using subjective measurements, it's almost impossible to avoid having biases creep in.

The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.

> The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.

Why would you ever want to evaluate employees by any metric not directly tied to their contribution to company success?

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

#54

Post by munchbunny »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

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

At a large enough scale, you can't avoid all complaints of sexism, because job performance doesn't exist in a controlled-experiment vacuum. To some extent your job performance always depends on how well you can work with colleagues, so if your company culture has sexism problem, there will always be a sexism problem whether or not it's openly discussed.

But absolutely eliminating sexism isn't the bar most people are held to. Most people are held to the bar of taking reasonable steps to mitigate the issue and improve culture.

In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.

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

#55

Post by SamReidHughes »

dragonwriter wrote: post #53
SamReidHughes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.

> The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success. Why would you ever want to evaluate employees by any metric not directly tied to their contribution to company success?

You wouldn't. That's why people use, or include, subjective evaluation.

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

#56

Post by BearGoesChirp »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

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

I doubt it. At least in the society I grew up in, there are gender differences in social expectations completely outside the job market that lead to different incentives in the job market. Any ranking system will have to deal with the results of two different demographics who have, on average, different incentives.

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

#57

Post by s73ver_ »

nradov wrote: post #19
hnaccount357 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I take that at face value doesn't that mean any performance evaluation system would be flawed so long as a man is in charge of it? (Assuming that women don't also rate women higher) >“This pay-for-performance system is fundamentally flawed,” Tavis said in an interview. “The performance element is very subjective.” What is the alternative?

One partial alternative is 360-degree performance reviews where each employee's performance is subjectively evaluated not just by one manager but rather by a collection of other employees they work with spread out across all levels of the org chart. Of course that's not perfect either but at least it provides more data points and can reduce the impact of some biases.

Not to mention it removes the whole, "Ok, you get the 5 this time around, the rest of you have to wait your turn" bullcrap.

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

#58

Post by atom-morgan »

mfoy_ wrote: post #11
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.

So your response can be summed up as "Well maybe the men are just better on average?"

No. He said "any systematic discrepancy is blamed automatically on some kind of discrimination, without consideration of the possibility for consistent differences in merit between subpopulations."

This doesn't factor in which gender is more represented. Parent could have said the same thing about nursing or elementary school teachers but that doesn't mean they're implying men are better than women.

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

#59

Post by SamReidHughes »

tptacek wrote: post #44
SamReidHughes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's "unconscious bias." What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect s…

You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer, which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start here, sorry.

Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of "QED."

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

#60

Post by s73ver_ »

Will_Parker wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody is saying that only white men have bias. However, white men are overwhelmingly in positions where that bias can be used to discriminate against others. Women may have just as much, but far fewer of them are in positions where that bias comes into effect.
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