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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

#71

Post by mfoy_ »

atom-morgan wrote: post #58
mfoy_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not going to go to great lengths to explain to you how you are missing the message. It's not about "factoring in" anything, or what the specific "subpopulation" at play is.

GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."

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

#72

Post by mfoy_ »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
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…

>Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average. Studies have also shown that when women exhibit identical "aggressive" behavior as men, they are labeled more negatively than their male counterparts.

So in a company that uses stack-ranking: Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

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

#73

Post by Grustaf »

jey wrote: post #2

Tldr: the claim is that when male managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often choose male reports over female reports due to sexist bias.

Even if true, why would this be a bigger problem in a stack ranking system? Surely they wouldn’t promote more people in total just because they had some other, more reasonable system? They’d still favour men if they are anti-women.

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

#74

Post by eridius »

gaius wrote: post #69
eridius wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but whi…

The metric isn't "number of completed tasks". That would be a terrible metric. The metric is "amount of valuable work completed", which is a combination of number of tasks and how much work (and value) each task is. The manager who assigns tasks should have an understanding of the expected amount of work for each task and the expected difficulty.

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

#75

Post by contergan »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
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…

>Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average. Studies have also shown that when women exhibit identical "aggressive" behavior as men, they are labeled more negatively than their male counterparts.

Wow, it's almost as if men and women are different and therefore different standards of behavior apply to each gender.

Who could have possibly foreseen that?

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

#76

Post by linkregister »

tptacek wrote: post #34
SamReidHughes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.”

On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.

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

#77

Post by chrisseaton »

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?

Lyft aren't even available in most places that Uber are, so I can't see it being much of a wider trend.

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

#78

Post by atom-morgan »

mfoy_ wrote: post #71
atom-morgan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not going to go to great lengths to explain to you how you are missing the message. It's not about "factoring in" anything, or what the specific "subpopulation" at play is. GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."

> without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men.

Again, you're reading what you want to read.

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

#79

Post by tptacek »

linkregister wrote: post #76
tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.” On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.

That is not the assertion I am making. You've also shifted the goalposts: you're talking about sexism in the workplace, which I agree is rampant in our industry, and I'm talking about performance review systems that are structurally or endemically biased against women, which obviously also exist, but pretty clearly don't exist everywhere.

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

#80

Post by mfoy_ »

atom-morgan wrote: post #78
mfoy_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to go to great lengths to explain to you how you are missing the message. It's not about "factoring in" anything, or what the specific "subpopulation" at play is. GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."

> without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men. Again, you're reading what you want to read.

How else can you read "consistent differences in merit between subpopulations" when the context is gender discrimination in employee performance reviews?
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