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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

#81

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?

A lot of my non-techie peers in Seattle are choosing Lyft over Uber due to ethical concerns. Even when they're not making that much money, it's important to them.

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

#82
post #29

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

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

Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?

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

#83
post #18
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.

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…

The systemic bias you describe is gender discrimination.

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

#84
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?

I am really not interested in a new first-principles explication of the inferiority of women as a workforce demographic in the tech industry. Sorry.

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

#85
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.

"To the privileged, equality feels like oppression." Change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and what you describe as "a growing problem in our society" feels like the beginning of a long-overdue good start to many others.

Why do you assume that I am a straight white male?

Why do you assume I lived a life of priveledge because of the color of my skin and my gender?

This is exactly what I'm describing. One cannot fight racism with racism.

Now I'm being threatened with a ban for expressing such an opinion. At what point does it become acceptable to discuss this topic? When straight white men become a minority? If we allow threads like these to be posted repeatedly, why is it ok to suppress the other side of the discussion?

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

#86
post #47

Why not normalize the rankings? It seems that at volume, that sexism should be the only remaining factor when looking at overall averages. Unless you really believe that "women are worse drivers". Normalize them to the average for each sex.

This is talking about employees, not drivers, and you cannot "normalize" stack ranking. The whole point of stack ranking is you're putting the employees in order from best to worst. They're not given numeric ratings.

Guess I should RTFA :)

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

#87

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.

Is this referencing outside the US? I travel very frequently to both rural and urban areas in the US and have yet to find a place where I could not Lyft, but could Uber.

In fact... I have only been to one place where I could not Lyft, and it turned out I also couldn't Uber (very rural).

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

#88
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?

One in which men also get a reasonable amount of time off work to participate in the birth of their child?

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

#89
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?

Why's it relevant? Why not just judge based on the employee's actual output? It's certainly conceivable that a talented and dedicated woman could both raise kids and simultaneously out-code her male colleagues.

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

#90
post #49

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).

Except you can't even do this unless you're managing a team of contractors who never communicate with each other or the rest of the company. Otherwise how do you propose to rate the person who is often behind on their own tasks but boosts the productivity of the rest of the team?
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