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Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#31

> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other one…

Recruiters don’t make the final decisions on hiring. The bonuses incentivize them or seek out diverse clients, not to lower standards. And your whole argument is, unfortunately, the standard-issue objection to any efforts to change an unfair system by, just to rub it in, once again blaming its victims. Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf?…

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right.

By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters don’t make the final decisions on hiring. The bonuses incentivize them or seek out diverse clients, not to lower standards. And your whole argument is, unfortunately, the standard-issue objection to any efforts to change an unfair system by, just to rub it in, once again blaming its victims. Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf?…

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to benefit them.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#33

Oh, come on! Dozens of threads and thousands of comments for the weekly Dr. Seuss pearl-clutching. But mentioning that, on occasion, tech orgs are shitty to women is immediately flagged? Whose the snowflake that can’t take any criticism and wants to stop others from seeing it here?

It's frustrating that we can't vouch for it, either.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#34
Tech certainly does have a diversity problem, by which I mean lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech companies. Yes, from the POV of companies who are hiring, this is largely a pipeline problem. No, tech companies aren't going to solve this problem directly themselves.

But, what tech companies can do is change their candidate sourcing practices. I'm in favor of some version of the Rooney Rule [0] in tech hiring. Roughly, you should make sure to interview at least one person from an underrepresented group each time there's a position to fill. Given the pipeline problem, I'd cap it at some arbitrary number of candidates per opening -- one large enough to ensure that the company made an effort to seek out candidates who would add diversity to the company, but small enough that you can still actually hire. You'd have to validate that recruiters were actually contacting people from underrepresented groups to make sure you're not just getting to a point where every position ended with "Welp, we tried, but the only people we could find to interview for the position were these N white and Asian guys," but it could certainly work.

The beauty of this approach is that you don't lower your hiring bar. You just make sure to get people from underrepresented groups in front of your interviewers and hire them if they're the most qualified people for the job.

Now, I get that big companies don't hire for 1 position at a time, so, the point here would be to have your pool of candidates interviewing always contain a certain number of people from underrepresented groups. This is explicitly not a hiring quota, because you don't lower your bar. It's just putting an opportunity in front of more people to see if you can get people who look different from your standard straight, cisgender, white or Asian male tech worker into your recruiting pipeline to begin with.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#35

Oh, come on! Dozens of threads and thousands of comments for the weekly Dr. Seuss pearl-clutching. But mentioning that, on occasion, tech orgs are shitty to women is immediately flagged? Whose the snowflake that can’t take any criticism and wants to stop others from seeing it here?

It's frustrating that we can't vouch for it, either.

Yeah, I'd like to know exactly why that is.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#36

I don't have many female colleges. The ones I work with, I like them. They are in avg more social. But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant" and we did hire her because she was good and I stood up for her. I should not need do so this! I think we would be better if with have more woman in our teams.

> But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant"

This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help.

> They are in avg more social

Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#37
I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response.

I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They followed up with several phone calls encouraging me to attend.

I didn't want to go because I felt like the only reason they wanted to talk to me was so they could add another number to their diversity report. My Dad convinced me to go.

They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending.

On day 2 they had hiring managers from dozens of departments. It was like speed dating. One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross.

One hiring manager handed me an offer letter when I sat down. She hadn't even spoken a word to me. She told me she had reviewed my resume and that was enough. WTF.

I got several offers from that event. I turned them all down.

I ended up getting a job at Microsoft. They didn't ask me about my race when I applied.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#38

>“Carl is a difficult person to work with. But I trust in you to accomplish this. You will use your feminine approach and you’ll be fine.” What's wrong with feminine approach? People use this kind of wording especially when it comes to design - e.g room, or outfit, generally those things that are considered as a areas where women are way better, so? >That social networks can involve as much technology as any video ga…

What does “the feminine approach” mean? How is she supposed to employ “it”?

What if a manager advised to use “manly ruggedness” to fix an algorithm from O(n^2) to O(n)? It employ “Irish Luck”?

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#39

Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.

I worked at a small company where everyone was on probation their first 3 months, towards the end of the 3 months our manager would come around and ask what we thought of the new person. If enough of the team found you annoying, you didn't get to stay.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to benefit them.

Never had anything given to me by any connection in my family. Heck, my family dosen't even have any connections I could profit off if I wanted to.

Now, it does annoy me having had to jump-backwards through the modern interviews for tech position and now there are people like the author who get handed the same kind of jobs solely based on the genitalia the were born with and still complains about it.

So save your dollar store philosophy and stop making judgments about my reasons.

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