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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

#191

Post by bArray »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #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 Albuquerqu…

I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind.

I think you mostly have two scenarios:

1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening.

2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time.

A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community.

As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.

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

#192

Post by sidlls »

"I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn."

This isn't sexist. I've been told this, and I've told this to junior engineers of both genders. It's not even just a stretch to claim it's sexist, it's ridiculous to. The remark about prioritizing is actually more troublesome, and entirely independent of this comment.

"Some things went well, others not so well. I am not giving you a list specifying each. It has nothing to do with your technical skills; that is normal to have room for improvement. We just feel there is a lack of chemistry with the team."

This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist.

"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."

"Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature, and there is nothing we can do. I see it in my children: While my son prefers video games, my daughter only cares about Facebook."

These are both sexist. The first one is disgusting and might also border on sexual harassment. The second is a gross demonstration of "anecdotes are not data."

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

#193

Post by tharne »

908B64B197 wrote: post #10
eqvinox wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... which is exactly why the post points out the need for the applicant to be informed about affirmative action being applied. If you know how much AA was applied, you can actually make a better argument when you're mistreated. [for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the article says.]

Sure. Company wide email: "Careful with these demographics: make sure to re-interview them before joining your team, they might not have had a proper technical screen." The lawsuit would be hilarious.

These conversations already happen, they just tend to be more subtle. "So and so has made tremendous progress over the last several months, and I think with a little more support and guidance they could really excel...".

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

#194

Post by ip26 »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #106
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #65

It's a pretty straightforward deadlock: "We want to hire you because you'll add diversity." vs. "I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity." Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong. I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons other than thei…

Actually, this is not a deadlock at all really. If a company wants to hire someone because of diversity, it’s not necessarily just because of diversity. In the article, the author describes their experience as having been different than non-diverse candidates, therefore creating a sense of personal doubt about their abilities, however unfounded. If given two equally qualified candidates, giving a preference to divers…

In practice, how often is it really going to come down to a neck-and-neck tiebreaker?

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

#195

Post by vlod »

kevinmgranger wrote: post #180
vlod wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?

Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?

It's probably next to impossible to imagine an end goal. There will always be 'crazies'.

I assume that most people would like to be treated by their characters. If everyone just started doing that, wouldn't the world be a better place? That's my take on MLK. Maybe it's naive.

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

#196

Post by jimbob45 »

bArray wrote: post #191
rsweeney21 wrote: post #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 Albuquerqu…

I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind. I think you mostly have two scenarios: 1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it…

>An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it.

Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.

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

#197

Post by ip26 »

Planktonne wrote: post #178
missosoup wrote: post #172

> The time I was told at a feminist event that men are more naturally predisposed to do my job They are. This is well studied in several countries now. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... Edit for the downvoting morons: 'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Read the fucking article.

The linked article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming: > The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they h…

Aptitude for a thing is your raw capability to do a thing well.

Predisposition to do a thing is your inclination or desire to do a thing at all.

Basically the linked article finds that women are perfectly capable of doing the job, but the more choice they have, the less they want to do it.

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

#198

Post by chickenbane »

coldtea wrote: post #130

Two things some people have difficulty differentiating between: - Being discriminated or insulted for being X vs: - Made fun or insulted with reference to X Not getting a job, a promotion, or even simply heard by your colleagues because you're X is discrimination. Being treated worse because of X is discrimination. Being called anti-X slurs by people considering X being inferior is racism. But being insulted or made…

> There's this idea that people must be 100% "professional", non joking, always zen-calm, all the time. That is, dry and passive aggresive.

This idea is likely held by people who have not had a lifetime of discrimination and insults and made fun of for X. When you have been such a victim, being in a professional, zen-calm work environment is a luxury, and honestly not too much to ask for.

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

#199

Post by thu2111 »

vlod wrote: post #159
washadjeffmad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions. Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent. During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than hist…

I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking). I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting. i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconscio…

It's been done. They dismissed it because when hiring is blinded like that the percentage of ordinary men who get hired goes up, not down. Men are discriminated against in hiring and that fixes it, but the type of people who want "diversity" don't want fair or blind hiring. They want to get trophy diversity hires.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #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 Albuquerqu…

[deleted]
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