Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient.

Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit.

Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions.

Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.

I work at a smallish company owned by a bigger group of companies, it is a nice place to work and family friendly, but not at the top of many people's list of exciting places to work.

I don't know all the filters between me and the people submitting their resumes, but there are lots of stages and filters and the process is slow.

As an unexciting company we're not getting the first draft picks from the market. By the time we get internal approval to offer a job to someone, more often than not men have another better offer, women generally don't.

I believe we are able to hire women with skills and experience that would not be as available to us if they were men.

Part of the dynamic would be that our company is very family friendly, and on average women are prioritising that higher than men, and thus on average ranking us higher than men, and therefore some of the bias is structural, rather than being entirely driven by personal misogyny of the recruiters and interviewers.

But that would only help explain the higher availability of excellent female candidates who are prioritising raising a family, it doesn't explain my belief that we have disproportionally been able to hire women with standout level of skills and experience no intention of ever having children*, candidates that I believe would be much less likely to be available to us if they were men.

(* no - I didn't ask that in the interview, I learned that afterwards, when we were work colleagues! )

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>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.

I think what you're missing is that the reason a statement like this was visited upon you, or whomever poor soul you visted upon in turn, may not be sexist in your case but perhaps so in the author's.

Precisely as you point out: it's dumb and political. The reasoning isn't going to be good and it's going to be opaque. Well, sexism, racism, etc are dumb, political, and opaque.

I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought that maybe we had looked at causes and effects, and found feedback loops like are present in so many complex systems.

Get this though - in the grandeur of my delusion, I thought that studies of these feedback loops we had found:

* people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves

* people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo

* complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally

And that these hiring practices were part of a bigger attempt to use the third bullet to address the other two.

But what do I know, I'm just a delusional fool who gets paid to work on complex systems. I should probably go resign. Anyone reading this - likely another person who works on complex systems - I encourage you to not apply your systems thinking to systems, you might end up delusional too!

it is certainly still possible for lower class children to get a leg up, but it's still an uphill climb