Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

> Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans.

Let's not even say that, he was just a person who was trying to communicate how we should treat each other. It's easy to label him to a group and start saying he does/doesn't represent that group. Let's keep it simple and say he was 'Homo sapien'.

I find the association between cultural identity and the color of ones skin a simplistic way of looking at things. "Blackness"/"Whiteness" are so overloaded and it often brings confusion.

Being a s/w engineer I immediately went to edge cases, where skin color can muddle the waters:

- Elon Musk was born in S.Africa and living in the US. Is he African American? Technically yes.

- A black French person, raised by white French parents, living in the US would refer to himself as French.

- A white French person, raised by black French parents, living in the US would refer to himself as French.

I'm a white Englishman who's living in the US, but there's not a chance you can say I'm the same as a classic white born American.

Heck my parents are not English, so you'd be hard pressed to compare me to a 'standard' Englishman.

Ultimately I try and view MLK 'spirit' of the talk, which is are you a good/bad character (irrespective of your upbringing) and that's how you should be judged.

Edit: formating

This is a problem I've been thinking about for the last week: how do you know a specific instance of something is sexist?

Sure, you can look at statistics and say that sexism exists, and that's all very important, but that doesn't really say all that much about individual social interactions, just like statistics about crime rates of ethnic group X doesn't really say anything about individual who belongs to ethnic group X.

A few years ago I tried to help someone on Stack Overflow who asked a series of very basic Python questions about the same piece of very basic code by pointing out that they're probably better off getting a Python book and actually learning the language first, as Stack Overflow is not really a mentoring platform. It was phrased fairly encouragingly (I thought anyway) and was intended just to help them in their struggle to get started with Python, but the person didn't take it very well and accused me of racism :-/

Perhaps the “everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn” comment was especially patronizing towards her purely based on the fact that she was a women, or perhaps it wasn't. It's almost impossible to say for sure, especially not based on this one sentence devoid of any context. In my Stack Overflow example I know there wasn't any racism involved because I didn't even notice the person was Indian until after he made that comment, yet the person was still left with a feeling of a racist interaction. It was a shitty situation for everyone involved.

So there's a wonderful idea from the world of comedy about this.

It's the idea of punching down, vs punching up.

That is, if you are joking about someone in a worse position than you, it's punching down, and a dick move. If you are joking about someone in a better position than you, it's punching up, and allowable. It's why it's okay for black comedians to joke about white people, but not okay for white comedians to joke about black people. It's why politics is always fair game to make fun of (people in power), but disabilities, say, aren't. Etc.

While punching across is technically doable, it's also very, very hard to do, because ultimately who are you telling the joke to? Who is laughing? I.e., if you talk about things your family does from your own homeland, and people laugh, what are they laughing at? They're laughing at your homeland, your culture, because they feel 'above' it in some way. It's an invitation to punch down. Otherwise it isn't funny; it's interesting. Truly punching across tends to be for an audience that is also the butt of the joke (think Vir Das telling jokes about Hindu beliefs).

Now, that's not to be confused with an explanation or similar. I've worked for a German company, and when asking about why we did something that seemed suboptimal to me, another employee, himself German, has said "That's very German". That's not necessarily a judgement, that's not an invitation to laugh at how silly German culture is; that's just a prelude to an explanation that it's a cultural difference in priorities.

IBM was so behind the times not only on technology. I'm glad that you found a place without any gimmicks.

I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.

The general problem, I think, is that talking the talk is not that hard, especially if you're not already well-covered in that domain (e.g. an established department/strong competency in the specific area) -- see all of sales. It's not that hard even if you are well-covered in that domain -- see all of pre-sales, and all of consulting. The fundamental issue is that describing a solution in broad strokes is much easier than in detail, and an interview doesn't give you so much time to even get into those details; and spending time to further evaluate is at least weeks of effort (because it's difficult to differentiate between someone competent getting up to speed on your codebase, and someone incompetent, and someone incompetent but can be made competent, without sufficient time to evaluate).

A lot of time is burned in recruitment cycles, largely because its much easier to say you're competent than to prove that you're not. (not to mention the natural reluctance & possible legal difficulties with firing).

Jobs get thousands of applicants; few of whom are worth considering, and resumes/interviews really don't tell you all that much. They tell you more than nothing, which is why they're used, but it's difficult to be comfortable on those alone, and there's not that much more you can do before it becomes weeks/days of free labor by your candidate.

Anyways, there's more than enough money burned on the subject that "throw more marketing at the problem" is very likely too easy an answer.