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Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

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Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#101

Post by rocqua »

blacktriangle wrote: post #79
rocqua wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear people I dismiss directly mention cultural marxism. But I have never seen an explanation of what cultural marxism is. Could you enlighten me?

Marx wrote about a theory of history in which all of history progresses through phases in which each phase is defined by struggle between classes. His view was that communism was the inevitable end of this model of history in that communism would finally resolve the class struggle. But for somebody who wishes to promote communism, the problem is if there is no class struggle, then history does not advance to their de…

Summarizing what you said (without agreeing) to see if I understood your point correctly.

Marxism is the idea of needing class struggle for progress. Cultural Marxism is transposing that from class to culture / ethnicity. Essentially moving the dialectic from worker / captialist to privileged race / non-priviliged race?

And the idea is that this is done, not to engender gradual change, but to engender revolutionary change?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#102

Post by marcus_holmes »

rocqua wrote: post #77
sokoloff wrote: post #32

> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity. This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone…

A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions. If the female population is too low, and you try to get them into higher positions, two effects occur according to this theory. First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thin…

You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation.

However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.

Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.

I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#103

Post by emerged »

sergiomattei wrote: post #58
mastazi wrote: post #17

I'm Italian and I speak Spanish and Portuguese relatively fluently. Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it imposes a way of using grammatical gender that is typical of the English language (think e.g. about the "singular they") upon neo-latin languages where the perception of grammatical gender is very different. In neo-latin languages such as Italian or Spanish, grammat…

Thank you for saying this. This has been my pet peeve for a while now. LatinX is not just appropriation, it's cultural imperialism at its finest. It's the "woke" American cultural hegemony trying to dictate what the Latino community can call itself. It's almost disrespectful to our autonomy, our culture and heritage. And I say this as someone who's completely pro the gender-neutral language revolution in his native t…

The feeling you’ve described is how many Americans feel about the woke telling them how they can speak too.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#104

Post by brap »

noutella wrote: post #47

How incredibly weird is it to witness American schizophrenia* when it comes to races (and gender) from a non-american perspective. "Black+", "Latinx+", "LGBTTQQIAAP". Putting people in smaller and smaller box in the name of equality and diversity. I am the only one to feel this is coming to an absurd point ? I'm not an alt-right fan, nor would I vote Republican if I could, I'm a leftist in what's considered a traditi…

As someone who works for Big Tech outside of the US, it's kind of comical to us foreign workers. From out point of view it seems like Americans are truly obsessed with diversity, or rather being perceived as diverse (PR), to the point where we can't help but laugh at the weekly corporate emails we get from the US leadership and the regular diversity training we have to do.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#105

Post by doubleunplussed »

sidlls wrote: post #75
mastazi wrote: post #17

I'm Italian and I speak Spanish and Portuguese relatively fluently. Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it imposes a way of using grammatical gender that is typical of the English language (think e.g. about the "singular they") upon neo-latin languages where the perception of grammatical gender is very different. In neo-latin languages such as Italian or Spanish, grammat…

Oh, absolutely. The appearance of "x" instead of the "a" or "o" is an immediate signal of someone who is trying to signal wokeness, but isn't actually.

Signalling wokeness is wokeness. It's not like there's some authentic wokeness - calling it wokeness is accusing it of being inauthentic.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#106

Post by grapehut »

I've conducted technical interviews for a FAANG company for several years, and been explicitly told to go easy on and inflate the scores of minorities. On one hand it makes sense as we're trying to hire minority groups on a greater ratio than they're coming out of college. On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me they retention rates a lot lower when often they're thrown into positions they would otherwise not be really qualified for.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#107

Post by CydeWeys »

curiousgal wrote: post #80
CydeWeys wrote: post #25

The elephant in the room is the ouster of Timnit Gebru. Regardless of who you think was in the wrong there, a lot of people who left did so because they thought Google was in the wrong, and left in solidarity or maybe even because they thought they might be next for being similarly outspoken.

I think it's super hypocritical to be well paid a company while also trash talking them on Twitter. I wouldn't call that being outspoken.

My intent with saying "Regardless of who you think was in the wrong there" was precisely NOT to re-litigate the entire saga (that's old and played out here).

Regardless of who you think was wrong, it had a big effect on black employees' perceptions of their employer.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#108

Post by cudgy »

CydeWeys wrote: post #83
indigochill wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the reason for the attrition. I'm a white dude but work in a foreign country (also predominantly white). For the most part I'm just "one of the guys". I only really feel like an outsider when corporate policy dictates we have to talk about cultural sensitivity towards foreigners and I happen to be the only foreigner in the room. For people of different races, I assume this feeling is switched on practically all…

You don't solve problems (or racism) by ignoring them, and your experience as a white person in another majority white country is not particularly informative on the experience of a black person in a country with the history of systematic enslavement of, disenfranchisement of, and discrimination against black people. A head in the sand approach isn't workable. It was the black employees themselves who were most vocal…

Interesting. Can you name a country that does not have a history of systematic enslavement? Perhaps the commenter is living in a Slavic country where whites were enslaved?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#109

Post by mastazi »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #86
mastazi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine. What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the ide…

I'm learning German at the moment. Everything is gendered. Such a strange way of looking at the world. And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness? [0]…

Interesting I didn't know that. In Italian there is no neutral gender, Latin had it but in modern Italian it has been lost.

> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#110

Post by tomp »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #86
mastazi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine. What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the ide…

I'm learning German at the moment. Everything is gendered. Such a strange way of looking at the world. And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness? [0]…

Theres also “das kind” (the child). And I’m sure other examples. You simply don’t understand how other languages work, and you’re projecting your own ideas onto them.

And German is a whole different class than Latin and Slavic languages - AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German. In contrast, in Spanish, Italian (not sure about French) and Slovenian words actually “sound” either feminine or masculine (or neutral, but those are rarer and mostly for inanimate objects), because gender is based on word endings.

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