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Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

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Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#51

Post by daenz »

throwadogabone2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

I've worked in 2 companies that were majority white and asian women. The degree by which they explicitly favored women and minorities probably bordered on illegal, but you'd have to be stupid to bring it up to anyone. Yay, diversity!

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#52

Post by Manuel_D »

jrsj wrote: post #35
throwadogabone2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

If the average person actually knew what these initiatives meant they would be against them. In practice what it does is make it so members of designated groups typically win by default whenever they & other candidates meet minimum requirements for a position. It’s not even good for the people who get promotions faster as a result imo because everyone around them knows things are rigged in their favor. And who has be…

This is my observation as well. Most women don't want to be hired on account of some eng diversity target. It gets really toxic when a company is simultaneously engaging in this kind of discrimination while also harshly cracking down on anyone who points it out.

In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.

If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.

To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#53

Post by QuarterReptile »

jrsj wrote: post #35
throwadogabone2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

If the average person actually knew what these initiatives meant they would be against them. In practice what it does is make it so members of designated groups typically win by default whenever they & other candidates meet minimum requirements for a position. It’s not even good for the people who get promotions faster as a result imo because everyone around them knows things are rigged in their favor. And who has be…

This is why the Civil Rights Act passed when the congressman from Virginia (can't remember the name) tried to kill it by including women in the bill. A law designed to save the endangered black family was instead coopted to boost the career prospects of successful women, so I guess the poison pill worked despite the bill passing.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#54

Post by throwaway6734 »

throwaway0wha8h wrote: post #39

Throwaway. I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me. - pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male - people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hir…

>people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.

Isn't this illegal?

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#55

Post by FFRefresh »

throwadogabone2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

I can also attest to this, I just left a pretty well-known tech company who leaned hard into DEI in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. The exec team essentially set up quotas, with every race+gender group getting priority over white males. Execs were given bonuses if they increased the percentage of non-white male employees.

The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place.

For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#56

Post by Robotbeat »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #33
toolz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name any of these male dominated companies that hire men disproportionately to the gender demographics of their applicants/interviewees? The issue isn't the distribution of employees, it's whether there is sexism present or not and the first thing you'd probably want for evidence of sexism is disproportionate hiring of a demographic compared to their applicant/interviewee demographic. Just because something i…

Quoted post unavailable.

I was willing to listen to your point (that perhaps some companies favor women and so women disproportionately percolate to those companies… at least in theory seems like a possible argument, even if I’m skeptical) until you got here:

>> Also, because the intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end, a company will be disproportionately male simply by being more technical and having a more difficult hiring bar.

Okay, buddy. Women used to be dominant in computing. Literally were the computers. And when artificial computers came to the fore, many transitioned to writing programs for them. Until it became a more prestigious field and men came to dominate.

And once the personal computer became widespread with computer game culture arising and a culture of harassing women until they leave became common enough to be an issue, why wouldn’t one expect that those who developed an interest in computer programming (ie from contact with computer games, etc) to be predominantly men? (And I love computer games, but there is an insane amount of harassment. Everyone who plays knows this.)

It has nothing to do with intelligence curves.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#57

Post by duxup »

throwadogabone2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup. The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.” All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side. I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

HR department at a previous workplace was like that. All women, all friends, all worked with each other or were relatives of someone... their personal lives were entirely intertwined with work. Most weren't at work most days and this was when they had a no work from home policy years ago. Loud personal calls all day long.

I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting.

They would often take longer than their allotted meeting time in meeting rooms because after their meeting someone in there was crying ... why? Who knows... it was only known within that group. It just kept happening over and over... Along with folks storming down the hall all upset, again who knows why. Now stuff happens sometimes at work, no big deal, but running into these exhausting people couple times a week really takes a toll on you.

When were moving offices the tech support team was seated next to HR. At one point HR invited the both all of tech support and HR (at least those at that building) to a meeting to discuss why tech support wasn't "social enough" and "spent all day in their cubes", I duno maybe they're working... Thankfully that got cancelled quickly after a number of people (me included) noted to a VP that "No matter what the reason, there's no way this meeting ends in anything but a total disaster."

Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team and how much work they put into it and so on... I even left those events early because it's a lunch event and I don't want to eat veggie pizza only, I can only take lunch for so long.

Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

#58

Post by colpabar »

antiverse wrote: post #48
throwaway0wha8h wrote: post #39

Throwaway. I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me. - pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male - people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hir…

>- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc. Not surprised to hear people saying this, but am surprised that nobody brings that up as a plainly racist/sexist thing when it is said. Bystander effect?

The only person who would gain anything by saying that would be a white man, who would just be told that his opinion isn’t important because he’s a white man.
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