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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

#321

Post by mrguyorama »

Manuel_D wrote: post #15
_0jki wrote: post #7

Quoted post unavailable.

No, the protected classes are things like "gender" and "race". It's baffling how many people seem to think that discrimination protection carve out exemptions that permit discrimination against men.

Indeed, just because some stupid zoomer on twitter said all men must die or something equally stupid; 1) does not mean men are discriminated against and 2) does not stop the law from protecting a man from discrimination for being a man.

Sure, shit like that is really hard to prove, but so is it for a woman looking to be in a male dominated field. Add that to how often discrimination is subconscious or accidental or otherwise not a purposeful, organized effort to harm a specific group of people and you run into the situation where we struggle to prevent it.

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

#322

Post by forum_ghost »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #107
chrchang523 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your margin is my opportunity." Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness? If so, this should be exploitable by a competitor. Assuming you don't have the bandwidth to directly work for or advise a competitor of this type, you might still be able to benefit as an investor. If not... I have a hard time getting worked up about this. It's contrary to the dominant narrative, but if this female…

> if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses So your only metric for biased hiring practices being problematic is business performance??

you start businesses to lose money?

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

#323

Post by wccrawford »

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?

Any time I've pushed back on that racism, the person has redefined racism so that what they are doing isn't racism any more. Typically that involves the phrase "systemic racism" instead, as if the need to qualify the type of racism doesn't invalidate their point.

Unsurprisingly, racists aren't willing to actually discuss racism and instead do whatever they have to in order to justify it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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

#324

Post by rajin444 »

spzb wrote: post #284
rajin444 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't our genes dictate how we interact with the environment? I'm not sure how it could be anything but. That being said, yes, we can change our environment and see changes in measured intelligence. A person with a head is smarter than one without. To tie it back to your original point, you're saying the male/female differences in intelligence are purely environmental? As in, if two people with different genetic make…

Not really. Not the degree you seem to think. Otherwise identical twins would have the same personality. You’ve edited your post while I wrote this response. Your final point is a straw man. I didn’t say anything like that. Good day to you

> Not really. Not the degree you seem to think

Can you explain to me how our genetics don't dictate our responses? Short of God or some other unknown unknown (which is certainly possible), I don't see how it could be anything else.

Identical twins aren't in identical environments. It's not possible.

Sorry for the edits, I was trying to shortcut the argument based on what I thought you were saying.

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

#325

Post by cafeoh »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #286
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I find it amazing that you think this kind of blatant racism is acceptable - what does being “white” have to do with his behavior or performance? or do you think certain skin colors are limited in their abilities and performance?

More amazing yet, perhaps, is that some people find it acceptable to talk about racism in a situation where the word doesn't apply. Discrimination against white people can be a thing, racism doesn't. Discrimination can make sense (for obvious reasons), racism doesn't.

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

#326

Post by throaway_07_z »

spzb wrote: post #142
SamReidHughes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women? Uh, yes. This is a well-established fact. Women have two X chromosomes, both of which get used [1], and men only have one. So this should be your baseline expectation. In women, that genetic information used to construct the brain, gets, loosely speaking, averaged together. It is of course also consistent with every empirical observation. E.g.…

Sorry but that's pseudo-scientific bollocks. Far from being "well-established fact" it is actually contentious and poorly supported by the evidence. Intelligence testing is a human created concept. There are all manner of cultural biases encoded in it. Intelligence is more than just being good at sums which is what your math SAT example seems to suggest. Jeopardy champions are hardly a representative group. They're a…

These are good points ("Intelligence testing is a human created concept").

However it wouldn't be surprising to me if higher end SAT scores would be highly correlated with likelihood of being hired at FAANGs of this world later in life.

If the above is true, and given that the SAT score distribution is shallower and wider for males, then it'd probably follow that there would be more males employed at those places than females, even if the hiring would be totally controlled for biases?

Or, is it your point that there's (probably) correlation here, but not causation? As in, there's bias against females (there most likely is), so more males are hired, and it's an independent fact that males have broader SAT scores distribution. Ergo, if we controlled for biases, then faang hiring results would be 50/50 male/female, even if SAT score distribution would stay the same?

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

#328

Post by streblo »

mkl95 wrote: post #264

In my area, 40+ developers basically fall into two groups: - Burnt out developers who still like their job. These people often have a background in some STEM field, may hold a PhD etc. They can be difficult to work with due to the odd outburst, but their approach to problem solving is pretty constructive. - Burnt out developers who hate their job. This is the most difficult group of people to work with I've encounter…

I've worked with plenty of 40+ developers who aren't burnt out and match neither of these categories

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

#329

Post by jimbokun »

Manuel_D wrote: post #52
jrsj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Women attend college at a much higher rate than men.

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

#330

Post by smugma »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #115
nabaraz wrote: post #67

During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well. But what bothers me more is the ageism. The number of times an old person has been rejected from a job is too damn high. The reasons have always been "he may not work well with young people", "seniority complex", "he is over qualified" etc. Most of the times, they were more than qualified. I fear when I am into 40s or 50s, I will face the s…

As I have gotten older, my pay has continued to increase. "Over qualified" means that I want too much money . (I don't apologize for that. I bring more value than I did 20 years ago. Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.) Also, if you've got someone with 20 years experience, and they're willing to accept the same pay as someone with 5 years experience... ar…

BC (Before COVID), I was having trouble finding a qualified person for a role on my team (Operations, not Engineering). I was getting a lot of candidates apply that looked the same on paper but weren't good fits (they claimed to be technical but weren't that technical, poor communication skills, etc.).

So I went in the tool and looked through the discard pile and found more diverse candidates that hadn't been presented to me. One looked amazing—over a decade of directly relevant experience, Oxford grad, etc. I asked the recruiter why she hadn't given me that resume and she said "She's overqualified, she's got 15-20 years experience."

I was livid and said "I don't care if they have 20 years experience, I want someone who is qualified!" We ended up hiring her and she's been absolutely wonderful, and is still on the team ~5 years later.

I don't think the recruiter was consciously discriminating against the candidate, but there were definite implicit biases that she wasn't aware of.

Implicit bias training is now required. I personally found it to be very helpful, and try and be aware of my own biases. I always hire the candidate that I think will be best for the job, but try and always find a diverse group of candidates to talk to. It's a better process, and makes for a better (and more diverse) team.

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