I've worked in a predominantly female team and there was discrimination against, well, me. I've worked in a team with lots of older folks and the younger members weren't taken as seriously as they should have been. It also happens when a company has lots of outsourced programmers. I think there is a lot of emphasis on discrimination made by young white men because they simply are the largest demographic in IT and, of…
Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
591–600 of 666 posts
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#592My company presented a DEI slide a couple years ago showing black employees on the rise, and white on the decline, with targets of 35% black employees by 2025. We also have intern roles that specifically require you be black, or lgtbq. It’s wild. I looked into what it would take to report the job postings, but from what I can tell you need to be discriminated against personally to make any claims.
35% is almost 3x the share of black people in the US population (assuming you are talking about a US company).
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. For instance - there's generally a big gap between "go to school with the goal of being an educator", and being a preschool teacher. At least in the U.S., the latter tends to offer far lower status, pay, job security, etc. than being (say) a 7th grade teacher. Between the low desirability, high turnover, and "we must fill the opening" nature of most bottom-end, female-dominated jobs, I'd guess that the an…
>I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs. I'm sorry to say you're definitely, clearly wrong about this. I am not an educator but I travel in those circles and I know at least a half dozen men who wanted to be early childhood educators and just couldn't find work, regardless of the need or their qualifications, and that is by no means a unique story. They…
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#594Earlier quoted context omitted.
So are you suggesting that some poor people have the wrong interests on certain issues and they need to fix that? Which issues specifically? I do agree that we should try to be inclusive on interviewing. It's always good to have more candidates to pick from, as long as the process doesn't last too long.
> So are you suggesting that some poor people have the wrong interests on certain issues and they need to fix that? Which issues specifically? Here I meant that often times issues are raised specifically as race issues, when really you can make the issue more inclusive and get better traction. For example, Black Lives Matter. While I can understand wanting to make the focus on race, it is hard to get traction on that…
I agree we should provide people with greater opportunities, but as a practical matter what are you proposing that employers actually do?
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night, but I agree with the other poster that EVEN IF you think the male/female curve distribution thing is completely correct without caveats, you just don’t have to be massively intelligent to do software development. You’re building a corporate SAP system, not proving some theorem or unifying the fundamental forces or something.
This isn't about my personal feelings, it's about the insistence that the demographics are not a reflection of the distribution of competence and personal choice, but discrimination. The entire foundation of discrimination against white males is dishonest because proponents refuse to allow for any explanation for overrepresentation beyond unfair hiring practices - which are being used to implement the systemic discri…
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit. > If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. This is a non-trivial objection. I struggle to think of many acceptable scenarios in which we have to choose between acknowledging something which we don't believe as true, or living in an unfair system. Likew…
> The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here. > There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained. This is an individualized cost, which doe…
This is a reasonable stance, but is also the one that I personally object to the most (if this is the core of our disagreement, then I think that's fine, and that reasonable people can disagree on this.)
In my view, it is not fine to disadvantage individuals for their immutable characteristics, regardless of societal benefits. It is fine to disadvantage individuals for their mutable characteristics, if it benefits society. I agree across the board with your point of focusing on social mobility, and that is precisely why I'm opposed to DEI policies that focus on immutable characteristics.
For instance, if we were to say "under-resourced communities tend to produce fewer STEM grads, let's invest more in STEM programs for those communities", that is great! It may be the case that a majority of the benefit from such programs would be to traditionally under-represented groups. This is great too, but it isn't the objective of the policy; the objective of the policy is to provide the same opportunities across the board. In this circumstance, there is no disadvantage to anyone. If nine-in-ten members of these communities are from under-represented groups, then awesome: you're helping more members of these groups get opportunities in engineering. If one-in-ten members of the under-resourced community happens to be Asian, though, they'll receive the same benefit as anyone else from the new investment. Wins all around!
What I object to, though, is the idea that we should prioritize actions based on the immutable characteristics of individuals for social benefit. For instance, saying "Black communities are traditionally under-represented in STEM: we are going to offer opportunities only to Black students". The only difference between the scenarios, in my mind, is that the latter case explicitly disadvantages the one-in-ten Asian members of the aforementioned community who also is under-resourced.
> Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.
To be clear, I'm not trying to direct vitriol at anyone here, nor to nit-pick cases where individuals got "unfair" gains through chance. I'm merely trying to point out that for the stated set of goals (which are largely to make sure we're incorporating diverse viewpoints), directing policies to address circumstance rather than identity is far more likely to actually achieve these goals in the long-term. It also has the side-benefit of largely being perceived as more fair.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#597Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hear hear. If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot. This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a p…
Genuinely asking: Is there a limit as to viewpoint diversity that should be tolerated in perceptions of diversity? eg. Should viewpoint diversity be extended to welcoming "women shouldn't have the right to vote" or "black people are not human beings"? If so, how does one value an opinion and also the opinion that some opinions are worth less than others?
I don't think this is a problem any society has ever elegantly solved, definitely not permanently, and I think it's a distinct possibility that a solution that feels "clean" the way good software design can is not possible.
Abstractly, a culture consists of core tenets that it considers literally unquestionable. For most of history, this list of tenets would include things like the existence of a god or gods, the moral imperative to respect the rulers, the prohibition of things that were thought to harm the group such as murder, theft, or adultery, and so on. More recently in the Western world, we might include things like "women are equal to men" or "people of all races are equal".
It is very difficult to defend these types of propositions and values in any sort of universal or non-self-referential way.
Even things we assume to be moral universals in the Western world like the sanctity of the individual (bodily integrity, freedom of conscience) or the importance of intent in our judgment of wrongdoing (manslaughter vs. murder) are, if you examine the historical and anthropological record, not actually universal at all. (Check out The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich if you're curious about these specific points.)
The US Declaration of Independence is a classic example of this. It asserts: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
If you don't also find those truths self-evident, all following reasoning based on their axiomatic status might very well seem wrong to you. What if you contest the existence of a creator? What if you contest the idea of innate equality of rights and dignity? What if you contest the focus on rights rather than obligations? Or what if you assert the existence of a different creator who explicitly singled out one tribe as the most holy, righteous, intelligent, etc.?
Because the core tenets of a culture are to some extent arbitrary and thus susceptible to replacement with a different set (like Christianity displacing paganism or atheistic rationalism displacing Christianity), there is a strong inclination to defend a particular set of tenets by making questioning them a taboo. That's the underlying purpose of the concept of heresy and its accompanying social shaming.
Unlimited viewpoint diversity does actually threaten the continued existence of a culture if its defenders are not able to meet the arguments of its critics in a way they and their audience find compelling. If you say "I think gays shouldn't marry because it goes against God's will" and your audience mostly thinks "I don't believe your God exists, so that's an absurd argument", you won't convince very many people and soon people will stop adhering to a core tenet of your culture, perhaps eventually leading to the death of that culture altogether.
In the Western tradition, the probing of a culture's foundational values and assumptions has been the domain of philosophy at least as far back as Socrates being sentenced to death or exile for showing impiety toward the gods of Athens and corrupting the city's youth by prompting them to ask questions that must not be asked.
So what does this rambling mean for toleration of viewpoint diversity?
Its absence can prolong injustice (abolitionists faced lots of censorship in the 19th century) and undermine scientific and creative inquiry (see Socrates, Galileo, McCarthyism, etc.). At the same time, its presence leaves all of your holy cows, carpenters, and civil rights vulnerable to ideological attack.
Those are two difficult tensions to reconcile.
I come down on the side of erring toward more viewpoint diversity because I think it encourages reflection into why you hold the values you do and teaches you to defend them vigorously or, sometimes, change them to something you find more compelling.
This isn't something everyone wants to do all the time everywhere, though, so I understand not wanting your company's Slack to devolve into constant philosophical debate or even less productive forms of disagreement.
I think we've been running into such trouble with this recently because many of the existing implicit boundaries separating parts of our culture were washed away by the great cultural homogenization of the internet and especially social media platforms. It used to be more possible to have fierce debates on university campuses about contentious issues without that instantly bleeding over into industry, non-profits, schools, knitting clubs, etc.
It's like Douglas Adams wrote: "the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Sometimes boundaries are healthy.
The best answer I've encountered is moving in the direction of a more federal system in which cultures can live as they think best AND individuals in each culture are empowered to move to different cultures if they don't like where they are.
This is not a perfect solution, though, because it still requires the universal enforcement of certain moral propositions, like people should have the right to their own body and mind and choice of home. Those propositions would not have been accepted in slave-holding societies or even recent collectivist societies like the USSR, which prohibited its citizens from emigrating without permission. This is, realistically, an iterative improvement that would only apply to cultures that already accept foundational Western moral attitudes.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit. > If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. This is a non-trivial objection. I struggle to think of many acceptable scenarios in which we have to choose between acknowledging something which we don't believe as true, or living in an unfair system. Likew…
You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively s…
This is really interesting to me, and is honestly a viewpoint I don't think I've seen before, I'd like to learn more about this.
It seems to me that there are self-evident wins to be had by appealing to a larger group. For instance, I really like jazz music. If all of a sudden (through no intervention or modification to how we approach it), jazz music were really appealing to everyone, that seems like an easy win to me: I get more jazz to listen to.
I can understand the viewpoint of saying "We shouldn't need to change anything or take any action with the goal of appealing to more people". For instance, if focus groups said "Featuring pop-singers on jazz albums will broaden the appeal to teenagers", it's fair to oppose that in preference of the way jazz is now.
It is new to me to say that one would be opposed to appealing to a larger group, though, even if the cost of that appeal were zero.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#599Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively s…
> I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. This is really interesting to me, and is honestly a viewpoint I don't think I've seen before, I'd like to learn more about this. It seems to me that there are self-evident wins to be had by appealing to a larger group. For instance, I really like jazz music. If all of a sudden (through no intervention or modification to how we approach it), jazz mus…
The problem I have with broadening appeal, at least for hobby type things, is that you're spending a lot of effort to attract people who are by definition not very attracted to your hobby. You're working extra hard to attract people because they're different, not because you want more participants, but because you want different kinds of participants. This is not a goal I find desirable or worthy. I like playing chess; chess is mostly male; I would benefit if chess had more players; getting more people into chess is good. Yes, all this I agree with. But then, somehow, the course of action becomes 'get more women to play chess'. Do you know how few women enjoy chess? Very few. For every dollar spent on 'women in chess' initiatives, women's chess scholarships, etc, you could have attracted probably 3 times as many players if you just focused on 'chess' instead of 'women in chess'. You'd attract mostly males, but that is okay. There is no reason to want the diversity! It's about chess, not gender!
Likewise with many things, including the workplace. If you market jazz everywhere, the people who like it are going to get into jazz. You don't need to specifically have a 'young asian teenage girls jazz' marketing division. Who cares if that specific demographic is underrepresented in jazz? What the hell does that have to do with jazz? Just attract people to the thing by advertising the thing; leave DEI crap out of it.
Re: Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're conflating two issues: discrimination and self-selection. Discrimination is never ok. If a woman applies to a job as a developer, she should absolutely not be discriminated against because of her gender. Self-selection is always ok. If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine. This paper is evidence of discrimination, not self-selection.
> If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine. Do you think there is something innate in women that makes them less interested in computer science? Personally I find that extremely unlikely. The only other explanation for why they would self-select away from tech is that they feel they're being told to. That might be fine by you, but I think it's a problem.
Why? Do you believe that men and women are biologically differentiated, but mentally identical?
If so, do you also not believe in transgender identity, as the entire concept is rooted in there existing a mental difference between genders?