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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

indiatoday.in

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#291
post #189

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively. HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes tha…

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#292
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you would need a bigger more representative company. If your slice is CEOs' then that is pre-filtering for a lot of things. Tech role at apple skewed a fair bit, general role less so, a retail apple role thena different population all together. Amazon possibly has enough employees in the fuller distribution of income / qualifications that would be an interesting dataset for slicing, but of course you will…

I don't think the question of why CEOs are older than non-CEOs is interesting. Highly important roles require suitable experience, which of course is going to bias the sample towards older people. The problem is that, if the only answer if there's no "reasonable explanation" is to imply the existence of some kind of discrimination, you're going to include a lot of weird things under that category, and often make comp…

> Scott Alexander wrote a good article "Black People Less Likely"

I enjoyed that one, thanks.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN can never has a coherent discussion about casteism in modern India OR in NRI populations because they lack the nuance and lived experience required to understand how jati system works. Indians are more likely to be affected by racism than casteism in the west.

> Indians are more likely to be affected by racism than casteism in the west Should we ignore sexism faced by black women because they’re more likely to be racially discriminated against?

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#294
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various caste markers that casteist people use to identify the caste of the other person. Some of them include food preferences, accents (yes Indian languages also have different accents). I have seen that people can be casteist on both ends of a spectrum and it’s really hard to tell what marker of yours will be noted by the other party. I’ve seen that most people these days don’t try to pretend about hidin…

White americans do this too. Think ozarks. I know plenty of ridiculously smart people from this region, who if they talked about the food they ate or didn't work hard to extinguish their accents would probably not have jobs w/ coastal tech companies.

True enough. Remote workers moving to non-Asheville Appalachia and some related tech companies could have interesting outcomes for the region. I worry about whatever you call Ozarks gentrification though. There’s a lot of cheap land away from the mining/coal environmental issues that the locals have a lock on right now but decent RSU grants more than pay for.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real shame is that living in Delhi, I’ve seen caste come back very strongly in everyday discourse. I’ve been here almost 20 years. This city used to be largely caste agnostic. Now when I meet new people, especially outside the elite tech circles, they will casually mention their upper caste status (“As Brahmins, we don’t do xyz of course!”). Even cars carrying caste stickers are more common.

Do you know why this happened?

Religion, especially in public life, has made a big comeback under the current ruling party. This party is also generally considered an upper-caste party. I assume much of it is due to implicit soft support from the ruling establishment.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#296
post #189

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively. HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes tha…

Quoted post unavailable.

Or the fact that people discriminate against others, everywhere in the world! Often way worse than in the contemporary US!

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real shame is that living in Delhi, I’ve seen caste come back very strongly in everyday discourse. I’ve been here almost 20 years. This city used to be largely caste agnostic. Now when I meet new people, especially outside the elite tech circles, they will casually mention their upper caste status (“As Brahmins, we don’t do xyz of course!”). Even cars carrying caste stickers are more common.

Do you know why this happened?

It's nothing that requires much research. The current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds. 7 years of this, and people who used to think "Caste is a taboo subject, and we should be working around it", now think "Caste pride is cool".

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#299

California treats ancestry as a protected class, and discrimination by ancestry is illegal. Not being a Desi, I struggle to see how this is not already covered.

>> California treats ancestry as a protected class, and discrimination by ancestry is illegal. Not being a Desi, I struggle to see how this is not already covered. It is covered, but not enforced because evidence is difficult. Caste discrimination in Silicon Valley is usually about putting someone from a lower caste into an impossible project that is destined to fail, and boom...now you've got your PIP quota ready fo…

PIP quota? Really?

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#300

How hard is it to fake being of a higher caste like Brahmin or Kshatriya? Since it’s not skin color but your heritage, can’t you falsify this information? Especially if you claim to be from some rural or remote location? Just how involved would someone try to investigate your background?

I'm not Indian but my understanding is that you can typically tell someone's caste by their last name. I'd also imagine there'd be a host of cultural information that would be hard to fake, like knowing certain prayers or rituals. Brahmin's are vegetarian, so you'd have to only eat vegetarian at the office to pretend to be one. I even had a friend who told me his sub-caste had their own secret language they spoke.
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