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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

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

#371

In my opinion, companies should produce "challenges" for leading personal, from a sort of internal investigations team, and among them should be corruption challenges, security challenges, nepotism challenges and discrimination challenges. If you fail them, you get demoted or otherwise restructured. Of course, this creates a atmosphere of distrust, but some things, like Meritocratic atmosphere, are worth it.

Do you mean audits? The problem is the incentive to do these things and be honest about them, and not skew metrics to keep the company looking good. Lets say they do these audits will full honesty and find that 50% of the management deserves to be demoted. Do you think that will actually happen and how does this make the company look from a PR perspective?

Third party audits would be the only way to make this work, and again what are the incentives? Security audits are common because the risk is high. Lots of money lost in a lawsuit on behalf of billions/millions of customers. The others not so much, because you would only expect a lawsuit from an individual employee, which your army of corporate lawyers can easily crush.

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

#372
post #176

I could have misread or maybe it was some sort of propaganda but I thought I read somewhere that Silicon Valley's caste discrimination is the inverse of what used to be in India? i.e. the lower castes discriminating against the higher castes.

Lol no. Brahmins (the highest caste) are wildly overrepresented in IT, in and outside India.

IT is one of the least casteist sectors within India though.

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

#373
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

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

#374
post #13

I have mixed feelings on this. There are of course things that aren't explicitly prohibited by workplace policies but are no doubt unacceptable - e.g. discriminating against left-handed employees. But it's still useful to have explicit policies against caste discrimination to make clear that it's unacceptable. On the other hand, as an Indian in a top tech company we're more likely to experience racism than casteism (…

> and this policy is likely to increase racism and result in Indians (and other South Asians) getting singled-out and scrutinized for casteism.

Is it? Do Whites get singled out and scrutinized for anti-black racism? Maybe they do, but if it is I doubt it's a significant phenomenon.

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

#375

looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him It’s all lip service. Nepotism is rampant at FAANG

Since we're sharing anecdotes and that's good enough for this thread, here's my own:

I'm a white guy - pretty much a typical one. My manager is a white guy - possibly even more typical, follow along North American Dude Stereotypes for both of us.

For most of the last 2 years, he had 8 reports - 3 managers, 3 product managers, and 2 principal engineers (me being one of them).

I was the only white guys out of 8 - the rest were all Indian.

Why?

Because the other 6 were the best people for the job. They applied for it (some external, some internal), and we hired them, cuz they were rad (and still are).

Demographically, that just happens sometimes, including all-Indian reports

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

#376
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the Indus valley was always Indian and never had external population migrations or conquests that left an impact on culture and dynasties analogous to England's Norman conquest of 1066 and earlier Saxon migrations that impacted the culture to the present day, reflected in socioeconomic class distinctions? Man, guess history is completely wrong.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India

How is all this diatribe related to the fact that AIT (not AMT) is a discarded theory, and jati vyavastha has nothing to do with imagined external conquests?

So you’re claiming that the Indo-European migration/invasion of Northern India is “imagined”?

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior. It would have been dealt with sooner if the employee was white because (assuming they meant white as in western white skinned person) culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would…

> Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior. How? Do you really think their language specified that discrimination could only happen from white people to minorities?

I'm guessing they weren't sure whether caste was a protected class.

Discrimination in law revolves around protected classes (race, religion, national origin, age and sex are the "big five" in the US, and subsequent acts and decisions have added sexual orientation/gender identity, familial status, pregnancy, disability, veteran status, and genetic information). If you act on the basis of that, someone can, well, make a federal case out of it.

On the other hand, if you discriminated on the basis of eye color -- pretending for a moment it wasn't correlated with race -- you might be a shitty manager, but it wouldn't be a legal issue.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the situation is that Western countries/companies don't usually have protected class status on basis of caste. Those protections exist for race, gender, age etc.

Ok are there also specific legal protections for Eye color, Hair Color, presence of Freckles, etc? Does every possible way to discriminate need to be clearly spelled out for it to be illegal?

No, there are not. (In the USA) You are legally allowed to discriminate based on non-protected classes as long as the non-protected class is not being used as a proxy for a protected class.

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them. It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much b…

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