This was the late 90s. A lot has changed since then. Yeah, there's still problems with male-dominated industries but it's gotten a lot better. Nowadays it's more about getting women even interested in the fields.
I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
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Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#12Is it weird that this article doesn't have many comments?
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#13That's really, really sad. And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect. What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
> What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people.
The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change.
I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone interested in the topic of gender discrimination. Jackson writes well, he's a man, and he brings a mans perspective to the issues. There is no demonization or undue blame assigned to men in the book. It's a powerful read.
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#14I am female with a hybrid background in UI design and front-end dev. A while back I created a fake linkedin profile identical to mine except with a male name. Even though it has no profile picture and no contacts, the fake profile gets more recruiter messages than I do, and for more technical positions (I get ones for design, he gets ones for engineering).
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#15That's really, really sad. And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect. What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment. The best HR departments already do that, at least that's the hope.
It's easy enough to fix for screening for gender, but it's much harder to fix the screening for age, because people like to see a sequence of activities. At the very least, work experience years comes across. When people leave off graduation dates, that throws up a red flag too.
The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start?
This was an issue with many orchestras - they ultimately made the auditions physically blind. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#16Is it weird that this article doesn't have many comments?
Not at all. Thoughtful and open discussion on gender discrimination is hard to come by, even on Hacker News. I think a hard first step to take is admitting that the problem really is quite serious and that it is something that affects all of us.
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#17That's really, really sad. And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect. What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment. The best HR departments already do that, at least that's the hope.
There was a proposal going around the Lib Dems in the UK at one point[1] to make it illegal to have names on CVs; because they describe gender, and sometimes race, too.
The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination.
I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why.
[1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#18That's really, really sad. And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect. What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
> What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it. There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people. The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change. I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone inter…
Thanks, I've been looking for reading on this topic.
(Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent is also excellent - one woman's experiences disguised as a man. Sounds potentially lightweight or biased, is neither.)
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#19That's really, really sad. And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect. What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
> What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it. There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people. The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change. I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone inter…
However, those biases come in part from our experience. People subconsciously assume that a woman won't make a good engineer (for example), because when they picture the engineers that they've met, the overwhelming majority are male. So to change those attitudes, one of the things you need is to make the numbers more balanced.
Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume
#20This was the late 90s. A lot has changed since then. Yeah, there's still problems with male-dominated industries but it's gotten a lot better. Nowadays it's more about getting women even interested in the fields.
You would hope, but sadly not much as changed. There have been numerous experiments lately where someone created identical mid-career LinkedIn profiles one posing as a man and another as a woman.
The male profile always gets far more views and recruiter messages.