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A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

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Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#121
post #46
post #37

So her talk was on tech interviews and someone thought she was a recruiter? Doesn't seem that big a stretch...

People thought she was not a programmer even though she wrote a book about programming interviews.

No. Based on the information presented, someone thought she had worked as a recruiter when she was at Google.

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#122

This probably should be a blog post with deeper research, but I swear it must be a human rite of passage to have the established groups treat some minority or "new" group poorly. For example, it wasn't but 100 years ago in the USA that groups like Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, etc. were looked down on as poor immigrants who were taking "real" American jobs. They eventually were accepted only to turn around and p…

Eventually, all the current minorities, including women Women are not a minority; not in the US nor in the vast majority of countries.

Obviously by number not a minority, but in the way they sometimes get treated or by perception or whatever, they seem to be considered a "protected class" or whatever the legal term is that you shouldn't discriminate against.

I think the point remains however that any group that faces a generation of discrimination/hazing/whatever you want to call it seems to find a way to revisit that same act on a later generation once they are in power.

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#124
post #121
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People thought she was not a programmer even though she wrote a book about programming interviews.

No. Based on the information presented, someone thought she had worked as a recruiter when she was at Google.

It's really easy to say "Based on the information, nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman, people assumed she was a recruiter".

That ignores all the times when people who are given the same information -but about a man- but who don't make the assumption that he was a recruiter.

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#127
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You have this a bit wrong. If ability is normally distributed for a given sex (and the mean of the ability of the same), then it is true that there would be more above-average male programmers than female programmers - just as there are more male programmers than female programmers at any skill level. If you are provided a skilled programmer, they are most likely male. And if you are provided any programmer, they are…

You should not assume anything. Given any random coder, yes, the chance that they're male is larger than the chance that they are female, but the chance that they are female is still present, and if you jump to the wrong assumption too early, you end up effectively denying their existence, which is a big part of the problem.

Consider it from the point of view of the female coder: in every discussion, people will always start out assuming either that she is male or that she can't code. And it's up to her to either correct that (with all the crap that often comes with it) or not, and let people believe there are no female coders. Constantly running into people assuming you don't exist, can be very demotivating, and may lead her to look for a more welcoming job. Let's not do that anymore, okay?

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#128
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I'm currently working at doesn't have any assholes in the dev team; and yet even after hiring every single woman who has ever even applied for a software development role, we have zero women in the team :/

What outreach have you tried to get more women to apply? I'm going through the job hunt now, and so many places seem determined to be as difficult as possible to deal with. One (I may have found it on HN) had a picture of the office bullpen, and every single person in the picture was a twenty-something male, mostly all white with one or two Asians, more than half wearing hipster goatees. I wondered "why in the world…

> What outreach have you tried to get more women to apply?

We haven't done outreach to any specific group (I'd guess because we aren't "looking for women" per se, we "looking for good developers and gender doesn't factor into it"); looking at the currently active developer ad, it makes no explicit assumptions about gender of applicant and makes no reference to the gender of the current team...

(Though there was that thing saying that "we are a strong team" is subconsciously excluding of women, and we should say "we are a caring team" if we want more women to apply, so there may be things like that that I am too much of a white male to notice? :S)

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy is strange. You realize I have never worked as a recruiter, right? This is the second time you've referred to me as a recruiter. I do things in the intersection of interviewing and technology space, yes, but I've never worked as a recruiter. I know you know that I'm not a recruiter, so... whatcha up to over there? Whatcha trying to prove? This talk discussed coding at far more depth than the vast majorit…

> I'm arguing that when a person who advertises themselves online as being in HR and gives talks about HR, it's plausible that people might perceive them as being in HR for non-sexist reasons. But again, the situation isn't "someone looked at my website and thought I was a recruiter" or "someone saw that I was doing hiring consulting and thought I was a recruiter". It's giving a talk which is talking in depth about t…

I've got to say I'm impressed how persistent you are in explaining the same thing over and over again to someone who clearly doesn't want to get it.

I'm glad you challenge people's stupid assumptions.

Re: A hilariously sad tale of gender bias

#130
post #83
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I don't know if you meant for your argument to be applicable to Gayle, but if so... well, it is not applicable. People only knew her gender and assumed she was not skilled because of it.

They knew her gender and that she'd been talking code for an hour, and still assumed she was not skilled because of it. Some people are unbelievably dense.
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