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Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

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Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#181

Post by mattm »

kvetching wrote: post #166
SavantIdiot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity…

It's sickening that a white man doesn't have a chance at any of the big companies, unless he's a programming god. This makes white supremacy even more of a problem because the white people that are there, are some of the best ever.

As a white, non-god developer who just went through a job hunt, I had offers from big companies. I don't think this is an issue in any manner.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#182

Post by cambalache »

coldtea wrote: post #133
rsweeney21 wrote: post #37

I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…

> One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross. While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross. It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also pe…

NO! I have noticed that many white Americans cannot fathom how patronizing and "otherizing" are many of the attitudes they take. "Oh my god, it must have been hard to grow up as a POC, you must be so strong". " I am fully aware of my privilege , I had loving parents and a functional family, I must not assume other people had that luck" . "Racists cannot understand that the expectations for POC must be different because they have been oppressed all their lives"

If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult? Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you are"

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#183

Post by missosoup »

Planktonne wrote: post #178
missosoup wrote: post #172

> The time I was told at a feminist event that men are more naturally predisposed to do my job They are. This is well studied in several countries now. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... Edit for the downvoting morons: 'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Read the fucking article.

The linked article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming: > The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they h…

'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Which is what the linked article studies - the fact that as women get more choices, they choose STEM less and less.

Boys are unquestionably more likely to take an interest in tech than girls, and no amount of 'equality' or active enticement aimed at girls has been able to shift that balance. The only thing left is to set diversity targets and discriminate the way that is described in TFA. And it's condescending and harmful as hell towards women who are actually good at what they do in these fields.

Convincing society that every workplace should have a 50/50 gender split is one of the most nefarious things large corporates have done. They've doubled the size of the workforce while not paying a cent more for it. Which is why it takes 2 people working full time today to have the same lifestyle as one person could have funded 50 years ago. Feminism was subverted into enabling corporate greed.

The messaging was quietly shifted from 'all women should have the ability to work if they choose to' to 'all women should work'.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#184

Post by ketamine__ »

mbyio wrote: post #146

Honestly many of the comments in this thread illustrate the author's point - there is such blatant sexism in tech, to the point that many people don't even realize it is sexism.

Why don't you reply to those comments with your criticism then instead of leaving us wondering?

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#185

Post by tharne »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #32
OptionX wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to benefit them.

You're making the assumption that all wrongs can be corrected or made right, and that's often not true. We want to believe that everything can be magically fixed if we just come up with a clever enough solution. But many things don't work that way, and can't be made right, even if someone wants to do so. For example if you best friend sleeps with your spouse, you can forgive everyone, you can get divorced, you can move on, but there's no "making the wrong right".

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#186

Post by wahern »

vlod wrote: post #134
f154hfds wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?

> I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?

I recently heard a radio interview where the guest explained that part of her character was "blackness", and she was offended by intimations that her character could be separated from her racial identity. (The context was a caller who had recited MLK's famous line.)

Taken at face value it necessarily implies a partial refutation of some of MLK's premises, and indeed of some of the premises behind the mid-century Civil Rights movement and even the American Experiment. Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans.

That said, there's a ton to unpack there, and decades later many of the concepts that we as a society are implicitly discussing are quite different, such as what we mean by "character". (I seriously doubt MLK had a sense of self that was any less black than the guest speaker.) So the two sentiments may still be reconcilable. Certainly I don't think the guest's expression of her opinions would have been as well considered and articulated as MLK's. (Ditto the caller's.)

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#187

Post by usaar333 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #34

Tech certainly does have a diversity problem, by which I mean lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech companies. Yes, from the POV of companies who are hiring, this is largely a pipeline problem. No, tech companies aren't going to solve this problem directly themselves. But, what tech companies can do is change their candidate sourcing practices. I'm in favor of some version of the Rooney Rule [0] i…

There's multiple problems with a Rooney Rule:

1. You'll lose candidates to companies that close faster. In fact, you'll likely lose the best candidates.

2. Can be gamed by hiring managers. If they want to close a rec fast, they just find an unqualified member of an underrepresented group to interview to hit the Rule. Waste of time for everyone.

3. Demographic targeting (especially beyond gender) has a variety of issues (arbitrary definitions, unknowns about whether candidates are in what demographic, etc.).

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#188

Post by tclancy »

koyote wrote: post #128
RulingWalnut wrote: post #50

Very much not challenging the experiences in this post but I will say: “I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn.” was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity. Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.

I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice to a new graduate starter.

Why stop reading there? No one is right all the time and the author is probably younger than you. But her experience is also different from yours. It would be good not to assume they are wrong simply because you think they misunderstood something.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#189

Post by jeromegv »

f154hfds wrote: post #85
rsweeney21 wrote: post #37

I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…

'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

Let's say your company has a workforce where the minorities are only 5% but they are let's say 30% of the population. Would that be fair to assume that Color-blindness has failed? Or perhaps there is some kind of biais that was missed and the policies were not as color blind as they pretended to be? In that case, in order to address it, would you rather entirely ignore the issue of race (and fail again) or perhaps have policies that want to address this inequality?

Lots of people agree that color blindness would be the ideal world, but seeing that the world is not color blind, trying to advocate for it seems like a way to continue pushing an injustice instead of addressing it.

Re: Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

#190

Post by ip26 »

vlod wrote: post #159
washadjeffmad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions. Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent. During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than hist…

I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking). I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting. i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconscio…

Some recent-ish research (I can't remember enough keywords to find it right now) has found that doing this actually hurts women's success rate a couple percentage points.
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