301–310 of 391 posts
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Of course not. Acknowledging that two things are the same in some ways does not imply that the two things are the same in all ways. Don't be intentionally obtuse.
His quote is damn near the definition of "objectification".
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> anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant. Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social bia…
> I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one. Allow me. It's illegal for an employer to discriminate against applicants based on gender when it doesn't serve a direct business purpose. (Actors, Models, Priests, etc.) While I can sympathize and understand their reasons, I can not condone their solution.
You can't legislate away reality...
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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.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of HR departments (even the 'best') aren't doing this at all. My company, Mighty Spring ( https://www.mightyspring.com ), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history. They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profile…
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It's conscious on a lot of people's parts. I've also heard "no women, no sexual harassment suits" enough from people in tech to assume that there are a lot of bigots not dumb enough to admit it out loud. I could be going too far, though. Maybe the kind of dumb lockerroom overshare bluster amongst the employees and managers of sexually harassing companies and departments lends itself to admitting incriminating things…
If we assume that's the reason, it should be easy to fix: if men start complaining about unprofessional and harassing behavior, there'd no longer be any reason not to hire women.
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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…
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I think we missed the key point that he implied he was a women with kids. Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot). That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an…
I'd like to see a study of response rates on resume's that are nearly the same, except for the gender, and race implied by the name. I feel like that would provide a pretty good measure to figure out how discriminatory our jobs system is.
The fact that this post is getting so much attention is baffling me. There is literally nothing in this story to indicate that the name made any difference. It's blatant confirmation bias. Nothing more. Allow me to state, once again, there is absolutely no denying that sexism exists and that it's an issue that needs to (and eventually will) change however this article adds absolutely nothing new to the debate.
But men are affected as well. Older men take longer to report symptoms of serious disease to doctors because they are taught that they should be able to handle it. Men are deprived of emotional outlet and expected to live up to impossible standards, foregoing friendships with women in the process. You see all these young men with unrequited love ("friend-zoned") who can't accept friendship with female people and thus must invent strategy to solve the woman-puzzle-box or justification for harassment.
Questioning gender itself is the best solution, logically.
[1] Rough examples for "girl-things" as a phenomenon: A girl can wear blue or pink, but a boy wearing pink is doing a "girl-thing" (I've read that the color scheme was reversed a under a century ago). A young woman can watch an action movie or a romantic comedy, but when a young man watches a chick-flick what is he, gay?
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He's stating fact. The HR industry is absolutely dominated by females. That's not a matter of opinion.
Human resources people are the ones who negotiate on behalf of the company to get cheap health insurance. They aren't hiring managers.
HR tends to be the first line of defence between a job seeker and a hiring manager. The majority also conduct the phone interview and occasionally the first face to face interview.
Finally, who do you think hires other HR staff? So, yes. Human resource people are hiring managers. More so than most.
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I think we missed the key point that he implied he was a women with kids. Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot). That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an…
> Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. In the present times, some set of managers would assume it for ANY woman of childbearing age. And if a woman doesn't have kids, she's assumed to get pregnant and go on maternity leave.
The point is that not hiring women because they have kids, is stupid, as the same can happen to men as well. Except for the pregnancy time, of course.
That'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.
Some of the best developers and managers I had the luck to work with were women.