I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume • Hacker News Board

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#321

Post by whiterabbit2 » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 8:44 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #145

lsiebert wrote: post #119

If your company is discriminating, it's not getting the best applicant for the job, it's getting the best young male for the job. That is missing out on at least 60% of applicants. That should be all the reason any intelligent person needs to be concerned about these factors. It is hard to hire good people. Also the pool of individuals discriminated against by other employers is perhaps more likely to contain qualifi…

Why should I be concerned? I like working with talented people, but my experience has been that those employers that employ gender-balanced workforce employ a lower proportion of highly talented people than those that do not. And if we're speaking solely about self-interest then as a male such discrimination works in my favour. So no, that's not "all the reason any intelligent person needs", you have to give an actua…

It depends on the definition of "talented". If "me myself and everybody like me" then it's very logical.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#322

Post by dalke » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 8:49 AM UTC

yaddayadda wrote: post #161

bbanyc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for younger people - SSNs have only been assigned at birth since the 1980s. My mother was born in West Virginia but her SSN has a Minnesota prefix, because that's where she lived when she got her first job. Someone who wasn't born a US citizen would only get assigned an SSN with their green card or work visa, and I'd imagine the prefix would indicate their first place of residence in the US. So the most you can…

I was born in the early 70's and mine was assigned at birth. In fact, when I was a teenager I ran into someone else born at the same hospital on the same day (at the time we met we were thousands of miles away living in a different city on the other side of the state, so not a high probability event). The first 6 digits of our SSNs were the same.

Children are not automatically assigned a SSN at birth.

Quoting from the Social Security office: "Must my child have a Social Security number? No. Getting a Social Security number for your newborn is voluntary. But, it is a good idea to get a number when your child is born. You can apply for a Social Security number for your baby when you apply for your baby’s birth certificate."

A couple of decades back, the law was changed to require the SSN for any claimed dependents. Most people, of course, want that ~ $4,000 deduction, so hospitals often distribute the birth registration form.

For what it's worth, I was also born in the 1970s, but didn't get my SSN until jr. high, as I recall.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#323

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:00 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #252

Camillo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is sexist, the fact that men and women handle the work/home balance in very different ways, or the company's recognition of that fact?

The company's assumption that the stereotype of how women handle work life balance applies to any specific woman. That's pretty much the definition of sexism. Also, the fact that a company would never ask if a man had any time consumer hobbies or other sorts of things that might prevent them giving 100% to their jobs, because when kids and women aren't involved, companies generally assume that their employees are gro…

By that metric, car insurance companies are also sexist - they charge individual men more because stereotypically men are riskier. Of course, that stereotype is based on data, but so is the stereotype that women take more time off when they have children.

Why is it legal to discriminate based on data in some situations but not others? I think the only solution is to remove the logical justification for discrimination: force men and women to take equal parental leave.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#324

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:03 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #318

prodigal_erik wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had any other time-consuming hobby and started phoning it in at work, the company could tell me I may be dismissed if I don't shape up. Only parents get the nuclear option, and thankfully most of them don't abuse the possibility very heavily.

That's because parenthood ensures that companies have future customers, while hobbies don't. Facebook stock isn't worth much if all the 13-25 year olds that buy the crap advertisers peddle on it is a shrinking demographic!

Whether employees of a particular company have children or not is irrelevant to demographics on the national scale.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#325

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:10 AM UTC

bitops wrote: post #57

speeder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you need to change MEN attitudes? Most HR departments are staffed by women for example, they would be the ones that saw a "Mr." in the resume.

> Most HR departments are staffed by women for example Do you see the irony in this statement?

There must be an awful lot of anti-male sexism in HR departments to keep the percentage of men so low.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#326

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:21 AM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #133

cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #23

I get this so much, although I've had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I'm female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team. Isn't necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, it made me think of all the LinkedIn spam I get addressing me as sir, Mr., "we're looking for some cool dudes like yourself", etc. Sadly it's not just the gender thing that's going on here as…

>I've had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I'm female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team My wife noticed that too. She has basically the exact opposite experience as the author. Her name is also gender neutral, but more commonly male. As soon as she added "Ms." she started getting interviews. Comments like "it will be so nice having another woman…

Summing up your wife's experience with the one in the article, perhaps what employers like the least is the ambiguity of getting a CV where they don't know if the applicant is male or female?

I do know I have felt somewhat embarrassed when I had to reply an email to people with a gender-neutral name. Although maybe that's because there are no such names in my country, so I find the situation odder than most people. But I can picture a HR person wondering about the gender of the applicant and just skipping to the next CV to avoid the uncomfortable moment, especially if there are many similar CVs to choose from.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#327

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:37 AM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #260

JulianMorrison wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were me, I'd set a strict, cast-iron, no excuses 50% for the first, say, 50 years. After that things might have calmed down a bit. Demand will drive supply, if needs be. Lack of demand has certainly driven it down .

With dramatically higher demand for women programmers, would it be permissible to pay women far more than men? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace? Assuming that currently 20% of programmers are women, would 60% of the current programmer population (or 75% of current male programmers) have to go unemployed until more women had entered the workforce? Following from my first question: if we think pa…

> Would these same quotas apply to universities as well?

Most universities actually have more women students overall. So applying quotas to all fields would reduce female enrollment in many of them.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#328

Post by claudius » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:39 AM UTC

orff wrote: post #176

drpgq wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Germany to work from Canada after finishing grad school and was amazed to find applicants put pictures on resumes there. Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).

... and not only pictures. it is standard to include your birthday and nationality in your CV in Germany. And sometimes, the early career applicants adds the employers of their PARENTS in their CVs !!!

Sure, why not? Birthday might not be absolutely relevant, but allows to judge your success at school/uni/education much more easily, nationality is relevant to decide whether they would have to go through trouble to get you employed (if non-European), and the employers/jobs of your parents usually correlate strongly with your own qualifications, at least on a quantitative level.

Whether you like the fact that a surprisingly large number of university student has academics for parents, it is still there, and if you want an intelligent person, it might act as a decent filter to look for intelligent parents, especially is said person does not have much experience otherwise yet.

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#329

Post by klipt » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:52 AM UTC

johnvschmitt wrote: post #268

As a father, when I had my first kid, & read a few "Parents" magazines, I was so disheartened to see 99% of the references in articles referring to the parent as the "mom" or "She/her". I said, "WTF! Are fathers not parents!?" Then, it hit me. As a male engineer, manager, etc... I just got a very small taste of the less than subtle gender biases that exist all around us. That made me appreciate my wife more (who is a…

> bias in the other direction

No, both biases are in the same direction - "women stay home and parent" and "men go out and work" are two sides of the same coin.

By choosing not to fight the stereotype that those parenting are women, you are implicitly shoring up the stereotype that those working are men.

Mind blown yet?

Re: I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume

#330

Post by claudius » Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 9:58 AM UTC

whiterabbit2 wrote: post #321

lmm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I be concerned? I like working with talented people, but my experience has been that those employers that employ gender-balanced workforce employ a lower proportion of highly talented people than those that do not. And if we're speaking solely about self-interest then as a male such discrimination works in my favour. So no, that's not "all the reason any intelligent person needs", you have to give an actua…

It depends on the definition of "talented". If "me myself and everybody like me" then it's very logical.

If you need someone with qualification X, and n%, n != 50, of students attending university to earn qualification X are of gender A, yet you try to employ genders A and B equally, you will get fewer good people with qualification X than if you employed n% people of gender A and (100-n)% people of gender B.

Since there are very, very few subjects attended equally by both genders, employing equally will get you worse people.

Note that the above actually assumes that people from both genders are in general equally capable/intelligent. If you add, for example, a higher standard deviation of the IQ for gender C, you will get even more skewed results.