Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by robin21 » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

> Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature

This is true. There is scientific evidence that shows men prefer things, women prefer people. This is not to say women can’t succeed in tech or are not as good at tech, but the fact that women choose other fields belies this nature.

Women are better at language, social interactions, etc. So when her boss says to use her “feminine” skills to talk to a difficult co-worker, it’s simply a comment on a predisposed advantage women have over men when looking at the statistics.

Surprisingly, this would probably make females better managers rather than code monkeys. Managers make more money too.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/

> the times I was over-explained, or the times interviewers made a “not bad” facial expression when I replied correctly to technical questions

The problem women have today is that they are programmed to see everything as sexism, when in fact such things happen regardless of sex.

This really approaches disbelief. A “not bad” facial expression being sexism.

When she was fired for lacking team chemistry, I don’t doubt it when you have someone psycho-analyzing every single gesture and seeing it through some sexism lens.

And a junior developer out of college complaining about being “over-explained”. How hard is it to say “I am very familiar with this topic” and move on.

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

#342

Post by faridelnasire » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

Messed up people a long time ago created a very unfair pyramid with straight white men at the top and transgender black women at the bottom. And too many intelligent people today think the solution to that problem is to rotate that order, rather than to just do away with a pyramid altogether. I hope this is just an interim phase before we consider things like ethnicity and gender as arbitrary as hair color.

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

#343

Post by malandrew » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

vlod wrote: post #292

wahern wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans. Let's not even say that, he was just a person who was trying to communicate how we should treat each other. It's easy to label him to a group and start saying he does/doesn't represent that group. Let's keep it simple and say he was 'Homo sapien'. I find the association between cultural identity and…

> Elon Musk was born in S.Africa and living in the US. Is he African American? Technically yes.

I believe that makes him just African, not African-American.

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

#344

Post by vlod » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #343

vlod wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans. Let's not even say that, he was just a person who was trying to communicate how we should treat each other. It's easy to label him to a group and start saying he does/doesn't represent that group. Let's keep it simple and say he was 'Homo sapien'. I find the association between cultural identity and…

> Elon Musk was born in S.Africa and living in the US. Is he African American? Technically yes. I believe that makes him just African, not African-American.

He's an American citizen, so he can call himself "X.American"

Edit: clarification.

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

#345

Post by conception » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #308

conception wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty in many minority groups. The poor don’t have resources, wealth or contacts, to become a super coder/manager/whatever so they don’t make it into your applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place. The cycle continues. Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.…

It is impossible to solve systemic bias by using discrimination. It has never worked in the past despite an untold number of attempts. In a very similar way, violence create violence in very predictable cycles. Like violence, the solution to systemic bias are simple but unattractive. Don't display and rub symbols in people faces. Do not create ambiguous borders between groups of people. Treat each person as individua…

Despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent. But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#346

Post by rayiner » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

conception wrote: post #179

ipaddr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.

How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty in many minority groups. The poor don’t have resources, wealth or contacts, to become a super coder/manager/whatever so they don’t make it into your applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place. The cycle continues. Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.…

There are disparities companies can fix through hiring practices and ones they can’t. Systemic bias is one they can’t—who Google hires or doesn’t simply doesn’t move the needle on generational poverty. Even if every professional industry does it, that doesn’t move the needle because those industries employ a small fraction of overall workers. Fixing biases and barriers to promotion in service jobs and trades would do vastly more to fix systemic bias, because those industries simply employ vastly more people across a bigger cross section of the work force.

Then there are disparities that better hiring practices can fix, namely correcting the “first and only” problem. Most people just want to fit in, and being the “first and only X” makes that harder. It’s a kind of disparity that exists only because it exists and can be fixed by simply hiring people from diverse backgrounds to achieve a critical mass so that future applicants don’t face that conundrum.

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

#347

Post by nonbirithm » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

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…

I was a diversity hire at Microsoft.

The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think.

Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past.

And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life.

If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.

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

#348

Post by robin21 » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

entee wrote: post #277

worker767424 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hiring more black people It's not like there's a large, untapped pool of talented black software engineers. I'm at a large tech company. There was a team I worked with for a big with some really talented people, the sort of team where really smart domain experts go. There was a black guy on it who asked questions showing he wasn't an obviously talented domain expert. I found out he was recruited for coming from an…

Respectfully, this is the wrong way to look at the problem. It’s true, objectively, that there are fewer minority/female CS graduates. But there’s no way that gets better if a person who is “not a subject matter expert” gets dismissed. That person needs to be trained. If they want to be expert at that subject, we as an industry need to be able to help them get there. Increasingly I believe the problem with diversity…

> but all you hear about is hell stories

The reality is distorted though. Like in this article many would argue that none of it is sexist and it is just human behavior.

Whereas other women reading this have their biases confirmed.

I really struggle to find any sexism stories that describe situations that don’t also happen to men.

Human nature is to pattern match. It’s easier to blame groups than to blame individuals than to blame yourself.

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

#349

Post by jrnichols » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #206

conception wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty in many minority groups. The poor don’t have resources, wealth or contacts, to become a super coder/manager/whatever so they don’t make it into your applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place. The cycle continues. Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.…

The systemic bias I faced was that people assumed I was poor, didn't have resources, wealth or contacts because I am a Native American.

My recently experience with the Choctaw Nation would have led me to think the exact opposite. Their new headquarters is absolutely amazing. Beautiful new buildings, and huge casino expansion underway too. They seem to have been taking care of the tribe members quite well.

But that may be an inaccurate assumption on my part as well.

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

#350

Post by pacman2 » Tue, Mar 09, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

alienthrowaway wrote: post #334

pacman2 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure mate. Yes, some things you mention sound annoying and insulting but still. You are an immigrant to the US, got a non US education, you got a job in Silicon Valley and you made it. Honestly, I feel like I received more discrimination as a white, western European in the US than you did. When I was still working in a university lab in the US, it was extremely diverse, with a strong bias/over-representation…

> Honestly, I feel like I received more discrimination as a white, western European in the US than you did. What is the point of bringing this up - is this thread the oppression olympics/"Four Yorkshiremen" of discrimination? Do I have a bit for you: White, western European, you say? Try being an immigrant as a black, African in tech - I'm sure I had it worse than you, at least you people assume you had electricity g…

You work in tech in the US, a place I had to leave because I did not have a job, shelter, food, health insurance and had to go to China.

I have black friends that work in tech, patent law or whatever in the US. Yes, racism exists, no doubt. They told me anecdotes. But I am not very impressed by your complaining. And this is the most polite way I can phrase it.

Don't like it in the US? Go to Africa. Good opportunities there. If I had to leave China, Ethiopia would be on of the places I would consider.