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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

cspicenter.com

361–370 of 972 posts

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they are historically and factually wrong No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.

Which is why doctors and lawyers, two of the historically most highly paid and high status jobs, now graduate more women than men. Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge doctors make a lot of money.

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go into primarily and what specializations women go into primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's not that much of a difference. The male-dominated specialties tend to have far more high earning specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.

As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based on performance, and once again, historically speaking, men have always dominated on anything performance-based. Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at that.

As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay well and do so with high security still being largely in favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still being dominated by men.

None of this exempts the fact historically, women have never chased money through career nearly as much as men, and have always placed far higher value on a man's status than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too off-topic for this.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#362
It's obvious the writer of the article felt what he was asked to do was a mere distraction, made obvious by his statement that he would rather go back to "focusing on producing great software"

This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service to.

I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't continue to take their money but do something other than what they're asking for. Ridiculous.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#363
post #254

Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest? After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this. The cultural brainwashing that ther…

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#364
post #132

> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we…

It's essentially impossible to have a job opening without making choices that will directly affect which people see that job opening. If you go to some university's job fair, you're selecting for the students at that university. If you had chosen to go to a different university's job fair instead, the students who were exposed to your job posting would likely have different qualities. There is no "default behavior that doesn't constitute making a choice," thus the only thing we can debate is the virtues of which particular choice was made, not whether a choice was made.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we…

> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates. Two people growing up in different places (not different cities…

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic.

But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism.

Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.

So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#366

Back in 2020, I interviewed at Github for a professional services customer facing position. One of the steps in the interview was D&I, where I had 2 white males interview me, another white male, about what I do and will do for diversity, whatever that means. It was clear that they had a scripted checklist that they were going on and it was just a formality. They were visibly uncomfortable which this interview and so…

There are plenty of places where they aren’t uncomfortable with those questions.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we…

None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.

[dead]

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged group. Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on ho…

Blinding an interviewer by changing pitch/modulating the voice does little to erase the actual disadvantage. Few are arguing "people that sound like women are discriminated against", they're saying that the systems are set up in such a way that there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previo…

> there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previously, etc.

Actually, studies specifically aimed at measuring tech jobs indicate preferences favoring women candidates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644

People frequently compare the rates of women in tech relative to the general population, not the pool of tech workers. This is misleading, when in fact most companies are quite balanced in terms of gender representation - relative to the representation of women in the field. 80% of nurses being women isn't a sign of men being disadvantaged any more than 80% of coders being men.

working link for the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#369
post #315
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the state. The way this works is that there is a patronage relationship between the grievance HR class and certain political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort of…

I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this kind of contrived world.

What process do you use to select between world-models? I'm curious if you have a coherent answer here, or if you just can't accept what I'm describing because you don't like the way it sounds.

Do you know anything about employment law or the current state of title VII jurisprudence? I'm guessing not if you're reacting this way to a pretty uncontroversial claim.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#370

I don’t work at Microsoft, but another large corporation, and have been told by my manager that right now it is difficult for a white male to get promoted and that we may need to do some strange maneuvers to make it happen if I’m interested in a promo. Was kind of taken aback by the bluntness.

And yet, I'll bet you the majority of your corporation's management layers are white males.
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