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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

#71

Post by fwip »

pmarreck wrote: post #43
maxehmookau wrote: post #6

Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.

Assuming that a firing for "lack of chemistry" (which is a very real and valid concern, btw: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor... ) is, without evidence, veiled discrimination, is also a Grade A dick move, by being a "default victimization mindset". Anecdotal firings of minority hires are insubstantial proof of discrimination; in fact it may be the opposite, if there's a diversity retention…

This article may be worth a read for you: https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-workpl...

Below, I do some napkin math to attempt to estimate your likelihood of getting in trouble for firing somebody.

In 20 years, there were 1.8M employee discrimination cases filed in the US, so ~roughly 90K per year. Each year, about 19M employees are fired or laid off.

Considering that not all employee discrimination suits arise from termination, we can expect a rate to be significantly below the calculated likelihood of 0.04% (90K/19M), or less than 1 in 200. However, I don't have an estimate for this,

You can adjust that for the prevalence of underrepresented groups in your field, of course - usually it will be about half that have some protected factor (age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.), so let's double that, for 1 in 100.

Of those cases, 82% were closed without even a settlement. So we're back down to about 1 in 500, if you pretend that the EEOC chooses entirely randomly and cannot differentiate between real discrimination and made up ones.

I think it would be worthwhile for you to do some real risk assessment, and figure out whether the (Also, age discrimination constitutes the plurality of EEOC cases, so you should possibly be more concerned about hiring people over the age of 35 than hiring women or black people).

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

#72

Post by rachelbythebay »

Upside of being a token X: sometimes you get enough cash out of it to be able to leave it behind again. This only works if they get to trot you out. So get used to that bridle.

Downside of being a token X: normally they just keep you around long enough to tick off the "hiring" box(es), since nobody gives a shit about retention, and you probably won't be the one chosen to get put on a pedestal.

So yeah, keep trying until you can find a place where you can just do your work and be taken seriously and not have them treat you like a piece of meat or worse. Good luck. I'm still looking for that place.

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

#73

Post by worker767424 »

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 wonder if anything will ever happen with reverse discriminatory hiring practices like this. They're all seem so barely legal, and if even one in ten people in HR disagree with them, there could be a #metoo-like flood of issues once a high-profile case goes a little too far.

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

#74

Post by Mountain_Skies »

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…

Thank you for sharing your experience. There are more and more people who have had similar experiences that are speaking out about it and how condescended to it made them feel. It's good you were able to find an employer with whom you feel valued for your contributions and accomplishments.

Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #68
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by kbelder »

theluketaylor wrote: post #61
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…

I saw an interview with one of the late night hosts (I think it was Seth Meyers). He told a story about building the staff for their show as part of the launch. They asked the various talent agencies for packets for writers (which are collections of sketches and other material tv comedy writers use to get hired. Think artist portfolio). The show wanted to hire a more diverse writing staff and asked for that in packet…

Isn't that blatantly illegal?

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

#77

Post by baggy_trough »

kbelder wrote: post #76
theluketaylor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw an interview with one of the late night hosts (I think it was Seth Meyers). He told a story about building the staff for their show as part of the launch. They asked the various talent agencies for packets for writers (which are collections of sketches and other material tv comedy writers use to get hired. Think artist portfolio). The show wanted to hire a more diverse writing staff and asked for that in packet…

Isn't that blatantly illegal?

Certainly.

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

#78

Post by Kranar »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #63
maxehmookau wrote: post #6

Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.

Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is the theory. It definitely sucks, though.

I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever.

If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4.

I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people.

Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is.

Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.

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

#79

Post by rwcarlsen »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #69
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #65

It's a pretty straightforward deadlock: "We want to hire you because you'll add diversity." vs. "I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity." Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong. I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons other than thei…

Taking a non-diverse population and making it diverse is not easy at first. You need to jumpstart the effort across the board. Example: if there are no minority engineers applying from schools, it is because there are no minority students getting degrees. Follow that back to the source. It also is a lot to ask of a non-diverse group to suddenly understand diversity: they really can't, you need the group to be diverse…

More egalitarian funding will just make the wealthier classes just put their money and students somewhere else. I live in an area with a lot of private and charter schools. This is the mechanism that the community members have evolved to fund+support their children's education directly the way they want. If you try to make people pay for something they don't want to - they'll just find ways around it and you could even be left with even worse outcomes than before.

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

#80

Post by UncleOxidant »

Kranar wrote: post #78
UncleOxidant wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is the theory. It definitely sucks, though.

I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever. If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4. I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can on…

Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with only 3 or 4 applicants max.

The one time this happened I had gone through the phone interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software development). The hiring manager actually called me up a few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me, but that the other candidate had some extra experience in an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I understood as not many people would have actual experience in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.

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