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Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

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Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#81

Post by metaphorm »

rorosaurus wrote: post #42
wmccullough wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but can you provide examples of how privileged men are? Specifically, can you provide examples of how the person you responded to is privileged without meeting them? Can you also please cite reputable sources? This is the other source of alienation. Enforcing guilt onto someone based on how they were born (e.g. Gender, race). The last time I checked, this is outright bigotry.…

If you associate privilege with guilt, I think that provides some valuable insight on your attitude regarding this topic. I think you can recognize being privileged without feeling responsible (or guilty) for its existence.

the phrase is made as an accusation. "you benefited from privilege" which means "you have unearned advantages" which means "you don't deserve what you have".

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#82

Post by burkaman »

metaphorm wrote: post #73
burkaman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what privilege means, it's not an on-off switch. It's just about recognizing factors out of your control that might give you slight advantages over other people. When people talk about "white privilege" they don't mean your life must be great because you're white, they mean regardless of your situation, you have more opportunities because of your skin color, which increases the odds of having a better life…

> Your support for gender equality in tech should not depend on how inclusive and understanding feminists are who appointed you the gatekeeper of what another thinking, feeling human being ought to think or feel? maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect certain trends in feminist politics and communication strategies. if someone tells you "I am feeling alienated because of X" rather than thought-police…

I of course do not have any say over other people's feelings, and I think it's obvious that asking someone to strive for something is not the same as forcing them. But the belief that women deserve equal rights is also not just a feeling, it's a core principle that you either agree with or you don't. What I am recommending (not demanding) is that people try to separate feelings and principles, so that your morals aren't determined by who has been nice to you recently.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#83

Post by metaphorm »

Fraztastic wrote: post #49
the_gastropod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There absolutely is. What are you suggesting? The "privilege" slinging used to belittle the accomplishments of people based on birth attributes _is_ rather obnoxious. To pretend that, for example, women are universally less privileged than men is of course ridiculous. Paris Hilton is clearly more privileged than a low-income boy growing up in Flint, Michigan.

Obviously true. Women as a group are shorter than men as group, but some women are taller than some men. That seems so trivially obvious as to not bear mentioning. But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages. He has easier access to relevant education and social networks. His applications, wo…

who is "a woman" and "a man"? statistics are not the same thing as individuals.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#84

Post by danso »

metaphorm wrote: post #71
danso wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for your situation but articles like these are looking at trends across groups. They're not meant to insinuate that every man is in a better position than every woman. The article talks about surveying 1,000+ men and women. Undoubtedly, some of the men in that sample had less confidence than some of the women. It doesn't make it invalid to analyze statistics across the group overall.

why doesn't it make it invalid? there are many situations where considering the mean is so deeply distorting as to make any conclusions drawn from it either unreasonable or outright false. I think calls for greater clarity and attention to detail when doing data analysis are well-considered and we should be _deeply suspect_ of claims made based on statistical aggregates, and particularly the mean average which is one…

I don't argue that statistical analysis can be distorting, in fact, of course it can be. All data collection of any sort is at best a limited picture of what we think is reality. But that doesn't make aggregates useless because outliers exist. Just because Stanford freshman swimmer Katie Ledecky is faster than some Olympic gold medal-winning mens relay teams [0] doesn't invalidate the observation that the average man is a faster swimmer than the average woman.

In the GP, I don't think he's making a "well-considered" call for "greater clarity." He's using the fact that because he lacks self-confidence, that focusing on women as a group is bullshit, as if the purported problems that women face are only substantial once it can be proven that all women are worse than all men.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katie-ledecky-is-the-pr...

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#85

Post by Frondo »

danso wrote: post #51
J-dawg wrote: post #17

As a man who struggles with low confidence and self-esteem, I hate the way women are given special attention over this stuff. I frequently don't apply for jobs I see that I could probably do, for all of the reasons listed in the article. A couple of times I have even pulled out after a successful first round interview due to anxiety about continuing. This is an example of how the "women in tech" movement alienates me…

I'm sorry for your situation but articles like these are looking at trends across groups. They're not meant to insinuate that every man is in a better position than every woman. The article talks about surveying 1,000+ men and women. Undoubtedly, some of the men in that sample had less confidence than some of the women. It doesn't make it invalid to analyze statistics across the group overall.

Yeah, you know what ol' saw applies here?

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and individually they probably don't do as well as a given woman. But that's not the point.

None of these broad trends mean anything when you look at an individual. The individual is a molecule in a gas.

(And I can't quite figure out why someone would read a piece on trends and immediately go to "but what about MEEE?" ... the whole thing is based on large-scale data, not the individual, so what about you? Nothing about you. This isn't about you.)

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#86

Post by Jach »

burkaman wrote: post #56
wmccullough wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you, but can you provide examples of how privileged men are? Specifically, can you provide examples of how the person you responded to is privileged without meeting them? Can you also please cite reputable sources? This is the other source of alienation. Enforcing guilt onto someone based on how they were born (e.g. Gender, race). The last time I checked, this is outright bigotry.…

There is no guilt involved. The whole concept of "privilege" is about factors out of your control, nobody should feel guilty for being white or male or anything else, and I'm sorry if someone gave you that impression. And as I said in another comment, it's not an on-off switch. "Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not resul…

As a concept "privilege" is useless except as rhetoric to get what you want against your supposedly more privileged enemies.

I think your defending language is sloppy here: ""Male privilege" doesn't mean "your life must be great", it means on average you have more and better opportunities that may or may not result in a better life."

That's not what it is supposed to mean at all, it's supposed to mean men on average (not you as a man on average) have better opportunities etc., and that on observing that you are a man, knowing nothing else about you, I can infer in a bayesian way that you are more likely than not to have better opportunities etc. There are many things I can infer depending on what my priors are and what I learn about you. But when dealing with individuals, priors on such broad factors like race/gender/religion become useless very quickly since you learn so many more specific details about the individual that are far more important than those broad attributes. Additionally not all attributes have the same distribution. So what if the average man has more opportunities etc. if when you look at the distribution no individual man fits the average? Distributions matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet

Drilling into the concept, "privilege" is nothing more than "attributes" we happen to find external positive correlations for. There are many, many such attributes, people are multi-dimensional complex beings, and there are many attribute combinations that interfere both constructively and destructively. What annoys me more than "privilege" advocates focusing so much on broad attributes like gender (and trying to instill feelings of guilt -- you might not do it but it is very common) is ignoring the equally valid concept of "detriment" (except sometimes in the special case of having "not this privilege"), i.e. attributes for which you can find negative correlations. Note that many attributes have both! Being tall is nice because you can reach high things, but sucks because flying anywhere is basically mini-torture. And there are many more positive and negative correlations I can list, just for being tall. This gives me prior information for inference when I observe a tall person, but my inferences should not be very strong because of all the other attributes I don't know about or am not considering.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#87

Post by metaphorm »

burkaman wrote: post #82
metaphorm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your support for gender equality in tech should not depend on how inclusive and understanding feminists are who appointed you the gatekeeper of what another thinking, feeling human being ought to think or feel? maybe you should interpret this as a call to introspect certain trends in feminist politics and communication strategies. if someone tells you "I am feeling alienated because of X" rather than thought-police…

I of course do not have any say over other people's feelings, and I think it's obvious that asking someone to strive for something is not the same as forcing them. But the belief that women deserve equal rights is also not just a feeling, it's a core principle that you either agree with or you don't. What I am recommending (not demanding) is that people try to separate feelings and principles, so that your morals are…

but what you said is "you SHOULD feel this way" not "I have a vision of a better world were we all strive for greater equality". your word choices matter.

also, while we're on the subject of communication, I would like to point out that there has been enormous and widespread political backlash that is due in no small part to the poor communication strategy by many leftist movements.

many (most?) people absolutely do agree with the proposition "women are humans just the same as men and deserve to be treated as such." a lot of those people, however, really do care about how they are spoken to. tone and language choice matters. it is not effective communication or politics to be constantly making accusatory remarks. people really do respond based on their emotions and will oppose those who have been "mean" to them recently, just because of that mood affiliation.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#88

Post by danso »

Frondo wrote: post #85
danso wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for your situation but articles like these are looking at trends across groups. They're not meant to insinuate that every man is in a better position than every woman. The article talks about surveying 1,000+ men and women. Undoubtedly, some of the men in that sample had less confidence than some of the women. It doesn't make it invalid to analyze statistics across the group overall.

Yeah, you know what ol' saw applies here? The plural of anecdote is not data. Lots of men have a shitty time in the workforce, in life, or whatever, and individually they probably don't do as well as a given woman. But that's not the point . None of these broad trends mean anything when you look at an individual. The individual is a molecule in a gas. (And I can't quite figure out why someone would read a piece on tr…

Sorry for this nerd-interruption: The plural of anecdote is data, at least as said by that aphorism's inventor, Raymond Wolfinger:

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080523225000/http://listserv.l...

Both variations are insightful; I like using Wolfinger's because it is an accurate observation that all data start out as anecdotes, and are influenced/distorted by the collection and filtering process. Still, this also implies that one outlying anecdote is not enough evidence alone to dismiss the aggregate findings across all of the other anecdotes.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#89

Post by rarec »

beowulf_cluster wrote: post #64
rarec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are so timid as to not even rise to the challenge of applying for a job with some uncertainty, how can you expect them to deal with uncertainty in the field?

Because that's a nonsensical strawman; those things aren't even related. Personally, I see any employer advertising for a position with stricter requirements than what they'll hire as advertising their own dishonesty. It just makes them look bad.

It's mildly dishonest, but it does help you as the employer get closer to the ideal fit for the position. Especially one that is likely posted to a public forum.

The fact that candidates that pre-select themselves out of being chosen is not really a big concern. Why should it be? The way around this is knowing exactly who it is you want for the job, but in that case I wouldn't be posting the job in a public forum. It's kind of what recruiters are intended for.

Re: Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified (2014)

#90

Post by khedoros1 »

draw_down wrote: post #2

> You’ve probably heard the following statistic: Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them. Ah, I had not. Landing a job I don't know how to do 2/5ths of sounds awful.

If it's just a programming language thing, those are easy to ramp up on, within weeks or months. Every job that I've had so far has involved a lot of extra learning. Even in the cases that I already knew the development language, there's been a large preexisting codebase, essentially providing its own in-house-built framework.

The next position that I'm waiting for a written job offer for: I don't know the language, haven't ever developed on the OS, and I'll be looking at 15 years of legacy code. It sounds like an exciting opportunity to expand my knowledge on someone else's time and do something I haven't done before.

Granted, I never would've applied on my own; they contacted me through LinkedIn. But that kind of thing is how I expect I'll find all my work in the foreseeable future.

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