Several years ago, at a previous employer, a colleague whose technical ability I had deep respect for confided in me that he was only interviewing women until the representation on his team reached >50%. When I pointed out that was probably illegal and certainly unethical and lowers the chance of selecting the most qualified candidate, he said selecting the most qualified candidate was less important than "levelling the playing field." I don't think he ever considered the irony of his viewpoint that "women can only succeed if I enable it."
I wish I could say this is a rare viewpoint, but this sort of overt discrimination appears to be rampant in certain tech circles.
> this sort of overt discrimination appears to be rampant in certain tech circles
It's rampant in society, prevalent in most bureaucracies. It's minority essentialism, a subordination of entire minority groups to everyone else under the belief that these people, by virtue of their identity, cannot help themselves.
It took us 4 months to hire a woman to our team while we wasted the time of over a dozen qualified men interviewing people we knew we would not hire. I found this deeply distasteful.
Putting aside anything relating to the underlying goals, the questions of employment law are really interesting.
In Canada (unless it’s changed since I was there), you are allowed to state that a position has a preference for four specific groups: women, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and visible minorities. These are defined by the Employment Equity Act, and certain companies (those that are federally regulated) are required to implement proactive practices to increase the representation of those groups.
So you’d think this would create clarity, right? Nope! The Canadian Human Rights Act is still in force and makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, race and other protected categories. So those companies must somehow balance proactive employment practices without any kind of discrimination. I’m pretty sure even though you could state that preference, a decision not to hire someone exclusively on the basis of one of the classes would still be illegal. (And to be clear, I also believe that stating such a preference would also be illegal unless it was specifically to further representation of those groups. This comes up in the context of e.g. a preference for female servers or retail workers.)
I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like a potential lawsuit. I do wonder what sort of whistle blower status you could be awarded in this circumstance if any at all.
I wonder if you can get whistle blower protection if you know your team is discriminating against a protected group, and who you can even report that to.
I’m pretty sure that the law doesn’t allow discrimination to correct diversity imbalances.
DEI initiatives are about driving recruiting efforts and targeting towards underrepresented groups (e.g. having recruiters reaching out to qualified women, running recruiting drives at colleges with high minority populations, etc.) but the ultimate hiring decision cannot exclude anyone on the basis of a protected class.
Thanks, these are interesting cases. However, I suspect that these both hinge of the fact that they are related to specific training and internal promotion, which (to me at least) seems like it’s easier to judge that those not selected do not have their interests “unnecessarily trammeled” (they are still employed and will have other opportunities to make progress in the organization). Curious if you know of any pertaining to the external hiring decision itself? I am not debating anything, but the nuances are interesting to me.
I am not a lawyer but I am curious as to this. Maybe it depends on your jurisdiction? What is the legal precedent for this?
I am also curious -- if this is the case, then why not state explicitly in the job req that men need not apply -- if there is no fear of legal consequences? Seems like that would have saved everyone a lot of time.
I guess the first part would be deciding how to measure diversity. Maybe put people into different buckets based on their skin color, sex, gender and disability status.
Then, the next part would be deciding if we want an even split or counts representative of the field (unless that's incorrect too) or maybe based on demographics.
Is this just a "the means justify the means" argument or am I missing something?
Discrimination is wrong because of the harm it causes, not because it's a violation of an immutable law of fairness or whatever. There's a fucking lot to balance after all.
In the constitution of my Country (and many others) there's written that "all citizen are equal in front if the law, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age (..)" etc
Nowhere it is said "because it's economically inconvenient"
They are considered human rights, that people inherit as humans when they are born and are inalienable.
So, no.
Even people who discriminate have the right to not be discriminated.
So if I punch you in the face and steal $100 once every day for 30 years, all that is required for perfect fairness is today I merely stop punching you and stealing from you. I get to continue to enjoy my much greater security in life and your reduced ability to compete since I have all your money and have maimed and damaged you. Got it.
For example women in Europe, especially east Europe, were hired to program computers back in the 50s and 60s because it was considered a job for typists, which were mainly women.
Some men were scientists, some were engineers, teachers were highly regarded, but most of them worked horrible jobs in farms where women were never seen, because the job required physical skills and also because men were through they had to provide for the family.
Nobody has ever seen a woman in the European mines, it makes sense though.
Families paid the toll watching their men dying of silicosis and other horrible diseases.
Women got more comfortable job as nurses,because society decided they are natural born caretakers, where the few men in power sometimes abused of them.
So please don't make assumptions based on some modern propaganda, things are much more complex than they look.
Unless you're from the ruling class, we are all largely in the same boat in the end.
Besides, hiring a woman this way, assuming the story is true, is not exactly morale boost material.
That's debatable. What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs? Could it still linger today in having created the cultural environment which is why few women pursue STEM and why it's still predominantly men?
> Research has shown that women are no less capable than men in science and mathematics. But, according to the AAUW, external factors, like a lack of role models, cultures that tend to exclude women, and persistent stereotypes about women’s intellectual abilities, reinforce a wide gender gap.
> What was the impact of the biases against women towards them working STEM jobs?
I guess what OP is saying is that the beneficiaries are largely not people that actually suffered discrimination, they are just people that tick all the boxes.
You can make an argument that women today are still being discriminated against or are in a disadvantaged position because of past discriminations against women. Therefore the women they hired was an appropriate beneficiary.
As research shows, there is still bias against women in hiring, especially in the resume selection process.
And as research also shows, women don't pursue STEM jobs because of historically induced cultural biases.
If you discriminated against women in the past so that the profession got taken over by men, had only men's in it, men became all the professors, men became all the role models for the profession, it shouldn't be surprising from a sociological level that women today don't find STEM appealing because it's all men dominated and doesn't seem friendly or inviting to them.
How do you break this cycle is a separate discussion, and there's a seperate argument that affirmative action doesn't work.
> Balance it against nothing. The beneficiaries are not the same people as the victims.
This makes two claims:
1. That the woman that was hired is not at risk of discrimination.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.
2. That women are no longer disadvantaged when it comes to their likelihood of pursuing a STEM career and getting into the field.
I challenge the truth of this statement, because some research also shows there are still socio-cultural biases that turn women away from the field.
Now it's not because I challenge the truth of those statements that I claim to know the truth myself. I don't know the truth.
To me, right now, it appears that:
1. Women still face bias in hiring
2. Women are oddly not pursuing STEM careers
3. Socio-culturaly you can see that it wouldn't be as attractive to women to do so
4. There's a nature vs nurture question mark, but it's hard to say women naturally don't like STEM as much, given there's clearly socio-cultural influences at play, so how do you isolate that variable?
When I take all this, I feel there's a lot of reasons you might want to try to balance things out.
You might want to balance out the still existent hiring bias.
You might want to balance the discrepancy in gender in the field.
You might want to balance the socio-cultural influence, to try and reverse them, making STEM more appealing to women.
Now I say "you might", because it'll depend on your values, but if you value equal opportunity for women, wanting to try and balance those things seem logical to me.
> Should I get some kind of preferential lanes, even thought nothing of the sort ever happened to me?
Possibly yes. There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered. If some of those have affected you as well, you wouldn't have gotten the same opportunities as your peers whose family wouldn't have been discriminated against. Maybe the ripple stoped short and you weren't impacted at all, but we can reason some cases where it wouldn't have, and children of discriminated ancestry would even today be impacted by those second order effects.
> What about truck divers' industry, where what you are claiming as discrimination is undisputable?
I don't know anything about the truck driving industry, so I can't speak to it. But if there's bias and socio-cultural influences that affect people's opportunity I'd probably think the same.
It makes only one claim: that the people being hired now are not the victims of past discrimination.
Which arguably very probable, unless proven otherwise.
> I challenge the truth of this statement, because as the research I linked shows, it seems likely there are still biases against women in hiring processes even today.
there are biases even against men. There are biases against almost every category you can think of.
Look t the layoffs, it's men in majority.
The reason is obvious, still the statistics don't lie, right?
I'll ask you again, why isn't that a problem in the truck driver industry, were it's only men?
And if that's true, why is it so hard for companies to find women to hire.
A thing that is evident to anyone working in tech, there are simply much less women candidates than men, companies that need employees should or shouldn't be allowed to look in the largest possible pool?
Last but not least, tech is not STEM.
Tech is simply a job, you don't need a PHD or a thesis on the theory of everything to participate.
In US in the 50s and 60s women accounted for 40-50% of computer programmers, according to research by Claire L. Evans.
In the 80S it was 36%.
Now it's 26%.
What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women.on average, also professors started to ask more from their students, thanks to the boom of personal computers, programming classes were in high demand and the number of seats was still very limited.
The real divide became between who had a computer at home and who hadn't.
So many men too had no access to tech jobs or higher education in tech, it's not only women.
A fun fact: I was born in Italy in the 70s, I had a C64 as a kid that my sister hated, not because it was for boys, but because she thought it was boring.
She liked books.
She has become a scholar of literature.
Fast forward to my teen years, I was playing volleyball and had no interest for computers or programming, I was a sports guy.
Then in high school there was a limited number course for the final 3 years that taught CS and programming that I enrolled to given I had very good grades because if I was admitted I could stop studying German and Geography, that I had no love for.
We were half boys and half girls in my class, the girls simply had no interest for computers, except a couple that went to study CS at uni with me. Boys were even worse, they could only think about soccer. I was very hood at it, I don't think that's because I'm special, it's simply because I studied and did the exercises at home. On paper before buying my first PC! But AFAIK many of my classmates, men and women, are now working as some kind of programmers because the request is so high that even the not so skilled have a good chance of being hired (yeah, some are doing Cobol...)
> There are second order effects to the discrimination your family suffered
I disagree.
There are other effects that are more important than me and my family: fascism was defeated and nobody suffered again because of it.
Which is exactly what my family wanted.
Being a victim is not a full time job, you are a victim only if you are one, not if you think you are.
Are you denying the results of the research I linked that shows resume bias? Or think the research wasn't thorough enough?
Are you saying that you believe the only reason for there being less woman in tech is their nature, that their gender makes them naturally less interested in tech? And your only data point here is an anecdote about you and your sister?
> What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women
You don't see this as gender discrimination? Why did men have more access to computers? Why was the access to computers based on gender?
> It makes only one claim: that the people being hired now are not the victims of past discrimination.
I guess we interpret what they meant differently. I didn't interpret it to mean the victim of past discriminations, they never use the word "past" or refer to the past in any way.
My interpretation and what my rebuttal was for is that they're saying that the current women are no longer at a disadvantage and don't suffer any disproportionate discrimination anymore.
Basically the question is, are women today being pushed away from pursuing a tech career, and do they face additional obstacles in doing so if they try?
The person I responded too seemed to imply that the answer is No they're not. I'm not convinced because research still demonstrates that obstacles do exist which aren't seen for men.
> The real divide became between who had a computer at home and who hadn't. So many men too had no access to tech jobs or higher education in tech, it's not only women
Class discrimination is also important to fight. Access to opportunities shouldn't be reserved only to the rich. But women are in an even worse position if they're also from a poor family.
> Look t the layoffs, it's men in majority.
It's obvious that when most employees are men, most of the employees laid off would be men as well? Maybe I didn't get what you meant here?
> A thing that is evident to anyone working in tech, there are simply much less women candidates than men, companies that need employees should or shouldn't be allowed to look in the largest possible pool?
Exactly, that's the other point, there's less woman in the pool, so you need to make sure they don't get starved out, and to increase the representation of women in the pool you need to go out of your way to recruit women, it's one possible way to break the cycle.
I feel like we're talking a bit past each other at this point though. Maybe I get the impression the disagreement is on the Nature vs Nurture part? Are you explaining all the discrepancies as inherent to being a woman vs a man? That it's all just caused by natural interest and motivation?
I think this is an unanswered question personally, and I'm not seeing conclusive evidence that you can conclude it's purely a natural based outcome. Your anecdote about your sister really doesn't meet my bar for proof unfortunately.
>> What changed is not discrimination, but that the industry first started asking for prior experience with computers, which men had more than women
>You don't see this as gender discrimination? Why did men have more access to computers? Why was the access to computers based on gender?
If this is evidence of gender discrimination it's by the parents, not by the companies doing the hiring. The companies are doing nothing wrong in hiring the most qualified even if that skews highly male.
The reality is that the autism spectrum is *highly* overrepresented in STEM, especially the solitary pursuits (things like programming where the job is a worker at a computer.) The autism spectrum skews highly male. That's going to skew such jobs male. (And, personally, I think this actually understates it--autism is not binary, but a spectrum. That means there's plenty more that lean in that direction without reaching the point of qualifying for a diagnosis.)
> Class discrimination is also important to fight. Access to opportunities shouldn't be reserved only to the rich. But women are in an even worse position if they're also from a poor family.
And the antidiscrimination efforts do virtually nothing about this. Companies neither know nor care what someone's class background is, they just care what they can do.
> Exactly, that's the other point, there's less woman in the pool, so you need to make sure they don't get starved out, and to increase the representation of women in the pool you need to go out of your way to recruit women, it's one possible way to break the cycle.
You're assuming discrimination perpetuated by the employers, yet the only sources of discrimination you cite have nothing to do with the employers. There's no cycle to break.
I'm not saying the employer is discriminating. Read my other reply to you, I think it clarifies better what I'm saying.
My argument is that, there's a great possibility that gender inequality persists today, and that it contributes to the gender gap. Not that I'm convinced it does for sure, but that it's still highly likely it does, based on research data and other reasonable hypothesis.
Therefore, some companies are trying to combat this possible inequality, by choosing to prioritize a similarly qualified women candidate over a qualified men, in order to limit the effect of possible hiring bias, and promote women representation in tech, in hope to make their workplace more women friendly.
If there is in fact lingering gender inequality, this should help combat it, and it's arguably a good thing (we can separately discuss if in practice it works to combat it or not, but at least it's understandable why they'd do it).
If it turns out there isn't any lingering gender inequality against women, I agree that this would appear to put a bias against men now, creating an inequality against them.
This is where it gets a little tricky, because now it's about your belief of the true cause. I see some men worried about their own career chances often believe that probably there isn't inequality and it's just personal choice. But I also don't understand why you'd worry about it in that case, if women just don't want to become programmers, no amount of policy encouragement would change that, and you've got nothing to worry about.
I also personally feel the evidence for lingering gender inequality appears stronger, and I think you can learn valuable insight by trying some corrective policies and also seeing the outcome. The more policies fail to reduce the gender gap, the more you learn the factors that have or don't have an impact on it, eventually that could lead us to know the real cause.
Sure there are differences. However, you aren't showing that companies are discriminating to cause that difference. Companies shouldn't bear the burden of righting wrongs that they didn't cause, especially in cases where it's not at all certain there is even a wrong going on.
What you are missing is that if women just don't want to become programmers the drive to not discriminate means companies will be overpaying for female programmers.
And we have seen that policies aimed at reducing discrimination had a big effect in the civil rights era but then accomplish virtually nothing since. Instead, we see wilder and wilder efforts to "prove" discrimination while ignoring the marketplace is saying it's the other way around.
> However, you aren't showing that companies are discriminating to cause that difference
Correct, I'm also making no claims that they are. The discrimination, if there is any, appears to come from socio-cultural causes.
> What you are missing is that if women just don't want to become programmers the drive to not discriminate means companies will be overpaying for female programmers
I'm not following that, can you explain? I'd assume they offer similar pay to man and woman, as far as I know, there's no evidence they're paying woman more, in fact, seems to be the opposite.
> And we have seen that policies aimed at reducing discrimination had a big effect in the civil rights era but then accomplish virtually nothing since
Ya, I'm not sure that you can solve the problem at that level either.
In practice, I think women hiring pushes like this has actually caused some men to be even more hostile to women workers, and that's actually having the opposite effect, work environments are even less welcoming to women, and their credibility is being questioned even more, as people claim they were hired to meet quotas, etc.
It's hard to change socio-cultural attitudes. And it only takes a few derogatory men to make the field toxic to women.
It's a fallacy to ignore that an existing bias reinforces itself and requires active counter force to change it.
There are all kinds of well understood factors that influence women to avoid many typically male populated environments that are caused by the men and not by the women's simple innate disinterest in the topic.
They are voluntarily choosing to avoid being abused and insulted and disrespected, not voluntarily choosing not to be engineers or competitive gamers or whatever.
As a side note, you can't use the word fallacy as a synonym for wrong.
A fallacy is when your arguments don't actually prove that the conclusion is right, yet convinces people that it is. It's an error in reasoning that leads you to believe the conclusion derives from the premise, when it doesn't. It doesn't even mean the conclusion is wrong, just that it doesn't derive from the premise and arguments and as such hasn't actually been proven right.
So you should say: "It's wrong to believe you can fight discrimination with more discrimination".
Because"that X can be fought with a variation of X" isn't fallacious, this is a logical possibility. A variation of X could in some circumstances be used used to fight X. There's no error in logic here.
Let's take as a given that there was discrimination in the past. Unless you have a time machine you can't go back and change that. Hiring more people of the discriminated-against group now benefits new workers of that group (who haven't been discriminated against because they haven't had jobs before) but that does nothing to rectify the past wrongs, it just creates new victims (those who lost out on jobs that they should have gotten.)
The fundamental problem here is that attempts to redress discrimination pretend that groups can be victims. Nope, victims are always individuals. Does killing a Hatfield bring back a McCoy?? (Note that the original implementation of affirmative action was needed to break the problem of the social contract against hiring blacks. That's long since been done, the program should have been dismantled 40 years ago.)
As for continuing discrimination against "women", look more carefully at the pattern--the "discrimination" is the result of having children. Taking time out of the labor market (or working fewer hours while still in the labor market) translates to less experience and thus a lower value. When you control for actual hours worked (do *not* have a "full time" category!!), actual years of experience (maternity leave is at best zero experience, likely negative experience as that's time not keeping current with changes) and actual position (no lumping similar categories--pediatrician pays less than cardiologist) almost all the supposed discrimination vanishes. Compare young, childless, degreed women and they're making *more* than their male counterparts.
My point is focused on equal opportunity. Any individual should have the same opportunity to pursue a tech career, irregardless of their gender. Why tech careers? Because those are really good job opportunities.
What people are trying to "balance" is the unequal opportunities between women and men.
Now I'll assume that you value this goal, because otherwise we need to have a very different conversation.
I've assumed in your prior comment that "Balance it against nothing" refered to you arguing there is no gender inequality of opportunity in tech.
Now, if that was true, you'd expect to see a proportional representation of genders in the field, but that's not what we observe at all, it skews heavily male.
How do we explain this?
Based on your other comments and comments from other commenters, I saw "autism" skews male (I'm not sure about the accuracy of that fact), and tech skews autistic (I'd need data on this), and maybe that explains it.
I also saw some Nature vs Nurture, that maybe women are naturally less interested.
And I saw child bearing, but this is part of the goal, motherhood shouldn't affect your opportunities otherwise it's no longer equal since women have to give birth, and we're back at your gender impacting negatively your opportunities.
Now I'm not actually saying these couldn't be part of the explanation. They could, and if some of those were exclusively the cause, it would explain why we see a male skew in tech, and it would mean the skew isn't due to social inequalities, but women's own personal choice.
What I'm saying is that this conclusion is highly debatable, because there are other explanations that hold more or less merit.
The two I provided I backed up with research.
The gender discrepancy could also be due to:
1. Resume bias, which could indicate a greater trend of overall hiring bias, that might even expand to bias in school assignment grading, school entry application selection, parental encouragement, even women's own self-perceived qualifications.
2. Socio-cultural influences, like the lack of role models, an unwelcoming tech community environment that is intimidating to women or hostile to them, etc.
Again, I'm not saying these are the explanations for sure.
What I'm saying is that they're likely explanations with research backing.
So when you say "Balance it against nothing", you imply you know the absolute truth about this, that you just know for sure there isn't any inequality here whatsoever, and I simply disagree, you've not demonstrated the lack of inequality in a convincing manner, there are bodies of research in fact that indicate that there is still some level of inequality, and that it could be this remaining inequality that explains the gender gap.
That's why I say: "That's debatable". There are as likely, or arguably more likely explanations that would indicate lingering inequality.
But we’re coming up on 70 years - nearly a century itself - of so-called “positive” discrimination (affirmative action). Almost nobody alive can even remember what you’re balancing out.
My gut says it's worse than the numbers here suggest. I've been in more than one situation where no one outright said "Don't hire any more white men", but they made themselves clear nonetheless. The 'ole, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?".
Striking headline and summary data, but I don't like that the surveyors seem cagey about releasing the full data. Why should you have to contact they to get it vs. just putting it out there for transparency?
Surely the true number isn't 0 for each, but it may not be that high - or at least people may not be as willing to be upfront or see it that way.
>Methodology
>This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace. For full survey results, please contact pr@resumebuilder.com.
Literally, every company has been training staff to not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, national origin etc because it would run afoul of Civil rights law.
Is this a new bogeyman like the evil Jews who were conniving against the majority Germans in the 1920s as per Nazi propaganda.
Supposedly, it's all about don't discriminate. In practice, however, discrimination is measured by diversity. The safe path is to choose the diversity hire. It's pretty hard to get in trouble for not hiring the white male.
> however, discrimination is measured by diversity
No law measures discrimination by diversity. However, the law punishes actual discrimination by race and gender. This however does not ameliorate the victim complex/ mentality that a nations most powerful group experiences. Statistically speaking, in American society, this group is typically the white Christian male.
The law punishes "actual" discrimination--but determines discrimination by disparate results, not by observing actual discrimination. Thus the de-facto result is you're punished for not meeting quotas.
What the law says and what happens in the courtroom differ.
It's illegal to discriminate, but in practice that means it's "illegal" to have a workforce skewed too far towards the white male. Businesses are simply obeying the law as enforced, not the law as written.
We see the same thing from both sides--look at the recent cases where hospitals have refused to perform life-saving abortions. They're not going to jail if she dies, they might go to jail if they save her. Hence despite the law saying they have to do it they don't.
> What the law says and what happens in the courtroom differ.
I'm not from US, if it wasn't clear.
that difference doesn't exists here.
But most importantly, if it's illegal, it shouldn't be permitted
Classifying worker based on some personal attribute is illegal here and it's punished by the courts.
Because it's the law.
You can't measure diversity, the best you can do is separate male workers from female workers because it's used by the national institute of statistics to calculate the official unemployment rates by gender.
And that's all the diversity you can measure.
Other forms of diversity are measured through not so reliable polls or authorized studies.
Instead of giving examples of abortion, can you give examples where the court has punished businesses that hired white males, contradicting the race and gender protections offered by the civil rights law.
“All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.”
Manage 25% of total company hiring? So what, they’re tiny companies with big fat DEI programs? Who actually got interviewed here?
Having been in hiring committees for 10+ years and working in the industry for 20+ years, I have learned to dismiss glib statements outright, as the only purpose of glib statements is to make the author look smug.
The only glib statement in this conversation is yours. You're trying to dismiss someone's point on the grounds that it doesn't align with your political views.
I wish I could say this is a rare viewpoint, but this sort of overt discrimination appears to be rampant in certain tech circles.