I can sympathise with the men in this story. I have sat in on meetings where HR was telling Engineering that tech skills and experience did not matter; only the sex and race of the hired candidate.
How did HR get so much power? Most of them are barely out of University and at least at my org are a homogenous group of white women.
> I have sat in on meetings where HR was telling Engineering that tech skills and experience did not matter; only the sex and race of the hired candidate.
Fascinating! I have not yet had a chance to hear it admitted openly. Usually the implication is that the appropriate skills and experience can be found in any demographic (e.g.: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1400665677501853696)
While looking for a job in my country I saw a company EXPLICITLY advertise they wanted to hire a woman for a coder job, and men shouldn't apply.
This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.
Thing is... it is still illegal (in fact companies here that really need a specific gender, for example when hiring female airport security so they can deal with female passengers and whatnot, companies go through crazy legal hoops, because our gender discrimination law has no exception, no loophole, nothing).
This is actually a good thing. Laws that are unresponsive to unwritten cultural norms (and their changes over time) are extremely inflexible, and the position that they should be so inflexible is a radically conservative one.
Responsiveness to cultural norms is in part a function of courts having to maintain some minimum level of perceived legitimacy with the public.
You can't ever just read the law and know what it means, because law, unlike a formal system, is written in natural language (a semantically open system) and interacts with the real world, so it requires non-trivial interpretation.
To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law.
Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.
In our case, the whims of the populace are mediated by judges, whose consideration for popular feeling is often limited to something like 'will there be uncontrollable riots if I rule a certain way', and balanced against their ideological views (about how to interpret law) and the content of the law.
But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.
All laws are about morality (except for those in science and maths).
We often pretend they are different, or draw a distinction between behaviour constrained by laws and that constrained by personal morals, however the question of what laws to create and how they should be formulated are moral questions.
Some laws are about settling convention where the specific content of the convention has no normative component, e.g., which side of the road cars drive on
Some of the specific content of the law is arbitrary yes, but the fact we have a law about which side people should drive on at all is motivated by a moral imperative.
Although actually neither the right or left hand side rules are arbitrary. They were each intended to better serve a moral objective.
They do serve a normative aim, i.e., 'we should have drivable two-way roads', yes.
I'm not sure we need to reduce all norms to 'morality'. But if we think of morality in a really broad way, like 'humans (or other sapient creatures) seeking to satisfy preferences or impose additional structure on nature or society for their own purposes in a universalizable/principled (i.e., fair) way', then definitely: laws should always be motivated in some way by morality.
That's different from the claim (which I'm not saying you've made) that this relationship means that laws should always simply 'encode' moral norms in some direct sense, which imo is a common (and mistaken) simplification.
So we should get rid of laws against murder, rape, theft, etc? Some people do not believe those things are immoral. That means when we create laws banning them we are imposing our morality onto others.
you take the reply you got back from a the judge and send it to sympathetic media to get public eyes on a judge abusing the law for their social goals. There’s no other way to fight against corrupt officials when the system is corrupt.
What sympathetic media? There are none, except maybe for Breitbart?
Look at what happened with James Damore. His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed, so they simply invented it, claiming his memo said women programmers are worse at it than men when it said no such thing. Media blanketed the news with this false claim even though the document was public and anyone could download and read it for themselves. The only news outlet I saw cover this story correctly was Breitbart, who also ended up as a result with lots of leaked screenshots from disaffected Googlers talking about internal racial and sexual discrimination against "white" (+Asian) men.
I don't think Damore would have been bad with women, I believe his attempts were genuine for that matter. They way he handled publication was probably too much for the company and surely for a certain public out for blood. For any public statement you need the message to be easily digestible.
He never published anything publicly. His essay was written internally and then deliberately leaked by the sort of people who want to punish any ideological dissent. And it worked: the leakers were it seems never found, and Damore was fired, despite that his essay was written in response to a diversity training workshop asking for feedback.
Media, including big tech, is not sympathetic of men's issues. This is because male users are worth significantly less as advertisement targets, they would rather lose 3 male users over 1 female user. Its just pure capitalism and not inherent bias, but still it means that you wont find any media that cares much about your issues because they would rather not alienate their lucrative female users.
What if the only sympathetic media is decried as bigoted or [insert-your-favorite-whatever-ist] as a result (or is already known as such)? Then it stops being "corruption" and is seen as heroic.
If your case is that the judicial system and the media as a whole won't touch your issue (and the outlets that will are decried by society as being bigoted) maybe, just maybe, you're the one who is wrong and the entire rest of society is correct.
It isn't the entire rest of society, it is a very small privileged group pushing this. A majority of men strongly disagrees with these things, but their voices aren't allowed to be heard.
> This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.
I hope this comes up when she's up for reelection.
> The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.
Literally millions of men have died to save women and children from Titanic times, or in wars, if not still (just look at all the construction, electrical, mining jobs where there's no regard for "diversity" or lost lives)... Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? :eyeroll:
I recently interviewed for a job because my friend asked me to and put in the recommendation. They refused to interview me and just said they weren't interested. My friend got back to me and said "I'm pretty sure it's because you're a white male." It's speculation, but it probably happens more often than you think.
I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances.
This is not some "white men have it hard" diatribe. Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. But at least in tech they seem to have swung so far the other way that there is some discrimination against white males. I'm not mad, we all have to play the hands we're dealt and honestly being born a white male is about as good as it gets with regards to demographics. Just sharing my anecdotes.
If you're being denied jobs because of your race and gender, how is that "incredible privilege"? If you insist on feeling guilty for the circumstances of your birth, surely it is being born in a rich, stable country that yields the privilege, not race? The white women who would have argued for those policies, were not born less privileged than you.
I think age plays a role here, I'm a white male in my 50s and certainly women of my generation faced enormous hurdles that men didn't. That's because the majority of people in power while I was growing up were white men who grew up in the 1940s and 50s, and had moral compasses and gender expectations baked into them at that time.
Time and again I witnessed girls in my school classes in the 70s and 80s treated disrespectfully and condescendingly by teachers so boys of my age were exposed to these attitudes and I'm sure some were influenced by them.
I have two daughters and when they were about 9 and 10 my brother bought them a model combustion engine. When we told one of my uncles he snorted and said "Hasn't he noticed they're Girls!". That was about 8 years ago, and that uncle of mine has 3 daughters. Of course my kids loved the model and wouldn't let anyone else touch it, they spent hours working on it.
I'm pretty confident the current climate is much, much more open to women choosing their own path but it's still not perfect. There are still a lot of men in positions of power or influence with attitudes they learned many decades ago. Actually a fair few women too, many older ladies have regrettably regressive attitudes. They're there in families and work places influencing expectations, promoting biased thinking and giving boy's toys to boys and girl's toys to girls.
You are basically a NIMBY on gender and other men should not get penalties because you have daughters and are protective of them.
Women tend not to reach university in tech, so the blame would be on parents anyway.
> but it's still not perfect
What would "perfect" look like?
I do think time will solve this if there are indeed that many women interested in tech. There is still a possibility that those women are exceptions though. And this "positive" discrimination sets everyone back.
Don't penalize other men because you are unsure about educating your daughters. It is natural to be defensive here, but that is for you to deconstruct.
I already described how male teachers treat girls condescendingly and how other family members can subvert their interests, as can their peers. There's a lot parents can do, but they can't be everywhere during their child's education and gate keep all their experiences.
>What would "perfect" look like?
The best we can hope for would probably be enough awareness of positive role models, and access to encouragement and opportunities, to effectively counteract the inevitable discouragements and adverse influences. Not perfect but it might have to do.
I'm not at all for positive discrimination, I hope I didn't give that impression. I don't think it's necessary. I do believe white men still enjoy a lot of advantages, or at least face a lot fewer obstacles, than even white girls and that's based on personal observation and experience. I was replying to a comment that white girls do not have fewer privileges than white men, and I think that's thoroughly misconceived. It's better than it was, but misogynistic attitudes are still very much out there.
- Wow, example that came up just today. My wife and I were discussing plans for a renovation to our house with an architect. They guy pretty much refused to look at my wife and addresses his answers to me every time, even when she was asking the questions he checked it with me before answering. It was weird.
> I already described how male teachers treat girls condescendingly and how other family members can subvert their interests, as can their peers. There's a lot parents can do, but they can't be everywhere during their child's education and gate keep all their experiences.
Being guided to a male or female path isn't a privilege though. Boys gets even more pushback than that if they try to enter female dominated fields. There is a male privilege in tech, sure, but this article is about the advertisement segment which is far from male dominated. So what we see here is a bunch of women pushing out men using their female privilege in that industry.
The most likely explanation is that he was reading the nonverbal communication and body language of you and your wife. Sales, even technical sales, is too cutthroat to afford to dismiss any decision maker in the room.
You're focusing on one tiny anecdote of my life and generalizing it to my entire existence. I never said being discriminated against for a job was an example of incredible privilege - it's many of the other things that most white males never notice. When I get pulled over for speeding I don't have to worry about getting shot like black men do. Do you have any idea how fucking horrible it is to go through life worrying about legalized thugs with a proven history of racism regularly getting away with murdering you just because of the color of your skin? I don't because I'm white. That's privilege. If you think "driving while black" is a joke then your ignorance is making the world a worse place.
Holy fucking shit I cannot stand the echo chamber that is tech sometimes. Get out of your bubble and try to experience the world outside of reading about it on HN. There are worse things than being denied a job because of bullshit HR policies.
Those are raw numbers. What happens when you consider that there are more white people than black people in the United States? It reverses your claim. Your numbers show there are roughly twice as many white people shot, but there are roughly 4x as many white people as black - so being black makes you twice as likely to be shot by the police in the United States. This is so obvious I assume you're arguing in bad faith.
The sign of privilege is being unaware of it, because you're not regularly confronted with adversity. What is the worst adversity you've faced in your life as a white male? Mine is maybe being denied a lucrative job. Boo fucking hoo for me.
Look, the original article is about gender discrimination and you're displaying all the signs of the newly converted, so I'm not going to try too hard to argue with you about this. We all know there's many aspects of life where outcomes are disproportionate to racial/gender demographics, and that US police violence is one of them, with white women being given a famously light touch by police. In fact I once talked to a girl who openly boasted that she was always speeding and never got a ticket because she just started crying at the policeman (she was a very pretty girl so I could believe that this worked).
However your original claim was wrong and deserved to be called out. You said:
"When I get pulled over for speeding I don't have to worry about getting shot like black men do."
which is an absolute statement. In fact, you do have to worry about getting shot. I knew perfectly well you'd make a statistical argument in return, and also that it would be irrelevant given the strength of your original claim. There is no "white privilege" that means US police won't shoot you. They will do so if they feel the need, or perhaps even if they don't. The primary determinator of that is nonetheless your own actions, like whether you're armed or on drugs at the time.
But it also doesn't make sense to use this one isolated statistic in the context we're debating. After all, if you want to use getting shot by the police to define your hierarchy of privilege then the poorest European is vastly more privileged than the richest American will ever be, implying that Europeans should never be hired for jobs when an American could be hired instead. That wouldn't make sense.
Now, none of the above will land home with you. But I want you to consider something else. When you try to justify racism and sexism against white men like you are doing above, you're not just slapping yourself in the face, you're slapping the rest of us too. You're justifying us being denied jobs, including those of us who don't even live in America, because this ridiculous self-harming ideology gets exported via American HR departments, management and cultural production to the rest of the world. That's how you end up with people marching in London saying "hands up don't shoot" even though British police are almost always unarmed and the UK doesn't have a problem with police shootings.
By insisting that arbitrarily chosen differences in outcome with deep and complex socioeconomic causes are all reduced to "white man bad" you are deservedly opening yourself to harsh criticism, not merely because it's a racist and sexist viewpoint, but also because it directly harms the lives of those around you. By all means, stop applying for lucrative jobs if you feel so guilty about existing, but for goodness sake don't insist that those same harms befall the innocent.
You actually make a lot of great points, and I agree with you up until this part:
> When you try to justify racism and sexism against white men like you are doing above, you're not just slapping yourself in the face, you're slapping the rest of us too.
Yes, I did choose an absolute example. You're not wrong about that. The part you're missing is that you sound tone-deaf. To quote a famous movie: "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole." Are you the guy that says "all lives matter" instead of "black lives matter?" It's like you don't get the bigger picture. Yes, the problems you point out are real - they're also trivial. And if you want to make a mountain out of a molehill I can't stop you, but you come across as an entitled jerk.
The point isn't white men are bad. The point is white men are clueless that others are suffering more than them and are only focusing on themselves when others need help more than they do. It's selfish. It's similar to billionaires complaining about taxes. You also conveniently avoided my question - what's the greatest adversity you've faced as a white male? Because that's the perspective you're lacking.
FWIW I actually appreciate you writing a long response. Anyway, agree to disagree.
Well, when an argument devolves to "you're right but you're an asshole for being so" there isn't really anywhere else to go. I disagree that I'm an asshole, and yes I say things like "all lives matter". I do not agree that black people need some kind of global social movement promoting anti-white/male discrimination to help them, especially given that many of us live in places with no history of slavery and very small black populations. Even in the UK, only 3% of the population is black and in other parts of Europe it's far less still.
But even if we just focus on the USA, the situation and causes of some parts of the black population's outcomes are so complex that reducing it to "white people don't care enough" just doesn't make sense. White men don't make black men get divorced at a much higher rate, to pick just one example.
Greatest adversity I've faced "as a white male"? I ignored the question because it makes no sense to me. I don't know what it means, grammatically. I've faced all sorts of adversities and was a white male whilst those things were happening but that's not what you mean is it? How about being incorrectly accused of being racist? That's happened a couple of times. Whether that happened "as a white male" I cannot say, but I really doubt it would have happened had I been black. But then maybe it would have been. Who can know?
You say I deserve harsh criticism but get upset when I call you out for being an asshole? Man you just keep victimizing yourself. It's obvious you're convinced you're right and nobody can change your mind. I understand your perspective just fine because I used to agree with you. Then I grew up. I suspect you will too some day.
Men are more overrepresented as targets by police violence than black people are. So you just brought up a strong example of female privilege, and more specifically white female privilege. But certainly not a white male privilege.
> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall.
Only if you limit privilege to negative reward (suffer less discrimination and exclusion) instead of positive reward (getting actual benefits) and as you say, the tide is turning. Positive reward is still mainly tied to class and generational wealth.
> I'm not mad
Do you think it makes sense for a for-profit enterprise to have hiring policies based on the political sensibilities of the staff, let alone mainly those of SJW middle class white women?
The ripple on affect of this is going to break society. You want to fly, drive or be treated with systems, people or processes that weren't hired, designed and built using merit? Of course you don't. Skill matters, who cares about color?
If you think the old system was based on merit, you haven't been paying attention.
Successful products that will work for diverse people need diverse engineers to build them. Hiring only "the best" leads to hiring mostly only people from the largest majority group, because that's how statistics work. And that leads to ridiculous product fails like facial recognition that doesn't recognize non-white faces.
The company I worked at pushing the "diversity" agenda is Cruise. It seems unfair to name and shame the other company as I can't actually confirm that was why they declined to interview me.
> I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances.
Fast forward a few years, and when looking at internal transfers you'll hear "don't worry, he's a white/asian male, so you know he's here on merit". First time I heard that I was shocked.
> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall.
Go tell that to the trailer trash white kid who last saw his mother with a needle in her arm when he was a teenager, never met his father and managed to somehow make it in tech thanks to Community College and scholarships.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Just remember that these sorts of companies will miss out on hiring some excellent talent, who will go on to be hired by their competition.
If you experienced "incredible privilege" it is not because you are white male, it is because you were privileged in one way or another. There are many white males who are born into dire situations and got no incredible privilege overall. Each person in this world got their own situation in life.
This right here is a demonstration that language around "white privilege" is too opaque, loaded, academic and at times outright hostile. It's failing at it's job of helping people to understand the problem.
Privilege is a word loaded with connotations about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
White privilege isn't about being upper class because you're white. It's about the advantages a white person has over non-white people of the same station.
A white person in a poor neighborhood is on the whole more likely to be able to pull "themselves" out of poverty, because, the systems and power structures in place have white people in power, or have systems that are fair on their face, but still lead to higher white hire rates or social mobility.
Nobody is disputing that some white people have it bad, they're simply pointing out that all else about your social status being equal, being white provides tremendous advantage over being non-white.
You are talking about white privilege and not male privilege here. White privilege is pretty straight forward, male privilege isn't. The discussion in question is about white women pushing out white men from sectors where white women dominate, that doesn't sound like a privilege for those men.
Also, it is extremely frustrating that people quickly start to include race when the discussion is about gender. As I said racial inequality is an entirely different thing from gender inequality. Police shoots black people more, white people get paid more. There, white privilege! But, Police shoots men more, men get paid more. Who is privileged? See the difference? Most of the problems black people face are also problems men face more than women, so you can't talk about those two as if they were the same.
Fair enough I guess, but parent was still to my eye misunderstanding what `x privelege` means.
s/white/male/g and the point largely still stands with mildly adjusted examples.
I'd argue overall it is on the whole easier to be a man in society than a woman for similar reasons (i.e. men have been in charge of power structures for longer and entrenched assumptions abound).
I hadn't thought about the perspective that men are more often killed by police than by women, and probably for similar reasons (i.e. subconsciously viewing men as more dangerous than women), but by and large as a man I don't fear getting shot by police on a traffic stop.
It could definitely be harder to break into a traditionally female field, as an example, though for sure.
Overall I feel the "male privilege" would be more pronounced than any "female privilege", though.
This is actually what intersectionality describes: we each have our own unique sets of advantages and disadvantages through the lenses of our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
In the vast majority of cases a straight white male is going to have the fewest disadvantages and most advantages in western society, because it's been designed for centuries around the straight white male as the power-wielder.
It's not fascinating when you're waiting for a team to grow to offload a big workload and your manager says It's taking a while because they only want to hire minorities.
And then imagine the stigma your new colleague would be subjected to when HR underscores that they hired a red haired Sri Lankan genderfluid voodoo priest.
I've been at two sizable (publicly traded, Fortune 300) companies where this has been documented in both Slack and Email. And I just facepalm wondering how management can be so ignorant of the law.
Eh, I've been at a company where the CEO announced at an all hands that he'd have to do the job of a direct report he'd just fired for a while, because the next one had to be a woman and there weren't many available. It took like 8 months to find a replacement for that critical role, at a time when the company desperately needed commercial success.
Worst thing is, the CEO wasn't even a culture warrior. He just seemed to be afraid of board members and/or radicalized employees who were.
The thing to understand is, these people aren't ignorant of the law. It's plebs like us who are ignorant of the law. The people doing this are well aware that their ideological allies have taken over most government institutions, including the ones that supposedly protect people from this, and are not interested in enforcement of the law unless it elevates women and minorities. The law is not what's written, it's what's enforced. These ad guys are a rare exception where the law was enforced as written, but even then, they literally had a written presentation that said the female CEO planned to "obliterate" white men from their team and were fired two days after objecting to it, yet it took so long to get a judgement that their former employer technically no longer exists. Three years for them to get any kind of justice, and other men who were sacked as part of their "diversity" drive ended up settling out of court.
That's the penalty for cases where people admit to what they're doing in writing, and present it to the whole firm. Good luck getting any justice in cases where it's less obvious than that.
Pretty simple, if you oppose them then you're an easy target to be branded enemy of women. So most people who need their job will just nod and not risk opposing HR.
Are there any specific legal requirements for companies regarding the demographics of their workforce? That would help explain why companies are so eager to spearhead those changes.
To be clear, that depends on the country. In the USA, racial quotas in hiring are illegal, so you won’t see a law requiring them explicitly. I know it’s different in other countries though.
All you need is a supreme court redefining the interpretation such that now not using racial quotas is discriminatory. Then the laws stating that you can't discriminate based on race now work in favour of quotas.
I've always wondered that, too. I thought "The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions" had some interesting inputs on this question (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3322830/Dobbin_S...).
I dunno probably because they can have you fired if you disagree with them, and worse since they often know each other across different companies cause problems for you getting jobs in the future too
> I would imagine statistically that having conversations about people's lives all day is more appealing to women than men in the ideal for the job.
Well, a similar line of reasoning is sometimes used to explain why there are more men in coding roles than women and it's widely criticized as inadequate at best.
My understanding is that some of the issues stem from external recruitment agencies.
The agencies are pitching against eachother. They state they have a gender skew higher (6:4 Male to Female) than the market data (9:1 Male to Female) to win work.
They never can deliver on their targets and will blame it on location/salary etc, and place male candidates anyway.
But it sews the seed that the gender balance in industry is higher than it really is and creates these issues.
They become more pronounced the bigger the employer because the reality gets lost in translation.
HR only appears to have power because they are going along with the prevailing political trends [1,2,3]. If they tried to oppose them, or go in the opposite direction, you would quickly see how empty their power is.
[2] the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” - https://www.city-journal.org/lockheed-martins-woke-industria...
Homogenous groups of white cishet women at HR departments are also a travesty IMO. I highly doubt there isn't something going on internally that make it unfriendly to diverse perspectives (whether from a person of color, an lgbtqia+ person, or a man) that is an HR nightmare waiting to happen.
I don't think its a point system. I just think if an entire department of any company beyond "small" is homogenously one demographic then there's likely a sign that something is going wonky with how that department is hiring/retaining staff. I'd be suspicious of an entire engineering department (of a company of any significant size) that all came from one school, if I was applying to that company and I wasn't from that school.
It's simple group psychology that an extremely uniform group is likely heavily biasing itself for more of that extremely uniform demographic. If that extremely uniform group is of one specific race, gender, or sexuality, that might be a yellow (or red) flag.
First of many such cases, if the allegations I've heard are at all representative.
It's a tough ask for businesses - they either replace their existing, presumably qualified staff due to their inherent characteristics being unfashionable, or they create new positions and fill those with people with other characteristics for purely statistical purposes.
Doing the latter exacerbates the "fifth column" situation that in turn increases the chance of situations like that in the OP.
Seems like a poisoned chalice from the first sip, but I may be biased due to my inherent characteristics.
Kinda hilarious that anyone would consider this a reasonable way of closing the gap and not, say, raising the pay of the employees earning less, which was the whole point.
Maybe I missed some details but it appears that the people responsible for the pay gap did not close it. They created legal risk for their company and lost two presumably high performing employees. There is a strong case that some employees at the company are overpaid based on that performance.
You can’t fight racism and sexism by using “reparative” racism and sexism. Going after straight white men because of their identity is as abhorrent as any other form of racism/sexism.
This is the realization I had the other day. It's an abstraction of the "their are no winners in war" paradox.
Racism does bad things. So then we try and fix the negative effects of racism. We practice a new form of "good racism." But it's still racism. And all it does is create more racism, despite our good intentions to roll back the negative effects of racism.
We do the same with sexism. And agism. And any other form of differentiationism.
And those that benefit not from one state or the other, but rather the flux of transitioning from one state to the other, flock to, and encourage the correctionism.
Personally, I'm onboard with being equal-and-opposite to whatever race/gender caste systems are being used. But if there's not a correct counter-balance, all you end up with is an inverted race/gender caste system.
It's like fighting fire with flood rains, and not recognizing the difference between a forest-fire and camp-fire.
Yep. There's been a recent surge of changing the term "people of color" to "the global majority." I hope the global minority is going to have some rights left when this is over.
Your argument doesn't consider the fact that straight white men have received benefits from racism and sexism their entire lives. I'm not saying that you're wrong, but it's just not that simple. They may not have gotten that job in the first place in a world with true equality.
As a trans woman I think I have a unique perspective here, having literally seen both sides of this issue. I would have agreed with you at one point in my life, but I see things differently now.
I never said that it was okay for them to do this.. just that the person I replied to was rather small minded about their view of this issue. You too.
It kind of bothers me to see straight cis white men get all worked up about things like this. You think this is unfair? You have absolutely no concept of what it's like to be a marginalized minority. They've had so much handed to them their whole lives, yet the second they have to deal with the kind of thing that minorities have to deal with they make a big fuss.
The world is unfair, deal with. We all have to every damn day and no one listens to us when we cry about it.
Applying the general benefits of a whole group of people to individuals applying to jobs is wrong. And doesn't work. Every person has a unique experience.
Also, grouping "cis" in with all that is nonsense. Esp trans women, who seem to think they don't have all the benefits of being male. (Because biology is, in fact, real)
That would be a way to address the underlying complaint. But it wouldn't be "reparative".
The perversion here is the assumption that the next minority you hire is a complete stand-in for the implicitly-assumed minority who missed out before, leading to the existing imbalance.
Correct, I guess. Online racial supremacists are diverse and multinational. It is not a quality in itself. Optimizing this metric is futile and doesn't solve prejudice. On the contrary I believe.
You’re confusing fixing the underlying cause with fixing the resultant effects. Your statement is about the former while HR is trying to do the latter.
You can’t fix sexism with just a hiring policy but you can absolutely fix the effect of your company having no diversity with one.
How is hiring along innate characteristics going to increase diversity? Are you of the opinion that a group consisting of Oprah Winfrey, Mike Tyson, Dave Chapelle and Barack Obama is homogenous just because they're all black? Do you think a randomly picked candidate from that pool would equally increase diversity in a team of college educated middle class programmers, or might there be a difference between their perspectives that goes beyond "African-American"?
I’ve heard people argue that such action provides a spark for further change. Like brings a new perspective to a group that cascades into more positive effects.
It comes to mind the idea of “black children needing black superhero role models” or similarly for girls or other groups. I wonder to what extent this merely reinforces a racist ideology. Why can’t the role model be of any colour?
How deep is it, truly, that the tribal behaviour based on group similarities, are ingrained in humans.
Interestingly, amongst the well educated, or the wealthy, a different selection criteria is established.
Of course role models don't have to be the same gender or race or culture. Plenty of white people find Bruce Lee's life story inspirational, and likewise there are plenty of black kids that are Batman fans. This is normal and healthy.
It's still reasonable to wonder why the vast majority of role models are white men, and think about redressing that a bit. The problem is we sometimes get dreck like the Batwoman TV show or Captain Marvel where diversity became a creative shackle; but then we also can get the Wonder Woman* and Black Panther movies where diversity was realised as a creative opportunity. The important thing is to maintain artistic integrity.
* And yes I'm aware of the irony given the origins of the character.
Because that's just not how it works. You're assuming that the important thing is the role model's race, gender, sexuality. It's about having a character that is like you. How they look is just one small part of it. If you have a movie script where the main character is a white suburbanite man and once it's fully written make his skin color black it doesn't suddenly become good representation.
You can if all of the reasons for whatever aspect of diversity is out of whack is under your control. But often the reasons for lack of diversity are not isolated to a single knob that the company itself is privy to dial to an ideal output.
People who support such measures are pretty homogeneous in their views and opinions from my experience. Then there are the diverse bunch that reject sexism.
An extremely able HR friend of mine has been following this case and at pretty much every step, the company compounded their errors. In my friend’s opinion this is going to be a very easy case of wrongful dismissal and the firm will probably end up settling out of court for a substantial amount.
Because that’s a very very very naive understanding of the gender pay gap.
The statement is that “women make x¢ on the dollar that men make.
You can “explain away” much of the gender gap by accounting for all sorts of things like career choices, aggressiveness of switching jobs and seeking promotions, experience levels, etc.. But that doesn’t make the problem go away or those things not issues unto themselves.
I put it in scare quotes for a reason because that's the phrasing people use when talking about but saying "we know many of the factors that contribute to the wage gap and when you control for them it mostly disappears" misses the point.
One of the factors you control for is job title. When you only compare people with the same title the wage gap shrinks a bit. For some reason people interpret this as "Great! Not a problem. Moving on." when it completely ignores that as a group women holding lower paying job titles is itself indicative of a problem -- career paths that are dominated by women are seen as less valuable and girls are socially pressured away from more lucrative careers (you know like software engineering where every woman in our field including myself can tell you stories of being the only girl in her class) by parents, academic advisors, the school and workplace culture the fields cultivate and pushed into "softer", "more nurturing", "more creative" career paths compared to boys.
Which it itself a problem for boys because boys who want to go into things like art, music, design, writing, fashion, social work, are mercilessly pressured away from it where girls are more likely to be encouraged. The patriarchy hurts everyone folks.
Not every person wants to continually climb the ladder.
In general men are more likely to value social status because a man with a high career title is more attractive to women, whereas a woman's title does not increase her ability to find a husband.
In fact, women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves. Is it any surprise men want to climb the ladder more.
Just look at the charts. Honestly, failure to understand this simple aspect of human nature is the reason for a lot of social ill, ranging from 'incels' to the disastrous egalitarian social policies.
The second study (with a smaller but believed to be more representative sample) asked slightly different questions, and concluded that there was some statistical significance on "Makes at least as much money as I do" and "Has a successful career," which don't by themselves support the hypothesis that "women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves" (though I can agree that it waggles its eyebrows and points in that direction; perhaps suggesting follow-up studies).
I'd also be very careful throwing around a word as heavy as "most" when talking about something as broad and far-ranging as the collective experience of human civilizations.
The [citation needed] for that is the stuff of multiple lifetimes of research.
The [citation needed] argument just says, "I'm going to ignore everything you present if it isn't proven, despite the fact that I've not proven my own position."
My position is simply to be skeptical of these assertions. People throw around a lot of unsourced claims; skepticism is often a correct response. There's nothing for one to prove when one's own position is "I'm not convinced by your argument."
(For example, when the citation was provided on the claim a few layers upthread, it indeed was revealed to be wanting, as the bulk of its data relied on Internet polls).
This is why I believe those responsible for identifying these issues are incompetent.
If you follow your thought, you would need to discriminate against the privileged group you have identified. This will cause a rift between groups that get penalized and those that get advantages, obviously.
Basic toxic middle management strategy to cause strive among your minions so that they don't pester you. This is what you are mirroring 1:1.
They need to do the tough man's job to earn more. Women that are already "Women in Tech" (e.g. HR in a TechCompany) need to make other women "also" do a tough (real) IT-job!
Fake women (in tech) are pushing other women to the real (coding) fronts... why is that?
funny thing is white men still own most of these companies, and that's exactly why they are trying to hardcode diversity into them as shielding.
our current economic system is exclusionary and ending gender or race gap won't do a single thing to fix it.
even if advertisement is 100% women, lgbt and non-white people, it will continue to be 100% "white" and will do nothing for Africa and other miserable places or for the homeless people that flock all rich nations.
It's not easy, of course, but new cooperative models will most probably emerge within the next few decades, and the ones that exist already will grow and more people will use them. There's nothing as disruptive as cooperation. Which is also related of course to the "killer app" to be on crypto, imo :) What do you think about all this?
Fixing diversity at the highest levels in companies is a really hard problem. The kind of people that get those jobs often have to make massive sacrifices to get there. Insane working hours, prioritising work over all other responsibilities, sometimes willingness to relocate globally as needed. There are some women willing to compete on the same terms, but comparatively few. It's great to see them get there when they do, but realistically ethnic diversity is probably going to be a more realistic expectation.
I feel that these gender pay gap focuses are really thinking too small. The general argument of a pay gap is that there is a systemic problem. Firing individual men just because they're men is pants-on-head even trying to follow the logic that there are systemic hurdles for women in some space.
Pay averages are dominated by outliers. These outliers tend to either be due to negotiation power, seniority, or performance incentive.
Odds are good that the outliers will cluster in your most over represented group, this group will then have a pay discrepancy with other groups.
A company can correct this by banning the practices that lead to outliers, ensuring outliers are evenly represented across groups, and by eliminating those with outlier compensation. In firms that lock in compensation for long periods such as through partnerships or equity comp ensuring equal distribution of outlier compensation can be complex and difficult.
> Two white male creative directors at a top London advertising agency have won a sex discrimination claim after a female director vowed to “obliterate” its Mad Men reputation of being full of straight, white men.
director kept Mad Men reputation of shitty management... pay gap is a reflection of shitty management that is causing bad hiring practice.
How did HR get so much power? Most of them are barely out of University and at least at my org are a homogenous group of white women.