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This is something that bothers me often about the US-centric view about DEI. I got lectured by a white guy from the US a couple of times wrt. not focusing enough on skin color and gender/sex when e.g. hiring, but somehow he was totally blind to the fact that e.g. a black woman from New York or London is not necessarily disadvantaged compared to a white male who grew up in rural Romania for example. But nobody really cares of the latter.

The same person explained that a 5% wage gap between women and men in a certain field needs immediate action but it's 'fair' that there's a 70% wage gap between his salary and the salary of someone from Eastern Europe (working in the same role at the same company).

Oh well.




As a white-skinned male, but non-native English speaker from a small university that doesn't appear in the ARWU ranking and their ilk, in a small city, in a country that is mediocre in research and far from the US, this really makes me cringe.

I needed to master a foreign language for reviewers to not reject my papers because "bad English". I have had applicants to PhD positions reject my offer and go to objectively worse US groups with less productivity by any metric because "my parents want me to study at a US university" or "your group is good but I think that I need to go to a high-ranked university to improve my prospects" (not to speak about how many applicants I get vs. how many an US professor with equivalent track record would get). I spend a lot of hours on things like grading that US professors have TAs do for them. I have several times seen people cite "Person from Stanford/Google/etc. (2013) proved..." when I actually proved that in 2011 and that person was just citing my result.

And still, I have to listen to female, white, native-English-speaking professors from elite US universities, lecturing me about how they are discriminated because some study said that women get cited less often, etc. and keep a straight face.




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