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.
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.