[chc]

> (White) men in general are given the benefit of the doubt. They are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise.

Based on everything I have ever seen in my life, you are either completely off-base or overstating your case so wildly it's almost unrecognizable. If this were true, I could walk into any company around here that is hiring, tell them I'd like the job and instantly land it without so much as an interview because I'm white and male and thus "assumed to be competent." That is very much not the case. I have to prove competence first.

[jacalata]

No. The benefit of the doubt is that you get an interview, and that if you get the job they'll offer you more money.

cite 1: male names on an application vs female names: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...

cite 2: 'white' names on an application vs 'black' names: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

[zorpner]

The bar for you is much lower. It may not even occur at the interview stage -- many studies have been done that demonstrate a lower rate of interviews granted to identical applications with a "foreign-sounding" name.

The insistence on "hard data" and derision of anecdotes (when, unlike e.g. sending out resumes with different names on them, most of this is essentially impossible to study) when discussing the very real experiences of women and minorities is a mechanism to deny the reality of their experiences -- a way of saying that their perception of the world is incorrect and yours, as a privileged individual, is correct. It's not a rebuttal of racism or sexism, it's a symptom of it.

[chc]

These studies do not show that white men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. It shows that people are less inclined to give interviews to racial minorities.

You seem to think I'm denying the existence of discrimination. I'm not. That was not the topic of my comment at all. I was responding to a specific comment that I felt vastly overstated its case, not to a broad issue.

[jacalata]

See the studies I cited and quoted from on another branch of this thread.

""Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, "

[chc]

This is getting a little tiring. Does this prove the claim "White men are assumed to be competent"? No, it does not. People really seem to want me to be arguing something other than what I actually said, but I'm not. My comment was very specific and not all that grand in its claims, and I find it amazing that people are this desperate to fight over it.

In case you have forgotten, my claim this whole time has just been that hackinthebochs was overstating his case — that the situation is not so crazy that being white exempts you from the need to demonstrate competence. Anything that does not prove white men are generally assumed to be competent is a red herring.

[jacalata]

Well, hackinthebochs never said that the assumption of competence was strong enough to prompt a job offer, you introduced that as a silly hyperbolic statement, so ridiculously grand in its claim - that 'an assumption of competence' can only be shown if it results in an instant job offer - that it appeared you were building a strawman with which to attack the idea that anyone had any kind of bias in favour of white males.

An assumption of competence doesn't imply that it will be allowed to stand untested in a high stakes scenario such as offering a job. However it will far too often stand untested in smaller scenarios, and it is exactly this assumption behind statements like "did you have your boyfriend help you with that assignment?" addressed to female students and not males, "you must be the graphic designer!" etc etc.

[hackinthebochs]

Your mistake was that you were arguing against my point as if my statement included a universal qualifier. Somehow in these discussions, the nuances and implied ambiguities of language go out the window and every statement is taken to the absolute extreme.

You were arguing against a universal statement that I never intended to make, and now people are arguing against you as if you were denying that white men are generally assumed to be competent compared to other groups.

These discussions could go a lot more smoothly if we would all just cut each other a little slack and assume good faith.

[hackinthebochs]

Are you being serious? Yes, when you're trying to get a job, you generally still have to prove competency (in tech fields at least). But the assumptions are still comparatively in your favor. What I'm referring to is more about casual settings, where there isn't already a process in place to judge competency. When people must make a snap judgement based on little or no information, a white man will have all the assumptions in his favor.