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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Here's a question:

Would it be sexist if the women on the team were offered either the men's jacket, or an opportunity to purchase the women's jacket at a cost equal to the difference in cost between the two (i.e. Uber pays the same in both cases, but the women have to add a bit)?

Would it be acceptable to only be offered one of the two options, or would each woman have to be allowed to choose for themselves?

These questions also implicitly ask whether Uber should be considered to have given the men "a jacket", or "a value equal to the jacket".

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You've entirely missed the point. The dollar amount of the jacket doesn't matter.

The point of the jacket is that they're a part of SRE culture. To have the SRE jacket is to belong to an elite team within the company. And Uber is big enough for that distinction to matter.

If you're going to create a wearable indication of membership in an elite division of your company, you'd damn sure better ensure that every member of that division can actually wear it. Not only did Uber fail to do that, it failed in a way that specifically excluded women.

The jacket thing was less of a big deal to me before I read this story. With the SRE culture refresher, it rises to the level of "among the worst things Uber did".

To be clear, I would not have done what Uber did, and I don't think it was a good idea. I am trying to figure out where the boundaries of discrimination lie; I thought I could have this kind of conversation on HN, but I was wrong.

Did the boundary I just laid out for you not make sense?

If you create some kind of badge or wearable emblem of belonging to an elite division inside your company, it's the obligation of the company to ensure that every member of that division can wear it, and it's further egregiously discriminatory if you structure it in such a way that women are actively discouraged from wearing it.

I think that what you laid out was a good framework, and good advice, but I don't think that failing to follow best-practices necessarily means that you are being discriminatory.

My two responses to this would be:

* The failure here transcends "best practices" and reaches the level of "teamicidal".

* While being teamicidal doesn't automatically make you bigoted, if your teamicidal action specifically targets a workplace minority, that does.

Yes, it looks like this episode definitely did permanent damage to the team. I've never heard of the term 'teamicide', but have "Peopleware" on order, and am looking forward to reading it.

I tried to avoid specifically passing judgement on whether or not Uber was discriminatory in my initial comment, as I don't want to be dragged into that morass, and I will not take a 'side' on this case.

Well no, they're allowing women to wear the jacket except it will be in men's sizing. It's a subjective opinion on whether this is exclusion or not.

I am reminded of the story of author Lois McMaster Bujold's sci-fi awards. She is a very successful author ("won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record") and sci-fi awards (and nominations) give tie pins. Because she could not wear the tie pins in the usual way, she had them made into a necklace. There are good photos with labels for what each one is: http://www.thebarflies.net/redshirts/unzipped/24_cryoburn/Ga...

> If you're going to create a wearable indication of membership in an elite division of your company, you'd damn sure better ensure that every member of that division can actually wear it.

I'd agree, but would also suggest not creating a wearable indication of membership. Create multiple wearable indications of membership, and everyone gets one of those indications. Maybe a choice of a jacket, a nice laptop case, a fancy scarf, or a sword with belt scabbard.

Of course we're talking about Uber, so if they did that it would probably be the leather jacket for the men and a string bikini for the women...

I agree with this too! A special laptop cover or huge laptop sticker, a special phone case, something you can attach to you bag --- all seem like better ideas than jackets or shirts or bathrobes (which I guess was also a thing at Google?).

Yes, in the same way it would be a bad idea to require employees needing larger sizes to pay for any extra cost. When you buy a lunch for employees, you don't charge people who might eat more an extra fee either. The whole point of these is to build community within the organization or team. Excluding certain groups is a horrible idea. Doing it based on sex, religion, or ethnicity is a whole extra level of bad and stupid rolled into one.

What if you went to a restaurant for a Friday lunch (on the company's dime), and everyone orders a sandwich, except one individual (who may be of different race, sex, or size) that orders a steak and lobster meal? Could you discriminate by denying the request, or asking them to pay out of pocket? Does coming up with a rule ahead of time remedy the potential discrimination?

You probably think you're being clever by coming up with all of these "But... but what if!" scenarios, but you're not. You're just looking like you're trying to excuse their behavior.

this isn't equivalent. In your scenario the single employee is choosing to take advantage of the company's hospitality and I think their manager would be right to either deny that or speak to them afterwards.

Except the world isn't run by some computer blindly following a strict set of rules. Obviously if someone orders a steak and lobster meal, they might not deserve the same treatment. If someone orders a vegetarian meal, or a kosher meal, etc, then they probably _should_ be covered. It's a judgement call with shades of grey, yes, but it's not too difficult to see which side is "right"

Reading your post makes me think that we might need to have two standards: one that employees apply to their employers, and another that regulators apply to employers. I am reluctant to give broad discretionary powers to regulators with limited accountability and insight, but I think that employees make up a fairly good 'jury', as they experience the work environment every day. My next question is whether the employees should have some remedy or options outside of quitting. It seems that people's experiences with 'HR' are very mixed (and often negative), so companies might need some kind of arbitrator, panel, or other problem-solver.

edit: a now-deleted response to this comment said that an 'ombudsman' can fill the 'problem-solver' role. I am not familiar with how that would work, but that comment said that 'ombudsmen' were effective in their case.

HR is already supposed to be an arbitrator; adding another one, external but still economically dependent on one side of the dispute, is just papering over the cracks.

This is why employment laws, with all their warts, are necessary: because the justice system is (or rather, should be) completely independent from capital. The State is the only power that can force employers to act against their own self interest, because it does not rely on their welfare.

What you choose to order at the restaurant is very different from what size or shape you happen to be.

I'll bet that the correlation is good enough for you to prove 'disparate impact'.

That's great except these women didn't choose to be women. Picking a sandwich is a trivial decision and not the basis of who you are. It's telling that your immediate response to this is to concoct some specious argument to show how there maybe wasn't bias.

I am not trying to show whether there was or was not bias, as I don't find Uber's particular case very interesting. I am more interested in finding what the limits of discrimination and accommodation are, and I thought that thinking out loud on HN might allow others to share their insights. I was apparently wrong to do so.

I really think this is the sort of thinking you could have done not out loud. It seems obvious to me that someone who orders a jacket that fits them did not choose the shape of their body, and someone who orders a steak and lobster meal usually (in the absence of some medical condition) did choose to want a steak and lobster meal, and that there's a fundamental difference between being inclusive to people of all body shapes and being inclusive to people of all lunch preferences.

I make this comment out loud because I might be wrong, and if there's some insight here about how this train of thought does not occur to you, I'm genuinely curious.

I agree that there is a difference, but I'll bet that larger people (in height, weight, or both) order larger meals, so you could make a case that not paying for the larger meal was discriminatory.

I agree that the meal analogy is not a great one, but I am using it because it was in the article, and another commenter replied to me with it. I try to avoid 'fighting the hypothetical' by changing the example.

Lets not rush to judgement, please. The gp might just be playing Devil's Advocate here. To be sure, you hear these kinds of arguments all the time and your answer is very helpful and not something I recognized immediately (perhaps I am a little misogynistic? Definitely horrified by that thought and do want to change/learn more).

Fair enough. I think unconscious bias like this is incredibly frustrating for people who can see it and feel its effects.

When you're on the other side and aren't affected by these issues, it's easy to critique legitimate concerns somewhat academically, ignoring how insensitive it looks to others.

A sane manager will pick a restaurant with entrees of a reasonable price, or let the team know beforehand what items might be off limits.

Trading pennies for pennies is just not something a mature, reasonable person does. "Buy everyone a jacket" is as far as the thinking needs to go. If someone wants to debate the costs of jackets on the basis of sex (rather than, say, size) then they're being sexist about it.

Equality isn't about balancing the checkbook. It's about making sure everyone has the ability to make equally good decisions. Which means giving your team the support they need to be cohesive ("everyone gets a jacket") and allowing them to focus on being an effective member of that team rather than petty and superficial issues ("don't worry about insignificant cost differences.")

My post is not about my preferred option; I am trying to 'triangulate' where the limits of discrimination are.

Not a lawyer, but that sounds like it touches on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

If you have a rule that is neutral in theory, but has disparate impact on a protected class in practice, it is not a neutral rule.

I agree that disparate impact analysis could be applied here, but you would first have to decide what the 'benefit' was (i.e. money-equivalent, same garments, or similarly well-fitting garments).

i think the article attempts to address this question by this hypothetical:

> Can you imagine what would have happened if Uber decided, because men gobble more food than women, that only women should get free catering in the company’s cafe, and men would have to reach into their wallets?

Would it be remedied if the company offered to provide the same number of calories to each person (regardless of gender), with the obvious implication that women would be more satiated than men? What if Uber offered to provide the men their required calories at some additional charge?

My questions don't directly address what happened at Uber, but I'm trying to figure out where the boundaries lie.

Seems to me that, if you can afford to offer free catering but not for people who eat too much, that you can't actually afford to offer free catering. If the extra cost for the few is too much, you can't afford the whole.

Same way with the jackets. If you can't spring for the extra $ for the womens's jackets, you really probably shouldn't be buying jackets for everyone at this time...

I doubt the issue was "can't" so much as "won't".

There is very clear precedent on this from the way IRS treats perks as either deductible or wage compensation. Basically if your perks are not universal to all of your employees they cease to be deductible perks and start being treated as wage payments to those certain employees and therefore subject to Social Security and income tax withholding.

With cafeteria food you can either provide free food to all of your employees, or run a cafeteria that charges for food at-cost (the cafeteria cannot operate at a loss).

Having an executive cafeteria used to be a thing in companies. This is discrimination based on employee rank. The IRS treats executive cafeterias as wage compensation. Discriminating between employees of the same rank based on things like race would be racism, sex would be sexism, etc.

The jackets were not provided to certain employees, therefore they are not a perk and their value is wage compensation according to the IRS. So this is exactly like denying all the women SREs a bonus because they are women.

BTW it is very likely that those jackets were deducted as perks so this decision is not just overt discrimination by Uber but also breaking tax law.

Interestingly, if the women's jackets were more expensive than the men's, would that not be equivalent to having different 'cafeterias' depending on status (specifically gender)? I suppose that one solution would be to ask the garment supplier to put all the jackets on one invoice line, at the average cost, but that seems obfuscatory and possibly fraudulent.

In this case they were more expensive but not more valuable, since it was just the difference between bulk and individual prices. If the company buys every employee the same chocolate bar, it doesn't matter if Brad's cost $0.10 because it was part of a bulk order whereas Jane's cost $1.50 because it was bought at the retail price.

>Having an executive cafeteria used to be a thing in companies.

Well, yeah. When you have 90% marginal tax rates and the IRS hasn't caught up with taxing non-cash compensation/perks, then you tend to look for every possible perk you can give such employees! Anything short of "okay, what would you spend your next $X of take-home pay on? Tada! That's a perk for you now!"

Yes, it would be sexist. If the company is doing their employees a courtesy, it's a courtesy to all or a courtesy to none.

I am trying to ask what the 'courtesy' is; is it the value of the jacket, the sense of belonging, or the protection from the weather?

It's the sense of belonging... employees didn't get jackets because they were cold and asked the company to buy one for them...

Here's another hypothetical: suppose a manager makes a practice of emailing all their male reports every week with "Just wanted to say that we appreciate your work at this company. Your work this week on ___ was fantastic," and not their female reports.

Then there is no question of cost or value or function, other than the five seconds required to figure out something the female reports worked on this week.

Would this be an acceptable thing for the manager to do?

That seems like it would be discriminatory, because the message contains no sex or gender-specific language, and sending the same message to the women would take no more time (per employee) than the men. Modifying the message to contain gender-specific language would mean that the manager would have to have two templates, but intentionally creating a gender-specific template for the purpose of excluding one group would itself be discriminatory.

No. Neither of those is acceptable, either.

Do those who got a large or XL or XXL jacket have to pay the difference between that and a small?

I think its entirely reasonable that if the company said ahead of time, we are covering cost X, anything outside cost X is on the employee. (thats obviously not what happened)

Who wants to work for someone that cheap?

As a fat guy it's really common to miss out on swag that we didn't get in my size.

None of it was like a badge of office, though.

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