Oh, you’re with them? (2016)
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com
blogs.msdn.microsoft.com
"I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter. I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs.
I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn). I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on...
Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well:
>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.
There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)?
Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background.
What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men?
[0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduate...
I think the question I'm positing here is very reasonable, given how other fields have been able to improve their situations dramatically. I don't know the answer to my question, that's why I asked it.
In college one of my classmates was not understanding the material, and I asked her if she thought she really wanted to do CS...
The thing is, a bunch of other guys were also not understanding the material, and I didn't say anything to them.
I still think about it from time to time, and wherever you are, I'm sorry M. I don't think I can fix that, but I can speak up now.
I think the cycle can be broken if current practitioners can find young women who are willing to work extra hard (harder than their male peers) and give those women as much tutoring as they can handle (I certainly can't study for a full day, and I guess this plan requires studying overtime) so they can ace tests/projects, advance in the industry, change norms and people's expectations from women and make it easier for the next generation of women. There will be accusations of favoritism but as long as it's clear that they succeed because they worked hard and did the work themselves and not because they were helped, the accusations shouldn't get anywhere. Basically, I'm against favoring women over more qualified (or even as-qualified) men, but helping women become the most qualified candidate is definitely fair game.
I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We had person Y from that course and they were bad".
It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on the color characteristic and project from sparse examples.
I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone could come up with a solution.
However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really solve this. Or so I believe.
And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill set to perform the job properly.
Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future.
There are only two solutions:
(1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect it.
(2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases.
Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.
Make your leadership pool more diverse in gender, race, and (more importantly) life experience and things will change. An artificial solution is only going to be top down, engineered by the very execs who have limited experience.
The bigger problem is the self-perpetuating vortex that is Silicon Valley. Mix it up.
This isn't an instance of bias. It's a mistake based on simple base rate prevalence. No harm was done here and no harm was meant. Now, that doesn't mean that all forms of what people have taken to calling 'microaggressions' are harmless - some of them are harmful. This is just pretty clearly not one of them.
(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.
That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That might get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?
Edit:
I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.
You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?
edit: your edit makes more sense :)
Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because
a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone
We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc
B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.
The reality is that we're all biased but we're also malleable. If we understand how our biases manifest, we also understand that biases are pretty resilient to reason and goals. They need to be re-trained or manipulated (like through priming and other bias inducing mechanisms.)
This is what bothers me about unconscious bias training. They show that everyone is biased. But the solutions fail to acknowledge that the system can't change just through positive intention.
You might not expect the black female to be a "high powered tech executive", but on the other hand, when you see the whole list of "high powered tech executives", you will probably remember the black female better than any random 40 year old white male.
Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive?
I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand, apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her much.