Sexism, racism and bullying are driving people out of tech, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Sexism, racism and bullying are driving people out of tech, study finds

theguardian.com

17 pointsanigbrowl12 comments

I stopped reading when I saw they were quoting Ellen Pao.

And of course the article doesn't mention she lost the lawsuit.

This is such an astute observation. If you take an article about individuals or companies the media loves to denigrate, they will take every opportunity to not only mention other negative things but cross link to every previously written negative story they've published, sometimes to the point where half an article is referenced to many of the past negative things.

This was related to the article. It paints her as if she's proved how systemic sexism caused her to lose her job, but she failed to lose that in court. In fact, it's the opposite - as far as I'm concerned the court showed that she was either making things up or blowing them way out of proportion.

You can't just conveniently leave that out.

> Thirty percent of underrepresented women said they were passed over for a promotion, a rate significantly higher than white and Asian women

It's weird that racism outside of tech is generally considered "whites vs everyone else", whereas racism in tech is "whites and asians vs everyone else".

Its a bit like when google got pinged for lack of diversity, because they had overrepresented asians and underrepresented blacks. Enough asians in fact, that in order to have their employee makeup match the general public, that as well as blacks, they'd have to hire more whites.

I think you are missing the point of the article. The article is not about initiatives to get pre-set numbers of people of a certain race without regard to merit and qualification (which is what your comment is about). The article is about people who met the requirements, and were qualified, and got the job on the merits. The article is about how these people choosing to leave tech in high numbers because they feel the environment is racist and sexist and it raises questions about how that can be properly dealt with by the tech community.

If Black and Hispanic women feel as they are being passed over for promotion at rates higher than other women despite qualifications, I think it's time to at least look at that and investigate instead of dismissing it out of hand. And really I think that dismissive attitude is part of what these people are complaining about.

The problem I have with these reports is that they are based on self reports and feelings. If you constantly tell people that their group is being victimized, they will start interpreting everything that happens to them through victim-colored glasses and will interpret many actions from actual discrimination to non-descriminatory actions as descrimination. We need objective measures of discrimination not feelings and self reports. Teaching people to interpret everything as discrimination by default actively harms them because it robs them of the opportunity of attributing the cause to their own shortcomings (when that is actually the cause) and therefore being able to come to the conclusion that they need to change to overcome the circumstance. If the desired goal is success at the individual level, it is simply not productive/constructive to arrive at any conclusion where you externalize blame.

FWIW, I'm an engineer from Latin America myself. Latin America will never be as well represented as people from Asia, especially from China, India, Korea and Japan, because those countries academically value (1) engineering and (2) English more highly than any country in Latin America. Until countries in Latin America start doing the same, I don't expect this to change.

>Teaching people to interpret everything as discrimination by default

I don't see any evidence of anybody doing that. What I see is people complaining of discrimination and it being waived away and dismissed. In a normal, non-sexist, non-racist sector, when people say they feel they are being discriminated, it would be investigated to see if there is in fact any real discrimination. Apparently in tech it's dismissed as "ah fuck your feelings, you've just learned to see everything as discriminatory"

I'm all for measuring discrimination. What I expressed concern with is measuring the perception of discrimination which is fraught with all sorts of biases.

In fact, just today there was another front page story today that got flagged that is perfectly demonstrative of this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14252978

The headline is inflammatory and suggests falsely that they've measured something that "objectively" proves discrimination is happening and I'm sure people shared it and upvoted it based on the title alone because it confirms their biases about discrimination being all-pervasive. However a closer examination of the study shows that once you account for differences in level of the engineer that there is in fact no difference. I see this all the time. Anecdotally, the majority of studies and articles claiming discrimination and using data fall prey to the base rate fallacy and misinterpret the results to show discrimination where none exists or where it it is small enough to not be measurable.

I am not disputing that discrimination exists, but it would be prudent to stop crying wolf all the time. In 2017, I have seen remarkably few "smoking guns" relative to the amount of noise we see. What I have seen is an increase in how everything is distorted to maximum effect by people with an agenda to say discrimination is the cause of all the problems.

> In a normal, non-sexist, non-racist sector, when people say they feel they are being discriminated, it would be investigated to see if there is in fact any real discrimination

Can you give an example of such a sector? Because discrimination is everywhere. Indeed, when it comes to the racism part, tech seems to be doing better than other high-paying sectors (if not perfect), which was part of my original point.

There are no sectors as you describe them - minorities and women have had to fight on all fronts to gain a fair deal.

The funny thing is that most diversity reports are not out of line for the base rates for the local population in the Bay Area. About 30% of the Bay Area residents, especially in San Francisco, Alameda and San Mateo counties, are Asian and about 50% are white. This is pretty much right in lines with the diversity reports from big companies. Women are disproportionately underrepresented, but race figures aren't that out of line with base rates.

The simple fact of the matter is that the base rates in the Bay Area are not representative of the rest of the country and it's absurd to expect them to be. One of the most startling findings in my research into Bay Area demographics is that between three different groups: (1) born outside the United States; (2) born in California and (3) born in the United States but outside California, its like 37%, 35% and 29%, respectively for those three counties IIRC. Let that sink in. Only ~29% of those living in the Bay Area represent the entire rest of the United States and those born outside the United States outnumber not only that group but those born in California as well. The Bay Area and tech is diverse, it's just not diverse in favor of of diversity representative of the diversity of America as a whole.

It's because when you look at whites alone, they are underrepresented in favor of Asians. Since whites are oppressors and never victims, Asians get added to their category to keep up the narrative.

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