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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

>minorities in the workplace (particularly by race and gender)

We have a minority gender? (Or is that a can of worms I shoudln't have opened?)

I don't think women are equally represented in the upper echelons of politics or business. For example, only 29% of FTSE 100 board members are women - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/record-number-of-women-on... - so that makes them a minority in that context, no?

It's a bit like how people of certain races may be considered "minorities" in our society, yet there could be billions of people of that race elsewhere in the world.

Throughout tech, women are a minority in the workplace, even if not a minority in the overall population, which is one potential meaning of "minorities in the workplace." At least that's what I gathered.

Women make up 51% of the US population so clearly men are a minority. Ha!

But really they probably mean a minority in a specific career or environment. For example, ~6% of truck drivers are female but only ~18% of primary and secondary teachers are male.

Men are 42% of teachers at the high school level: https://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/blog/757-the-teacher-g...

School administrators are overwhelming male: http://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=14492

I'm male, and taught K-5 special education for 2.5 years in my first job out of college. Few men join the profession, and many of them leave for better paying jobs, but I think a huge part of it is society's willingness to make raising children women's work. This is the "oh Daddy is babysitting!" phenomenon happening at the professional level.

Majority/minority are not strictly numbers in this context. Its more about opportunities whose limiting factor is age/race/gender etc.

I have yet to see decent evidence of limiting factor being race / gender where I work (in Europe). Age is a bit different as experience is closely tied to it.

The statistical definition of "minority" isn't the same as the sociological definition of "minority." It's not a numerical measurement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_group

>"a group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination"

Influence doesn't scale neatly with numbers. Also, people with nonbinary genders are helped by more equal binary representation since they're affected by the same problems that affect everyone regardless of identity in homogeneous environments. Even people in the statistical and social plurality are worse off with less variety.

I've never seen a place made worse by keeping space for more perspectives.

In most workplaces, yes. For many fields (IT, executive-level, politics...), women are in the minority. For others (teaching, nursing...), men are in the minority.

One big disparity is that most of the female-dominated fields tend to be lower-paying.

I'm pretty sure that construction and truck-driving which are male-dominated are lower-paying than medical, which is female-dominated.

Don't forget people who don't easily conform to the binary gender breakdown, or people who may be in the middle of a transition.

In the higher positions, yes.

Under the law...one gender, while not a minority, is a protected class.

Protected classes are qualified for special treatment in law and policy, particularly in the context of employment law.

False, all genders (including male) are protected classes.

"We didn't hire you because we think women make better caregivers" is just as illegal as "We didn't hire you because we think men make better middle managers."

http://www1.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/5-2-18.cfm

>The Children's Home, Inc., a Tampa nonprofit child care organization also known as the Children's Home Network, will pay $18,000 and provide training for its human resources and management employees to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC's lawsuit charged that The Children's Home violated federal law when it refused to consider a male employee, Luis Vasquez, for a position in its maternity home program based on his sex. The suit further alleged that, Vasquez, after voicing his concerns about the company's refusal to consider him because he is a male, was prevented from applying to any other positions with the organization.

https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/7-30-18b.cfm

>BALTIMORE - Park School of Baltimore Inc., a private school in Pikesville, Md., violated federal law when it refused to renew the employment contract of a male softball coach because it preferred female leadership, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit it announced today.

You are correct, and I intended to reflect just the point gender is a protected class whether or not it is the/a minority gender in the context of the employers work place, industry as a whole and society at large. I suppose my comment was poorly worded and open to interpretation based on use of “one gender”.

Of course there are exceptions to gender discrimination that does allow an employer to hire on the basis of sex (I.e. bonafide occupational qualification).

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