It's discriminating based on sex and national origin. Why is this acceptable?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Turning (or trying to turn) a Show HN into a flamewar is obviously against the Show HN rules also:
Other commenters in this thread have posted things that are closer to what you describe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25160667, for example, is a completely different kind of comment.
Just to clarify - By using us all companies will be doing is post ads to reach a different kind of audience they otherwise won't.
Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say.
The entire premise of the site is to have a list of candidates based solely on gender and national origin. Discrimination is core to the product, so I asked a core, targeted question about it.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
I never dismissed it, merely sought to further understand.
Turning (or trying to turn) a Show HN into a flamewar is obviously against the Show HN rules also
I never introduced the topic or product, merely tried to understand its justification. The show hn rules also state "When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative."
This is not a hard call. The comment was obvious flamebait. Every remotely similar thread gets these generic, indignant objections, and they lead to the same flamewar over and over again. That's not what HN is for.
> I never dismissed it, merely sought to further understand.
That does not seem to me a plausible interpretation of your comment. If it really was your intent, you needed to make that much clearer. When it comes to inflammatory topics on the internet, the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If a comment looks like a drive-by one-liner and quacks like a drive-by one-liner, then it's trolling, whether you meant it to or not. We have to judge these things by their effects: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Disagree fully that this is automatically pejorative. If it's false (the first test of whether something can be considered pejorative) then explain why.
If you can't, then the accusation falls at the first hurdle. If you can, then why bother with all the BUT THE RULES! nonsense when you could just say why the statement is false?
It would not be acceptable to base the ultimate hiring decisions on sex or national origin.
Edit: to expand on this, to discriminate is to discern a difference in something. You are explicitly discriminating based on gender and national origin. This part is inarguable. Whether it's right or not is another question.
But remote work can be most useful for people from emerging economies. It can bring them better salary, better living conditions and this has huge implications in long term. We are trying to do our part in accelerating that.
If that's true, then why would these companies be on HerJobs (a platform which - as far as I can tell - seems to be designed specifically to facilitate hiring based on gender or country)?
I definitely agree that we need more diversified pipelines, but I don't agree that creating a restricted pipeline is the way to go about it; this seems more likely to be used as a means to get token women of color on teams for diversity points than anything. It seems more patronizing than anything - like women from emerging countries are somehow fundamentally unable to stand out in existing pipelines and thus need their own pipeline. A less patronizing solution would be to figure out why women from emerging countries are underrepresented in existing pipelines and address those factors there.
As it stands, I'm getting a strong "binders full of women" vibe from this, especially since I know full well that your average company will use it exactly in that way: to check off diversity boxes and make it look like they're "woke" as a substitute for actually-meaningful workplace gender/ethnic reform.
I wish y'all the best of luck, because this is definitely a problem worth solving; I just don't feel like this is the right way to go about it, or at the very least that it needs some refinement and adjustment to avoid doing more harm than good.
The fact is that there aren't many women from emerging economies in the pipeline of a typical remote company. This is what we are trying to change. These companies use social media, linkedin ads, other famous job boards to attract talent. But still the outcome is not much different.
By listing on HerJobs, companies can also reach a different demographic that is hard to reach(typically for a company in US or Europe)
Agree that there might be people who use this with not the ideal intentions. But we have to start somewhere. We also try our best to vet companies, not just candidates.
> A less patronizing solution would be to figure out why women from emerging countries are underrepresented in existing pipelines and address those factors there. This is exactly we are doing. Currently the community consists of mentors(both male, and female) and helps applicants identify their talent gaps and train them. These gaps are not necessarily technical - but cultural and language gaps.