Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer

IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money.

I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business.

This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money.

I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters."

That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity.

It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."

Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity.

I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it?

Bummer you go the offensive end of that.

EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through a gendered lens."

When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.

Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?

It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because they're either having trouble getting people on board, or holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for some definition of wrong.

Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than everyone else.

Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring?

My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing for your replacements.

I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time, the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal systemic bias and does have a strong local representative culture of Native American employees.

But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without it being sort of weird and cringy at first.

Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases this way... what other process would we suggest?

While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross.

It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain histories.

It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our life.

Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake, or whatever.

But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...

Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events.

The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual corporate experiences.

(They experienced the same super long interviewing and matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal with the recruiting pipeline).

These were not right out of college though, and they would have likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies anyway.

I think you mostly have two scenarios:

1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening.

2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time.

A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community.

As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.

Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient.

Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit.

Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions.

Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.

How does that even work? Even if we restrict "Native American" to groups that were native to what later became the United States, that's still a whole lot of different cultures across a vast range of ecosystems.

They had different foods and different kinds of music. How could IBM pick which Native American culture's food and music to have? Wouldn't any such choice be essentially foreign food and music to people from other Native American cultures?

When I ask what the most challenging problems company’s are facing and they mention PC stuff, then I know it’s not a place for me.

I’m also mixed race, part Maori and I had a guy in an interview tell me that “white guys like us don’t add diversity to the company”.

These social justice warriors can go fuck themselves.

You were right though that they were trying to check some boxes on a diversity report. IBM trots out those special events at trials to try and paint a favorable picture of their hiring practices - and if that doesn't work they just don't pay the judgements.

I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.

I get the intent, but it seems so incredibly forced and to your point, condescending for someone who busted their ass to get where they are in their career.

The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think.

Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past.

And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life.

If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.

sidenote - it is still, after more than 2 decades here, amuses me how people are allowed here to be "difficult to work with". Back in Russia - i was an engineer and later manager there - we didn't have "difficult to work with" persons, at least by the end of the first week of employment of any given person.

>

>This is just the way things are, especially in tech. It's not sexist, it's just unfair and dumb and political. And it's applied to all individuals. I've had it applied to me. I've been in management conversations on how to approach others to apply it to. This just isn't sexist.

I think what you're missing is that the reason a statement like this was visited upon you, or whomever poor soul you visted upon in turn, may not be sexist in your case but perhaps so in the author's.

Precisely as you point out: it's dumb and political. The reasoning isn't going to be good and it's going to be opaque. Well, sexism, racism, etc are dumb, political, and opaque.

The second one doesn't even support the premise. Video games aren't more "technical" than Facebook.

Well you're not supposed to say that though there may be some differences between the sexes. Like myself and my sister fit the stereotype.

$current_company runs internal events and makes noise about leadership bonuses being tied to diversity targets. I'm part of $targeted_minority so I usually show to the relevant zoom meetings. There's recurring meetings but no actionable items emerge from these meetings.

In a way I'm alright with this because some people need the meetings as a coping mechanism but it doesn't fix the underlying problem; bringing in more $targeted_minority does that. What's missing: data about internal hiring/promotions/referrals showing whether $targeted_minority has a funnel problem. Maybe those reports are above my pay grade at this company. For some anecdata I've made over 30 referrals and not one has been hired. At $previous_company I made 6 referrals that turned into 4 offers and 3 hires (and one of those referrals walked away before being made an offer). Sure, $current_company has higher standards but I'm a bit incredulous at the success rate gap.

Maybe one day they will give up and pad the numbers with marketing/HR folk, etc. and pat themselves on the back. Maybe they already do that and I just don't know about it.

I get called dipshit and you get called the N-word. Why race-based bullying has suddenly become considered worse is beyond me.

It's not like there's a large, untapped pool of talented black software engineers.

I'm at a large tech company. There was a team I worked with for a big with some really talented people, the sort of team where really smart domain experts go. There was a black guy on it who asked questions showing he wasn't an obviously talented domain expert. I found out he was recruited for coming from an unconventional background and was spending time with different teams.

Large tech companies are trying really hard to finds diamonds in the rough, and they're taking chances on people that aren't talented enough.

The other issue is blacks are only 13% of the American population. Seattle is only 7%. Now imagine you're an even smaller minority. It's about people not being assholes, not "hiring more x people" because that will always fall short for some group.

Honestly, I feel like I received more discrimination as a white, western European in the US than you did.

When I was still working in a university lab in the US, it was extremely diverse, with a strong bias/over-representation of Chinese people. But it was still diverse in skin color, heritage, religion, sex or whatever. I never saw any "insensitive comments" there, at least none that were meant in a bad way.

Tangentially related: when I got a new tattoo a few years back at an artist I never been before I made some joke that tattoo artists are like dentists: they love to inflict pain on people. I immediately realized that he must have heard the same hundreds of times before, and that I said something pretty bloody stupid.

You're up close and personal for a few hours with a stranger; I'm not shy or socially awkward, but I'm also not especially outgoing; just average. Sitting in silence can be awkward for some human psychological reason, and you feel the pressure to say ... something, anything. Reflecting on my own behaviour since this, I've noticed it's in those kind of situations where I say the silliest things: when you feel a pressure to say something but you're not sure what.

I think many probably have the same experience to some degree getting a haircut or the like (although haircuts usually don't take 3 hours; or at least, mine don't).

I'd certainly like to think I wouldn't be the kind of person who would "the same stupid jokes or comments" that you mentioned – but I can point at least to once case where I've done so. There are probably others that I've forgotten.

My point is that it's hard to understand how something is perceived by someone else, especially when their experience is very different from yours, whether that's a tattoo artist or a black programmer.

An idea I had a while ago is a platform where people can post personal stories to expand on these kind of things and how it's perceived by them (about a wide variety of topics). "I didn't mean anything by it" comes off as rather weak, but it's my impression it is actually true in quite a few cases, especially these relatively minor ones: many people just don't understand what it is to be in the shoes of another person. You really need to explain this, and just saying "that's racist" isn't enough.

P.S. Don't get your ribs tattooed people. Good grief that one hurt so much more than any of the others.

I think is important to talk about because insensitive comments aren’t always clear. Finding a good way to talk about comments in a healthy way is the difference between me having more peace or stewing.

Sometimes people don’t know what they’re saying is offensive, sometimes I misperceive something.

An example is that I was in a staff meeting and one of the seniors said “Paying for itself in spades...” and another developer’s face just sunk and he was clearly upset but the senior didn’t notice.

Dev2 went to a colleague to talk and explained how he was really upset because Dev1 uses this term quite a bit and that it’s offensive. Colleague pulled up some info on the origins of the term [0] and how it has nothing to do with race.

If Dev2 hadn’t talked about it, then they would have continued thinking that Dev1 was saying racist things.

Obviously, the particulars of situations will vary and there are jerks. But given that we work with lots of different cultures, it’s good to try to find a way to confront these offenses in a way that’s not exhausting and can help build team relationships.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade

[for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the article says.]

Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf? Did that sysadmin use to room with the tech lead in colleges? Empirically, such employment biographies are far more common than your hypotheticals. Gut somehow, they do not seem to provoke this righteous anger of meritocracy.

It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got more diversity candidates into the funnel or not.

As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you want to be happening.

Wow this is not at all correct based on my experience.

It is so common for "non-diverse individuals" to have gotten where they are based on things like network that I really don't think you can tell just by looking at someone.

The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates.

In that light, the non diverse office might be seen as less productive. Maybe this is a bunch of pals goofing off, rather than people hired to do work?

But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held down since forever.

Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent.

During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit.

Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc.

Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using.

Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.

That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.

Unfortunately when you have affirmative action or hiring quotas, you inadvertently to create a culture where the diverse individuals are seen as less skilled and less qualified even when many of them would have gotten to the same place without the quotas.

Sure, you can look at statistics and say that sexism exists, and that's all very important, but that doesn't really say all that much about individual social interactions, just like statistics about crime rates of ethnic group X doesn't really say anything about individual who belongs to ethnic group X.

A few years ago I tried to help someone on Stack Overflow who asked a series of very basic Python questions about the same piece of very basic code by pointing out that they're probably better off getting a Python book and actually learning the language first, as Stack Overflow is not really a mentoring platform. It was phrased fairly encouragingly (I thought anyway) and was intended just to help them in their struggle to get started with Python, but the person didn't take it very well and accused me of racism :-/

Perhaps the “everyone can become a good professional as long as they’re willing to learn” comment was especially patronizing towards her purely based on the fact that she was a women, or perhaps it wasn't. It's almost impossible to say for sure, especially not based on this one sentence devoid of any context. In my Stack Overflow example I know there wasn't any racism involved because I didn't even notice the person was Indian until after he made that comment, yet the person was still left with a feeling of a racist interaction. It was a shitty situation for everyone involved.

This boss was clearly an amateur. A truly effective manager inputs their employees' eye colors, clothing preferences, heart rates, favorite books, and heights into the magic statistics machine to determine the correct person for each task.

Case in point why women feel uncomfortable in the tech industry. Men holding opinions like this lurk there.

  > > Boys are just predisposed for technology by nature
  >
  > This is true. There is scientific evidence that shows men
  > prefer things, women prefer people. This is not to say
  > women can’t succeed in tech or are not as good at tech,
  > but the fact that women choose other fields belies this
  > nature.

Even if most women prefer to work with people as opposed to working on things, it does not tell you anything about the specific candidate one is considering for a job.

Regarding the quote from the article: It was used to dismiss the idea of also going to high schools instead of just going to colleges to promote the companies opportunities. So while going into high schools to promote job opportunities in tech likely can not eliminate that general difference in interests, it can have an effect on those women who would be interested but are not convinced or aware (enough) yet.

It was a really interesting conversation because to get a diversity of outcomes they had to completely change their approach, not just sprinkle some diversity into their existing process.

Applied to the rooney rule from above it would involve cultivating multiple inputs to the talent pipeline to make sure interesting candidates don't get blocked along the way. NFL positions like head coach have a pretty limited pool of candidates to begin with, so ensuring an interview quota is likely sufficient. For something like software developer the pool is so much deeper and wider and interview quota on its own is unlikely to be sufficient.

Tech companies are diverse, more so than most companies.

You mean to say 'not the right kind of diverse'.

The ridiculous, Monty Python conversation that nobody wants to have, is that since White Americans are slightly underrepresented, but Asian Americans are about 600% over-represented ... which means getting the 'right' kind of diversity literally means hiring less people of colour, specifically Asians, which seems really unfair to them for very obvious reasons.

It's funny and Orwellian at the same time that the problem exists out in the open, but nobody dare speak a word of it. These are the kinds of problems that Cults and the Bad Kinds of religions have.

The problem with the 'rule' as you describe it is it may decrease diversity in any sense.

There is no data to support the fact that African Americans and Latino Americans are showing up in the pipelines in sufficient the right qualifications to 'balance out' diversity.

The data actually works the other way - the ethnic and gender composition of people hired basically is a good reflection of the pipeline.

I understand we can do better than just looking at the pipeline, but from any specific, direct hiring perspective, the pipeline is it.

Within the pragmatic but admittedly narrow confines of 'the pipeline' - any company is going to be hard pressed to hire considerably more of the 'right race' of people. It's not going to matter that much how you do interviews.

'The Solution' is going to have to be 1) getting more kids from different backgrounds interested in tech at an early age and into the pipeline and 2) accepting that 'diversity' is an ideology on some level, and that just because you have people of some group, doesn't necessarily imply negative or racist behaviours. Nobody will ever state the later in public, but it's possible we come to terms with it.

(For reference, only about 25 percent of NFL players are white.)

1. You'll lose candidates to companies that close faster. In fact, you'll likely lose the best candidates.

2. Can be gamed by hiring managers. If they want to close a rec fast, they just find an unqualified member of an underrepresented group to interview to hit the Rule. Waste of time for everyone.

3. Demographic targeting (especially beyond gender) has a variety of issues (arbitrary definitions, unknowns about whether candidates are in what demographic, etc.).

You don't lower the bar but you do put a locking mechanism on your recruiting pipeline that reduces your hiring throughout in an already supply constrained environment and you impose greater hiring costs to make sure you always have a candidate.

Now that may still be a profitable thing to do, but you can pretend there are no costs and downsides. What you need to do it look at all the pros and cons and balance those considerations to find out what is most profitable. Anything that isn't profit maximizing over the time scale we are optimizing for is also to the detriment of the company.

One source: With engineering it can be followed back to opportunity at school. The US school funding model sucks: wealthy districts get the most money, which means better education, which means students come out primed for better jobs. Then there's the Gatekeeping common in engineering that tries to keep out others (in the late 80's it was harassing women so that they dropped out... one of the frats at my uni had an actual game to try to get women to drop out by making fun of them in recitation, which was horrific).

If a company wants to hire someone because of diversity, it’s not necessarily just because of diversity.

In the article, the author describes their experience as having been different than non-diverse candidates, therefore creating a sense of personal doubt about their abilities, however unfounded.

If given two equally qualified candidates, giving a preference to diverse ones does not present any deadlock. If you’re not just hiring someone for diversity, then you are doing that due diligence. Additionally, I would hope also doing the due diligence to make the environment you are hiring them into welcoming as well. The authors stories reflect things breaking down in this regard in a big way as well.

The fact that you got the same competence test should be enough. Leave it at "the team thinks you can do the job."

So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.

I'll be honest again: Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever I can, and I'm even a natural fan of "underdogs"... What would I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a discrimination lawsuit? Let's say my imperfect solution to this was simply to just keep hiring other white males for a while. Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity, but now I've created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by having an all-white, all-male company... Do you see yet what the problem is, here?

It's a problem if one applies the typical to the specific. If a woman is sitting in front of you and you assume her characteristics match the mean of all women's characteristics, congrats, you are sexist.

This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help.

> They are in avg more social

Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.

For example, looking for only people who graduated from a certain tier of school limits you by adopting whatever discriminatory practices that those schools have adopted. Or looking for people with a particular experience that is rarely afforded to a particular class of people.

Instead, by working identify the merits that actually result in high performance and then working to evaluate those in an interview can get you better and more diverse employees.

> I didn’t know what to think. I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don’t think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles. But I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be a transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept the conditions deliberately.

It was at least implied upfront that she was a diversity hire for 2.

And maybe I just don't have as strong a moral compass as you, but I have found it difficult to always uphold the ideas I stand for. E.g. I like the idea of solely merit-based hiring. But if I got a dream job because I knew the CEO's friend and they put in a good word for me, I would have a hard time rejecting that offer.

It only works if you're PoC, sweaty.

yes, some people have a problem working together. carl in the story is a good example. carl is someone i would let go because he is uncooperative. this again has nothing to do with cultural fit.

and especially if the difference in cultures falls along diversity lines, i would very carefully examine what the actual culture is and make a strong effort to push for a culture change.

> I had never received any feedback indicating my performance was poor. In fact, it was exactly the other way around: I’ve never had a role that was such a good fit for my expertise before. So I asked if he could detail better where I failed. He refused to..

It is completely unprofessional to fire someone having never given any feedback. Startup or not.

I understand that it’s more complicated when you are making jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that it’s not an issue of “bad culture fit.” As an example, employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their coworkers aren’t gruff people that have trouble fitting in to an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist jokes in the office. Just don’t do it.

(There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that’s a different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the office.)

Do we really have to explain why that's inappropriate?

The set of things you can comfortably joke about at work is pretty small these days and almost never includes jokes about any kind of group identity.

It's the idea of punching down, vs punching up.

That is, if you are joking about someone in a worse position than you, it's punching down, and a dick move. If you are joking about someone in a better position than you, it's punching up, and allowable. It's why it's okay for black comedians to joke about white people, but not okay for white comedians to joke about black people. It's why politics is always fair game to make fun of (people in power), but disabilities, say, aren't. Etc.

While punching across is technically doable, it's also very, very hard to do, because ultimately who are you telling the joke to? Who is laughing? I.e., if you talk about things your family does from your own homeland, and people laugh, what are they laughing at? They're laughing at your homeland, your culture, because they feel 'above' it in some way. It's an invitation to punch down. Otherwise it isn't funny; it's interesting. Truly punching across tends to be for an audience that is also the butt of the joke (think Vir Das telling jokes about Hindu beliefs).

Now, that's not to be confused with an explanation or similar. I've worked for a German company, and when asking about why we did something that seemed suboptimal to me, another employee, himself German, has said "That's very German". That's not necessarily a judgement, that's not an invitation to laugh at how silly German culture is; that's just a prelude to an explanation that it's a cultural difference in priorities.

She is not doing that

> working through specific, addressable issues

She is doing exactly this

It's illegal to do and definitely illegal to put on paper (in the US) - it's discrimination. That said, depends on what "HR had intentions to prioritize candidates" means in context.

One has to keep in mind that not only do Other people offend us inadvertently but also WE inadvertently offend others too.

We can’t be so sensitive that we become prickly and then have people avoid you because you’re so prickly.

We have to be okay with not everything coming from your point of view. You won’t be able to have the Other persons PoV either even if you’re conscious of it. You have no idea what I’m thinking in a moment. It’s a fool’s errand.

Be genuine, be respectful, but don’t fault people for coming short when trying.

When talking to an audience you cannot simultaneously please everyone. It’s just not possible. At best you can be compliant with whatever the accepted practice is.

> The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in them.

The article is just as much for those who are trying to help women and minorities as it is for those who are biased.

This idea is likely held by people who have not had a lifetime of discrimination and insults and made fun of for X. When you have been such a victim, being in a professional, zen-calm work environment is a luxury, and honestly not too much to ask for.

The "let me explain discrimination to you" responses from white men in this thread is really cringe-inducing.

What if a manager advised to use “manly ruggedness” to fix an algorithm from O(n^2) to O(n)? It employ “Irish Luck”?

"you will use your whatever skill and you will be fine" is quite patronizing.

i would have stated the situation without making assumptions about her ability to do this, especially not any assumptions tied to her gender. i would have explained that she was the only person on the team who doesn't already have a bad relationship with carl. i would have asked her if she wants to do this and give her the option to decline. and maybe even offered a bonus for taking on a difficult task. and at the same time i would have pushed to have carl fired because he clearly isn't getting along with anyone else.

Do you mean that more people get into gaming because of modding?