Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations | Hacker News Reader

Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations

journals.plos.org

475 pointsbehnamoh619 comments

My sense is that most responses here are only to the title of the submission (the actual article title is "Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case").

Skimming through said actual article, it looks like the "against men" hiring discrimination is ~completely driven by this:

"...In female-dominated occupations such as cleaner, childcare provider, preschool teacher, accounting clerk, and enrolled nurse, positive employer response rates were much higher for women than for men. This is in line with earlier findings in different countries..."

Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".

It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if men were clearly the (sole) group being wronged by that.

(Or do millions of men quietly aspire to jobs cleaning up dirty toilets, dirty diapers, and dirty bedpans, and I'm just ignorant of their dreams?)

Yes - the title here was so egregiously editorialized that I'm not even going to revert it.

Submitters: breaking the site guidelines like this will eventually cause your account to lose submission privileges. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and note this one:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

This is pretty dismissive of the men who want to work in what you consider low status crappy jobs. There are plenty of men out there who expressly go to school with the goal of being an educator, for example. The discrimination those men face is very real.

It's ok to admit that there are some areas society has decided men shouldn't work in. It doesn't diminish the struggles of anyone else

Yes and no. For instance - there's generally a big gap between "go to school with the goal of being an educator", and being a preschool teacher. At least in the U.S., the latter tends to offer far lower status, pay, job security, etc. than being (say) a 7th grade teacher.

Between the low desirability, high turnover, and "we must fill the opening" nature of most bottom-end, female-dominated jobs, I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs. Apply a bunch of time, especially when unemployment is low, and it's pretty likely that you'll be hired because they had no acceptable alternative. Or (say) a preschool wanted to have one male teacher, to be a social role model for little boys. Or (I have seen this done) a bookkeeping dept. wanted a couple males, to dial down the social drama that they experienced with a all-female clerkforce.

And for those concerned less about individual rights (to get the job one really wants, etc.) than about the larger-scale social downsides of discrimination, making it more difficult for men to obtain some types of low-status, low-pay jobs is a "pretty weak poison".

>> I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs

Is this not the opposite of the line you quoted from the study?

>> "... positive employer response rates were much higher for women than for men."

> I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs.

Based on what? For example, my wife and I have hired au pairs for many years. There are some men in the program, but almost no families will hire them. We certainly wouldn't. I'd imagine lots of care-adjacent fields are like that.

>I'd guess that the anti-male discrimination is a fairly weak barrier to men who really want those jobs.

I'm sorry to say you're definitely, clearly wrong about this. I am not an educator but I travel in those circles and I know at least a half dozen men who wanted to be early childhood educators and just couldn't find work, regardless of the need or their qualifications, and that is by no means a unique story. They all have stories of administrators, HR, etc flagrantly implying they might be pedophiles. It's not just 'the system's fault either, society is strongly prejudiced against men working with young children. The discrimination is real and these men actually suffer for it.

I'm not sure how to take your point of it being ok because nobody really wants these jobs anyway. Frankly it's hard to see it as anything other than reprehensible. Plenty of good, intelligent, well adjusted people do these jobs knowing the pay and conditions are terrible because they want to make a difference.

My unverified hunch is that HN skews towards those who value salary as form of status. I've probably more who studied computer science with a primary motivation of making money than I have who love the job itself. And the inverse it true for those I know in teaching. Suffice to say, there may be some value system projection when people say they don't think anybody wants those jobs.

> who really want those jobs

And why is it, Mr. Anderson, that you appear to really want this job? Could it be that you're a pervert?

Thank you, exactly this.

I can speak for myself and some of my male friends and say that there have been quite a lot of us who would have loved to become e.g. a kindergartner or a nurse.

While some actually did, they would not exactly say they "love it" anymore because of low pay and other harsh working conditions. I did not pursue this dream any longer because I realized that it is hard to find a woman when the majority of women prefer to choose men with high status and income (I do not want to generalize or be sexist here but I have the feeling that most women share this preference).

> The discrimination those men face is very real.

Yes, definitely. I can somehow understand how parents might be uncomfortable with a male kindergartner going to toilet with their child but there actually are men who can do this without being aroused or harassing the child.

I think this requires major introspection, it relies on the idea that representation is only important in higher paying jobs when that still means exploiting yourself for a corporation

> Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".

What an absurd interpretation. It takes a certain sort of mindset to react as if women having an advantage in certain jobs is somehow a downside, just because these jobs are "low status." It's not as if a man who gets rejected as a cleaner is going to instead become a FAANG engineer.

> Which sure sounds to me like "employers try to fill low-status, low-pay, often-crappy female-dominated jobs with yet more females".

That reflects an outmoded view of the labor market. These are good jobs for people who lack a college degree. Lots of the women in my wife's family have similar jobs. It's not like their brothers--i.e. men from similar educational and class backgrounds--are becoming doctors instead of nurses, or college professors instead of preschool teachers.

Yes, to a degree. But there are quite a few male-dominated fields with similar career prospects - semi-skilled building trades, road construction, sanitation work, truck driver, etc., etc. And there are often male niches within the female-dominated jobs - for adult patients who may be infirm, any decent-sized health facility will need some larger & more muscular workers (very likely male) on every nursing shift.

Those jobs are generally more physically demanding and dangerous, to offset the slightly higher pay. After my FIL dropped out of college, he worked as a window washer and forklift driver. Yes these are "male-dominated fields" but that's not because women are applying to these jobs and being excluded. Also, these jobs have been much harder hit by illegal immigration than most corresponding jobs for women.

It takes a certain sort of mindset to ignore the fact that there are many male dominated roles that are low-status, low-pay and "crappy". Not to mention that men dominate fields where the work is physically dangerous; front-line military, forestry, oil rigs, sea fishing, construction and mining.

It's incredible the amount of mental gymnastics you do when men are being denied whole careers simply because of their gender and you still somehow try to spin this as women being the real victims.

During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well. But what bothers me more is the ageism. The number of times an old person has been rejected from a job is too damn high. The reasons have always been "he may not work well with young people", "seniority complex", "he is over qualified" etc. Most of the times, they were more than qualified. I fear when I am into 40s or 50s, I will face the same discrimination.

After age 40 I did a coding bootcamp to change careers.

Another guy in the camp was doing the same. We compared notes on interviews. One day he gets a call back from a recruiter and he put the recruiter on speaker phone. She told them they liked him but chose someone else because (drum roll) culture fit.

He asked what she meant by that and she outright said: "The other person is younger. You're old." We were shocked and he pretended he didn't quite hear her... she repeated it word for word. I don't think she even realized it was illegal.

The other guy never made a complaint, he needed a job and I could hardly blame him not wanting to put up a fuss / fight over a job at a place he didn't want to be a part of anyway ... it was shocking to hear it made that clear.

Long run we both got jobs and are doing well, but man... that call sticks in the back of my head anytime I think of job hunting.

Would be interesting to compare this across areas. My impression is that eg Finance (another popular destination for mid-career switches) is far more open in that regard. Experience, even if it's in a different field (as long as it's a technical role or one that will give you a rich set of contacts) seems to generally confer seniority. Would be interesting if someone could weigh in.

Anecdotally, the hard engineering fields (e.g., mechanical, civil, etc.) are much more tolerant about age and more receptive to the benefits and tradeoffs of both youth and, erm.., "experience"

(said tongue-in-cheek because age does not necessarily equate to experience)

Probably most regulated industries. I am in medical devices and you can easily make it to 65 with dignity.

because fail-forward works so great with implanted defibrillators, I presume?

“Move fast and kill people”

That's my main issue with SV-mentalities moving into the safety-critical space like autonomous driving

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand you don’t want to kill people but on the other hand a lot of the big players in regulated industries are stagnant, complacent and inefficient. A good example would be SpaceX. Compared to their competitors they move faster, are innovative, cheaper and despite that they are reliable when it counts . Most of their failures were well calculated risks that helped them move faster. I am in health care and this industry also desperately needs new players that take more agile approaches and not the super expensive super slow approach most established players are taking. They are way too complacent.

I agree with you that the old corps in these industries are stagnant, but also recognize when there's a gap in the way new entrants approach safety-critical problems.

One example is the Uber incident that killed a person. If you read the NTSB report, it seems like they intentionally programmed a delay into a safety critical system in order avoid nuisance braking. From a safety-critical standpoint, deliberately slowing the action of a time-sensitive safety mitigation is big error in engineering judgement. Imagine if I reprogrammed your home smoke detectors to wait for an hour to determine if there's really a fire because you were annoyed that they went off every time your baked. My suspicion is they did this because their software wasn't really ready but they wanted to push it to market for testing.

Another example that has had some controversy in the industry is SpaceX using only touchscreens. I don't know where they settled, but a few years back they were adamant that they don't need physical controls. We've all probably experienced issues where a touchscreen doesn't respond as intended. Automotive manufacturers have walked back this idea on a lot of their models because they recognize all the additional failure modes that touchscreens introduce.

My worry is that sometimes "innovation" is really just forgetting (or not knowing) the lessons learned from the legacy players.

The traditional players like Boeing have had their own problems, but IMO they are more due to management than engineering. With the 737MAX, the engineering processes were in place. They had a hazard analysis that said MCAS shouldn't be a single-point failure; it seems they just didn't follow their own engineering processes due to budget and schedule pressures. That's a different animal than not having the safety-critical culture to define those processes in the first place (but not any less egregious).

Sounds believable, but how many people successfully transition into those?

It depends on what you mean by "transition".

It's probably hard to transition from a software engineer to a licensed structural engineer or the like.

But it's much easier to transfer into a software or software-adjacent role related to the field. Those fields have lots of opportunity for controls engineers, or data acquisition system developers, or data scientists, or even developing home-grown applications. The flip side is a lot of bad software practices are tolerated because those running the show just don't know better or don't care because it's not in their wheelhouse.

Sounds a bit like they might put you in the IT rather than the engineering department if you come in as a SE. Control is far outside the ballpark of a typical SE, unless you happen to have studied EE (which is arguably just another one of the 'hard' engineering fields). Sounds like short of having a relevant degree you won't be an engineer in those areas, and very few people get those mid-career.

An area that people do transition into and that almost puts a premium on plain age is therapy/counselling, but that's a far shot from technical fields.

Like I said, it's anecdotal, but I've known people who've transitioned to those fields. There is sometimes an issue of conflating IT to CS, but the converse seems to happen much more in my (again, anecdotal) experience. In that case a mediocre engineer with some software experience is crammed into an IT role because the engineering team doesn't really want them. If a SE adds a lot of value to an engineering team they are usually very reluctant to give them up.

what about someone in his/her 40s with no previous experience in the field?

I wasn't necessarily saying they have to make a complete career switch but rather find a niche within those fields that can use their software experience. For example, building a pressure systems database that isn't god-awful would be useful for oil/gas or firms that do aerospace research. Knowing the mechanical side would obviously be a huge plus, but it's also possible to lean on the mechanical engineers who are the system experts. Same thing with managing environmental requirements, or building automation/energy systems, data acquisition for medical devices, or software quality testing etc.

What are some common paths for people who make that jump?

Just my perspective so take it with a grain of salt. It helps to look for positions outside the normal SV roles so places like aerospace, defense contractors, manufacturing, etc. They post a surprising number of CS positions. I would caution, though, that the only role I've seen that pays SV-type salaries ($250k+) was controls engineer for automotive manufacturing. But to be fair, the jobs were all in areas with a cost of living much, much lower than SV.

If you get in (politely) look for processes that your SE skills can make an impact. These opportunities are sometimes there because the place is full of non-software minded folks who don't know what they don't know. An example from my anecdotal experience was when someone with software acumen helped reprogram an automation system to be more efficient and saved high-six/low-seven figures each year and really gets people's attention. Or showing how they can dramatically improve their quality control by developing unit tests. Some stuff that is common in SE firms is often overlooked in firms focused on other disciplines.

The most common paths for people making mid-career moves to finance are from using software skills in industries like aerospace, defense contractors or manufacturing?

That doesn't sound right. I'm not even sure most people transitioning into finance from another career have any software skills at all (beyond Excel).

Sorry, I lost track of the thread comments. I thought the question was how to move from SE to hard engineering fields like mechanical or civil.

Old companies also hire old people more easily. Microsoft, Apple, aerospace and defense contractors.

I think due to the massive influx of people into this profession, the median age is still pretty low, but I think this will stabilize, and the age pyramid will look more even. As good, productive people will get older, recruiters will realize that people don't go senile at 40.

Eh, it's been this way since at least the 90's.

How long should anyone wait for clearly illegal behavior to start being not ok?

Probably until they routinely get sued for it

Well I don't see the benefit of being lied to over speaking the illegal truth.

I reckon that someone in their 40s or 50s could probably make enough to retire from recording interview rejections and suing for discrimination. I've heard it happen a couple times myself as a junior employee, and had to tell hiring managers that what they were saying was illegal.

I entered the industry in my early 30s and remember getting a really helpful piece of advice from a meetup talk. Enthusiasm for learning and the technology is a counter for most of the ageism in interviews. It will stop people from assuming you're set in your ways, a curmudgeon, out of date, or anything on those lines.

The "culture fit" excuse is a tough one, though. That framing can be used to unknowingly discriminate in all kinds of ways.

> The "culture fit" excuse is a tough one, though. That framing can be used to unknowingly discriminate in all kinds of ways.

Just an imo here, but anyone who talks about "culture" at a company broadly needs to be called out. 9/10 they are likely leveraging some form of discrimination. Culture cannot be mandated or even controlled in any succinct way that it causes you to use that as a logic branch.

I share these concerns as well, my advice to anyone that will listen is to save everything you can because this industry chews people up & spits them back out a lot faster than you would expect. And if you want longevity you had better try and get into management at a larger corporation.

That's why I plan to retire at 35 :D

It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more. So like, seeing that type of application is in an indication that the person's first twenty years of career haven't yielded the kinds of achievements and contact network that have bumped them out of the hustle and into the world where they no longer beg for jobs because they're being actively head-hunted.

Obviously, there are loads of reasons why this might legitimately be someone's situation, including midlife career-, locale- or industry-changes. But it could be another vector for bias.

> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.

I really wish people would stop this. I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time. My friends tend to come from outside of work and they're not software devs. It definitely is age-ism adjacent; having to "network" to get a job is much harder after you get older.

>having to "network" to get a job is much harder after you get older.

hard but I'm not sure about harder than a new grad. contacting someone you worked with years ago is still preferable to cold contacting someone you only have a shallow connection to (same school, maybe you talked for a day at a conference, etc.).

They don't have to be friends, just collogues who can vouch for you.

> I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time. My friends tend to come from outside of work and they're not software devs.

'friend' is a much higher bar than 'somebody in your network'.

plenty of folks i worked with over the years, who i haven't heard from in decades, but i'd move them to the head of the line if they called up asking about work. i remember who got shit done and who didn't, and don't care that they didn't put in a repeating calendar item to take me out for a beer every 17 months.

I think they were implying that their friends do not overlap with work, while your comment seems to allude to friends you've made from work.

please don't put words in my mouth. i said nothing about being friends with anyone. and you've fundamentally misinterpreted what i said.

you don't need to be friends with someone for them to be in your network.

My apologies. I agree you don't need to be friends to be in someone's network and that's all I was pointing out. I deliberately couched my statement in "I think" and "seems to" because I understand how easy it is to misinterpret in this format. Rewording someone's statement is a way to ensure one understands and allows the other person to correct it, it's not meant to "put words in your mouth." I'm not sure why your tone is so defensive, but thank you for clarifying.

I'm not even sure it's higher so much as orthogonal.

Like, I have close friends who I still wouldn't necessarily give a special recommendation about simply because I have no idea what it would be like to work with them on a work project. Or even in some cases, I suspect it wouldn't be all that great because they're obvious slackers about work-type stuff; like when we plan things together, I know I'll need to double check their part of it.

Whereas there are work-colleagues I am absolutely not "friends" with but would recommend for almost any role in a heartbeat.

And there are a very small number that are both: a hard-working colleague who has also become a friend. Those are the people I'd consider quitting my job to start a company with.

> I don't really keep in touch with many coworkers due to time.

It's not hard to connect with people on Linkedin, even if you haven't seen them in years.

But is some random person you worked with 20 years ago reaches out, what are you going to do?

I would send the a link to the careers page, and that's about it. Unless person was a total rock star, you probably can't speak much to their abilities after so much time.

I mean personally I'd refer them if they didn't suck. Yes, 20 years is a long time but I find that people generally don't change, and successful people are likely to continue being successful.

Going deeper though, obviously networking isn't going to hit every time. That's why you need a whole network and not just one or two people. If the first person you reach out to doesn't want to refer you, it's not a big deal. Just move on to the next one.

If I reached out a former colleague for a referral, and they just sent me a link to the careers page, I would be trying to figure out at what point I offended them so deeply. You're not saying that this person is a shoo-in for the role and will be promoted within the year, you're saying that you know what the quality of their work was at the time you worked together.

I can think of people from my first real programming job that I would hire or refer in a heartbeat. I am can also think of a couple who I might just send a link to the careers page.

This is just plain ageism; there is nothing “adjacent” about it. It makes a generally untenable correlation between your age with some other trait that has no bearing on your ability to do the job, then bases decisions using that correlation. The result is discrimination based on your age, plain and simple.

Maybe, but this feels like making excuses for something that is part of a big and obvious pattern. FWIW, ageism is the one form of outright and open discrimination that I have witnessed in tech companies. None of the unconscious bias, microagession, dog whistle, tone stuff. Just straight up insulting people in the open to their face for their age. And I’ve seen it done to justify crappier technical solutions. The problem is real and out in the open. No need for elaborate excuses.

> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.

I think that is an assumption made by people who have had a single smooth career trajectory, but it often does not hold water.

Making a career change in your 30s or 40s is a thing. Honestly, I think it’s one aspect of the US that makes the economy robust and resilient.

Having made a bad career choice (e.g., former employer) is also a thing. I know that there is one place a friend of mine worked at that was basically a real-life Dilbert documentary. The specific work she did was right up her alley, but the organization was just an absolute train wreck. The few good people (including her) in that org left as quickly as they professionally could. Sadly, that was her second bum employer in a row, so all of her previous work contacts were not recent.

I wish more people would be open-minded to these possibilities.

> It's kind of ageism-adjacent, but I wonder if some of it is a bias that expects that past 40 you shouldn't really be needing to apply to jobs by resume drops any more.

This is akin to saying, "by 23, you should have moved out of your parents' house, otherwise, what's wrong with you?": it renders the speaker's presumptions into judgments.

"If you were good, you wouldn't need this job by now"

Who the hell would want to work for an org that thinks this way?

As I have gotten older, my pay has continued to increase. "Over qualified" means that I want too much money. (I don't apologize for that. I bring more value than I did 20 years ago. Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.)

Also, if you've got someone with 20 years experience, and they're willing to accept the same pay as someone with 5 years experience... are they really willing? Or are they going to bail for more money at the first opportunity? If you hire them, you have to worry about how long they'll stick.

So "more than qualified" can be a real thing, not just a discrimination thing.

I’m somewhat sympathetic toward your POV, but the average tenure in this industry is like 1.5 years or something like that. It’s not like young people stick around for a long time, and I would wager that older people are more likely to stick with a company (the older people I know are more likely to talk about “company loyalty” than my age cohort).

I don’t think it is loyalty. By your 40’s your pay is high enough that new offers to get another 20% come much rarer. The effort to find a new job has less upside.

I meant I've heard older people talk about loyalty explicitly.

And they may make enough and have enough savings that they care less about a salary bump. They probably own a house and don't want to move for any number of reasons--which still matters a lot of the time even in this more WFH friendly world. And, at some point, they know that a job search is probably going to be harder. And there's always risk with a new job.

I've certainly known people who would entertain a move if a new position fell in their lap but wouldn't likely seek one out.

I had interviews with people that were overqualified; I told them it is their choice if to take the position or not. I learned that overqualified people tend to leave after a few months to something more interesting.

Also "I want too much money" is a thing if all you need is a low level tech and the applicant is an expert in the field. It is not worth paying for expertise that you will not need. For example I hired a guy to do some very boring, routine cleanup in some databases; if I would hire a real DBA and pay double, what for? In this case I pay for the work and result, not for the expertise.

But to be fair I always tell the applicants what is the situation and give them the choice. I know it is a very rare case in the industry.

More than just wanting too much money, they think you are going to be bored going back to gruntwork and if you are bored you'll be looking to switch jobs again in a year.

The sad thing is someone like that would probably produce a better product thanks to their years of experience, and even possibly become a mentor to the rest of the team, but that's not the kind of thing recruiters think about.

BC (Before COVID), I was having trouble finding a qualified person for a role on my team (Operations, not Engineering). I was getting a lot of candidates apply that looked the same on paper but weren't good fits (they claimed to be technical but weren't that technical, poor communication skills, etc.).

So I went in the tool and looked through the discard pile and found more diverse candidates that hadn't been presented to me. One looked amazing—over a decade of directly relevant experience, Oxford grad, etc. I asked the recruiter why she hadn't given me that resume and she said "She's overqualified, she's got 15-20 years experience."

I was livid and said "I don't care if they have 20 years experience, I want someone who is qualified!" We ended up hiring her and she's been absolutely wonderful, and is still on the team ~5 years later.

I don't think the recruiter was consciously discriminating against the candidate, but there were definite implicit biases that she wasn't aware of.

Implicit bias training is now required. I personally found it to be very helpful, and try and be aware of my own biases. I always hire the candidate that I think will be best for the job, but try and always find a diverse group of candidates to talk to. It's a better process, and makes for a better (and more diverse) team.

Eh, having known some recruiters over the years? A lot of it is definitely not implicit.

Sure. This was a late 30’s white woman being biased against a late 30’s white woman. It didn’t feel intentional.

You do realize, right, that "implicit bias tests" are poppycock (and hence very likely implicit bias trainings as well).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype#Criticism

>>Either you have a use for that - enough of a use that you're willing to pay for it - or you don't.

I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'. And, as you said, there is always the fear they will leave tomorrow for 2x the money...

*) I wanna see 'evil genius' next! :-)

> I think this is the crux of a lot of it. You only need one lead/rockstar/ninja/10x* for every 10-20 'developers'

I really disagree, ideally you'd have at least one in every team.

oh - I agree it would be nice... but very few places seem to do that. I've seen a lot of 'senior' people leading 3+ teams of junior/average developers.

edit: point being, if you can muddle thru - mgmt generally doesn't see it as a 'need' just an 'expense'

> If you hire them, you have to worry about how long they'll stick.

That needs to become outdated thinking, since most people but particularly the younger ones, don't stick around any job for more than a year or two max regardless.

I'm almost 50. I've been working in tech since 1996, and at this point, despite being a strong and seasoned engineer, I'm getting comments like, "it's different now", or "back in your day", etc, and the very young engineers fresh from school are the ones throwing this around. Those with a few years of experience under their belt don't.

It's really disheartening, but it's also my job to train these bozos and turn them into good engineers, which they most certainly are not coming fresh from school.

I hope these people are in the minority. I'm 21, I have my first internship coming up in the summer, and I am ecstatic to learn from engineers more experienced than me, no matter what age.

Yes, definitely in the minority.

A vocal minority unfortunately, and hiring is so driven by the fear of hiring the wrong person that just about any pushback is given a large amount of credence generally.

I am going to say this is an artifact of people not self-learning things on their own before the school or from a job.

I find in my earlier teenage years that internet was great source of knowledge. I read lots of blogs/articles etc from people 3x-4x my age. It made me appreciate them, not disrespect them. And for the most part, when you are on the internet, you really don't know what otherside even looks like for the most part - you only know in retrospect...

I'm sure there is ageism from younger devs, but be sure not to confuse it with respect. In my experience, younger devs (like me at the time) were always excited to learn from older devs.

But what if that older dev is only at par with the younger one: will she or he be treated equally, if everything else was equal? In other words, is an old person expected to compensate for her or his lack of youth by an excess of wisdom?

I think there is a certain expectation that after 10-20 years in the industry you bring some added value a fresh grad won't bring. Surely you must have learned a few things, no? If not that's not a great sign.

Impact. Impact is #1.

Interesting thought though, what if the product in question is a product geared toward a younger audience that younger devs are more "in tune" with? Assuming they have more impact as a result.

If the older dev is compensated more/has a higher level position, they are expected to provide more to the employer/product, whether it is through their excess wisdom or knowledge or responsibilities or otherwise.

They shouldn't be expected to compensate for their lack of youth in any way, as youth isn't a metric that has any relevance to their work in software development. And if they are of the same title/total comp as the young dev, there is nothing wrong with them being on par in terms of skills/knowledge/responsibilities.

Yes and no to fresh engineers being good. I’ve met many fresh engineers that integrated and soon outperformed their older peers in a couple months. My first engineer position I went from new hire to lead on most projects in about a year. I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers (expect one he was amazing and I learned a lot from him). There a lot of good and bad engineers and experience doesn’t make up for bad engineers.

Certainly, the variance between engineers is huge and can offset experience.

Over time, though, the bad older engineers get managed out of the profession, or leave out of frustration or lack of satisfaction, so you end up having fewer. The selection function for good engineers has had much longer to run on them.

Think of experience as a trend line which pushes everyone to be better relative to what they were. School teaches algorithms, languages, tools, but it doesn't teach things like engineering approaches and how to keep a team productive, which doesn't always mean the most awesome algorithms. School teaches how to get the "correct" answer, experience teaches how to get "good enough" in a short amount of time. You need both!

About algorithms: It very much depends on the thing one works on, whether one ever needs to look up what a good algorithm is for a problem, which needs solving. Often it is more about how to put pieces together, using APIs, building an API, making a service, etc. Similar for data structures. For most you only need to know the basics like when to use a hash table, when to use an array or whatever of the data structures that are often available anyway in the standard library of the language.

This even more diminishes the gains that engineers get from their expert knowledge.

Usually only when in a position to develop something ground up, does the expert knowledge of data structures and algorithms come into play.

Algorithm and data structure questionaires rather seem like mathematics in many cases. A filter to weed out people, but not often of use at the job.

Obviously I might be biased due to personal experience.

Single data point. It doesn't prove or disprove anything. I have seen 60 yo folks jump on a project and literally turn it around in weeks.

> I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers

Self-Humbled

Not really, I really expected to be very lacking in experience and aptitude. I did poorly in school and I have really bad ADHD and Tourette’s. My expectations as an engineer were to do well enough to keep a job; never expected I’d be a natural at writing software.

I'd still consider myself a bozo (3 years out of school), but may I offer a humble thanks for your shoulders that many of the rest of us stand on!

wow man - thats sucks... As an older engineer, I hope you hang in! There ARE good companies out there!

I'm in my 50s and haven't seen it in that overt form. Maybe a silicon valley thing? I've only worked on the east coast. On the other hand, I have missed out on jobs because of culture fit concerns that have an age component: I'm not sensitive enough. Not mean, but not as...nurturing?...as companies seem to now expect. Things were definitely more rough and tumble when I got into this field and I really do prefer that, so I can't deny, I don't fit into modern company cultures as well.

Recognizing seniority is hard. Computer Science is a field were a teenager in front of a computer quickly feels like a god. You can do anything!

But getting that out of their thinking takes time. And that is IMHO what you experience. It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.

I am in my early 40s as an architect arguing with our mixed-age teams to give me the necessary rationale before making stupid "it's different now" decisions.

I think part of the reason for feeling like a know-all can-do-everything in junior years and afterwards as well is, because of not reading the right books. I am talking about really good books about the core competence of programming. I have read books authored by people with more than 50y of experience. The ideas and wisdom they come up with is unparalleled. Reading about such great ideas and how to avoid issues with code makes me feel like: "Woa that is sooo neat and clean! Why did I not get that idea myself?" and there you have the humbling experience, that should introduce respect for seniority.

Of course it is not a blanket. A senior should adapt to new ways as well, if they make sense. For example functional constructs have become more popular in recent years. Just because one is a senior, does not mean, that they should go on writing their sequential do-while loops (usually it would be for loops, but exaggerating here), when things could be written with multicore in mind and using map reduce style. That is not seniority, it is lack of self-education and development of ones skills. No need to join the web framework churn either though. One should understand their essence though.

>It is disheartening that they lack the respect they should have socially independent of profession for an "elder" person.

Especially when you consider the fact that the tools and concepts they've learned and made them super awesome were developed by people in their late 30s-50s. James Gosling was 40 when he came out with Java, Bjarne and Guido were both 35 when they came out with C++ and Python respectively. None of these guys, by the way, have stopped working.

Oh and do not give up on them. Junior engineers are like teenagers. You need to raise them even if they are their worst.

If a 70 year old wants to churn out the same amount/quality of React code I get from everyone else on my team, I really couldn't care less

When it comes to more senior roles, it may not only be ageism, but naturally there are much less open positions and many more people down the pyramid fighting for them

Work remotely and anonymously. Let the quality of your work shine through so that age becomes irrelevant.

There aren't many such roles, but with remote work gaining popularity, they're becoming more of an option.

What jobs are hiring individuals anonymously?

No legal ones, that's for sure.

Perhaps parent meant private, as in keeping your age private as it wouldn't make sense to be anonymous if your expecting to be paid :-)

You can dye your hair and use soft lighting to look a lot younger on video. I've seen senior engineers do exactly that to get remote jobs. Then after that you leave your camera off.

Another point to where the crypto space shines, for compensation.

Most of the experienced people were involved in some major fuckup not long back. Just roll a new ident and build. The market is insatiable. A segment of the market thinks they want to “doxx” every builder, but they don’t matter.

> "he is over qualified" etc. Most of the times, they were more than qualified.

What's the difference between "over qualified" and "more than qualified"? ;)

The amount they'll have to pay to keep the person in the future.

They don't want someone that will leave in a year. They want them to stick around, without inflating their budget.

aka 'wageism'

if you don't need a rocket scientist, you don't pay for one... grunt work is grunt work.

> During my career, I've seen enough discrimination in the name of DEI as well.

At my work recently, we interviewed a white male and an asian female for the job. To my knowledge, this is the first female applicant we've gotten because they generally get snapped up by higher prestige/visibility roles. I've interviewed many people before, and the manager will request feedback about the applicants and use whichever had the highest score on a rubric. This time, the manager simply asked "please tell me if anyone has an objection to hiring [asian female]". I was shocked at my manager's language, as it implies the default action is to hire rather than to not hire (the latter being typical in companies). The white male was not discussed at all in my presence.

I'm strongly considering tipping off the white male applicant that he was discriminated against and that he may want to consider legal action. This is one of a number of what I consider discriminatory behaviors my employer (large company you've heard of) has displayed. Companies need to be fearful of engaging in all types of discrimination, not just ones that are culturally-sanctioned, and follow the law.

Please let them know, but do so as anonymously as is possible. Consider an email from a proton burner address via VPN, printed letter mailed from somewhere other than where you live (maybe even from your office if there are no cameras). Depending on the size of the company, discovery during a lawsuit like this can get insanely detailed and expensive.

Honestly, it might not be a bad idea to make it easy to find him.

Yeah, the op might be punished, but if companies start to worry that employees are going to out them for their illegal behavior, they might change.

Unfortunately I think the more likely scenario is that OP gets sidelined at work until he leaves. Most importantly (to the company) though, he's no longer involved in hiring.

I've also seen similar behavior on interview loops. I also would love for there to be fear of engaging in illegal discriminatory behavior for companies.

However, as an individual person, the cost/benefit equation on whistleblowing just seems so so bad. It just doesn't seem worth it as an individual. If these illegal things are going to be pushed back against, it seems like it'll need to be a coordinated/collective action.

Whistle blowing is legally protected. So if you do it keep a lawyer on hand so you can sue them latter when they retaliate.

That's a miserable way to live though.

There really are no winners in court except the lawyers.

From perspective of fairly young hiring manager (25y old) it really depended on candidate. If you changed industries and you want to come in, more than fair. If you have 10+YoE and I know we don't play that much, why would you want to work with us? I am bit wary if those people are teachable.

Please don't take it offensively, I just want to understand better philosophy of people who do only lateral moves for 8+ years (not becoming seniors, not becoming highly paid).

If the case is "not everybody is looking to dedicate their life to work" then its more probable that I will hire young person, as they just might put extra effort, as they maybe haven't chosen the philosophy yet.

But for the record, my first hire was 10yrs older than me, my last one is probably 10yrs older as well. So I still value experience of people who are longer in the industry

If I were a senior manager and I heard that coming from you, you'd hit the unemployment turnstile faster than you could blink. You're being paid to determine whether they can do the job well and are a good team fit. If you don't understand that, then you aren't capable of conducting a quality interview, and you shouldn't be in that position at all.

What do you expect from someone who wonders if old people are teachable?

I know some of them are, but I seriously wonder for people who spend considerably long time in exactly same position with regular job hopping

>You're being paid to determine whether they can do the job well and are a good team fit.

Yes and their job history and how they changed the companies is very vital part of that.

So many people are talking a lot about "quality interview" but lets be brutally honest, for more junior positions 10% of people get to have interview, rest of them is rejected based on CV (story that job history tells) screening or technical test.

So instead of criticising me, can you advise me motivation of somebody who does 5 lateral moves in 10 years?

I didn't quite have five moves in ten years and they weren't all lateral so this isn't me but I have a resume that some people didn't like because of high frequency moves due to early stage start-ups. My resume took off when two of the companies I worked with got acquired by Shopify, but before then having a high frequency of moves was viewed by some as a negative.

Keep in mind moving every two years is common in tech especially in companies that don't give four year option plans because you often get a token 1% raise when inflation is hovering around 8%. This means you're roughly 15% behind after two years with compounding. If you're a senior engineer making roughly $200K, that means you're often getting around a $30K raise to move. I think some people have careers that cap out at senior and that's okay. Not everyone makes staff or principal engineer.

Let me give you a personal anecdote.

I built software for an employer that pulled in over $35M over the 13 years that I worked for them and continues to draw approximately 70% of their revenue. This wasn't an application. It was an entire suite of online products. I interfaced directly with C-level executives to go over the strategy, the scope, the features, and the design of each of these products in the lineup. I met with clients to learn about their marketing needs and how we might meet those needs. I was the technical point of contact for all software and hardware related tasks.

I was the only technical employee on staff. Occasionally I'd manage a contractor.

To be clear, I was the product manager, the hiring manager, the project manager, the lead developer, the business analyst, and devops.

But those weren't my "official" titles.

My job title was software developer.

I was fully engaged with creating the products, I was well compensated, and I was close to home.

Now tell me, what should my next move have been? Should I have gone for a position where I sat around, twiddling my thumbs, fucking with spreadsheets, sitting through inane product roadmap meetings, planning to plan about planning, and all the other insane busy work bullshit that tech companies do to justify spending capital?

I'm an expert product developer and an expert product designer and an expert facilitator and I have the receipts. I didn't become a software developer to manage people. I became a software developer because I wanted to develop software. How's that for motivation?

Thats very impressive to be honest. So to understand better people like you, if you decided to change jobs, would you search for SWE again, or only filter for positions with "senior", "principal" etc.?

If for any SWE position, what would be the motivation/ in which cases would you consider smaller scope of work?

You might also hire a younger who turns out to not work on bugs because it's beneath them. Or they only want to work on new projects because they went to some uppity college and it would just be wasting their education to work on "old tech".

I've seen those. They suck to work with just as much as an older who is set in their ways.

Honestly, age has nothing to do with either. It's personality.

I'm in my 40's have been with the same company (FAANG) for over a decade. I'd say a majority of the management (including engineering) is in their mid-30's to 50's. It looks like the entirety of the senior management in engineering in my org is in their 40's.

There are fewer individual contributors in their 40's, but I know several (some moved from manager back to IC, others stayed IC).

Maybe this is a bigger issue at startups, where the founders are in their 20's?

How many 40+ are recent hires versus having been with the company 5-10 years?

I'd say the many/most have been with the company 10+ years (low attrition!). New hires are generally younger, but new hires that are more senior (IC or Manager) are generally older. That's not surprising, is it?

I have similar experience at a FAANG. We have a good mix of 20 somethings through 50 somethings.

Part of it is that FAANGs have explicit IC ladders, so you can advance without being forced to manage.

All the DEI brochures I have seen show young good looking people with different skin colors. There are no disabled people, no ugly people, no fat people, no old people.

United Colors of Peloton

And no political conservatives.

I'm apolitcal, personally, and welcome all points of view in my personal life.

I'm 50+, and perhaps I've just been lucky...but its not been an issue for me. I got my last job 18 months ago and I'm looking now. I think a lot of what people think is ageism, is wageism.. but that's just a hunch.

In my experience, if you work in areas with enough demand - its not an issue (eg you work the 'ends' of tech - really old or really new). If the demand isn't there, they probably don't want to pay for a senior employee when a fresh college grad could do it for half the cost ?

Anyway - fear not for your 40s or even your 50s!! Old geeks never die...

we just 'exec' a new program! :-D

Off topic, but this is the first time I’ve seen your username. I would love to compare sometime how we both came to such similar kinda odd usernames, haha.

you mean... a mech uprising! :-P

I think it was mech warrior or something in my case...

Remote work helps a lot in that case. I got my current remote job, which was specifically advertising for young developers, without mentioning my age. They know I'm an old fogey now, but that was after I had proven myself.

Yes, I had to severely abbreviate my resume. But no misinformation passed my lips or fingertips. The insurance paperwork, with age related info, all went through a third party.

And working remotely suits me down to the toes. On the internet nobody has to know you're a dog.

Most of the age discrimination I've ever seen has been anti-Boomerism, not specific fixed ages. i.e. it was "people over 30-40" 20 years ago, and now is basically mainly against people in their 60s+. I've never (as far as I can tell) experienced age discrimination, and I'm >40 now. There may be passive age discrimination (incompatible schedules for people with families, etc.), but most of the companies I've interacted with have been explicitly pro-family which goes against thag.

It doesnt matter what label you put on it, its still age discrimination.

Yes but it means the OP is less likely to experience it.

Its interesting how you can make sweeping negative generalisations about one group in society (based on age) and its completely acceptable. But for any other attribute (skin color, gender, orientation, ethnicity) it is considered appallingly ignorant.

Second this. I helped a guy get into a programming career in his mid-50s. He was/is really sharp but it took forever for somebody to give him an opportunity. He shined when he finally got it but there was a real struggle.

I'm curious if the ageism bothers you more because you know that will impact you specifically or is there another reason?

I agree ageism is total crap, but so is all forms of discrimination - it just seems that we will all ending up aging whereas the other forms are limited to minority groups who probably get the double whammy of minority + age.

I joke with my age-peers that I'd bring up ageism in our DEI outlets in my current company, but I'm afraid they'd decide to kill us and use us for fertilizer if I speak up ;)

Dark humor with an underlying truth. Ageism isn't seen as an "ism" by anyone except those over the age of 40.

My company appears to be extremely concerned with discrimination and inclusion. Been there less than a year, and I had already three trainings on the topic.

The emphasis is very clearly on certain minorities. There's not a single "senior" on the training material videos/pictures and the issue of ageism is barely mentioned. There's clearly no will to hire older employees. I wonder what I could do about this at my level. I'm 45+ and already feel out of place and just "tolerated", don't want to raise any attention on me.

Throwaway.

I'm happy to have more women in tech and hope it occurs or continues. However, virtually everyone recruiting in tech has observed some toxic diversity initiatives, I would venture. Some examples I have seen personally or one degree removed from me.

- pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male

- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.

- people championing all women teams as a win for diversity

- women getting a salary premium to help companies boost DEI "representation"

I think eventually this will be shown for what it is, but it will take a long time. Personally every tech founder I know thinks it's bullshit but won't say it in public.

>- people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.

Not surprised to hear people saying this, but am surprised that nobody brings that up as a plainly racist/sexist thing when it is said. Bystander effect?

The only person who would gain anything by saying that would be a white man, who would just be told that his opinion isn’t important because he’s a white man.

Which is racist.

I have observed some people pushing back, but it's rare. I know there is a fear of dissent to the DEI dogma. Particularly if you're a white man. If you're a minority you have more leeway to dissent and it will be fine you'll just be ignored or perhaps have someone read the pro-DEI talking points to you. After Damore firing most people just think it's not worth it I would guess, why risk it? And if you're a founder why risk a campaign against your company when you need to raise funding etc.

They’ll just say racism and sexism only exist in a context of oppressed and oppressor. It’s all been carefully worked out by certain academic intellectuals, long before it vectored into the mainstream (apparently by way of Tumblr)

I sat next to a guy who once complained that our new Pakistani CTO fired our black coworker for no reason (he was a top performer but was called “lazy”) and then proceeded to fire 3 Indians and only bring Pakistani candidates to the final round of interviews. He was called racist for pointing this out by HR (all white women) and he was the next person to be fired and replaced by a Pakistani developer.

Moral of the story being that unless you already have another job lined up you shouldn’t even question things like this publicly as it can cost you your job.

That would be a good lawsuit case.

Difficult to do because when you want to do something like this there are a lot of tools that can be used to cover up for the behavior. There was a paper trail of “evidence” created that would give them a degree of protection. This particular company was also acquired by a very large corporation shortly after & odds of winning a lawsuit against them are basically 0.

This wasn’t the only thing they did either. They had to sell the company on not particularly favorable terms so they also invented a lot of reasons to get rid of people just before their stock options vested. Basically everyone but the 5 people at the top got fucked.

Any time I've pushed back on that racism, the person has redefined racism so that what they are doing isn't racism any more. Typically that involves the phrase "systemic racism" instead, as if the need to qualify the type of racism doesn't invalidate their point.

Unsurprisingly, racists aren't willing to actually discuss racism and instead do whatever they have to in order to justify it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Protip: “race based discrimination” is what the federal government prosecutes for 40 years, and it cuts the knees off of the segregationists that are playing a semantics game with the word “racism”.

So just use race based discrimination, thats the unproductive thing after all, the representatives have been far ahead on this one.

>people in interview panels openly saying "but he's a white man" / "do we want to hire more white men" etc.

Isn't this illegal?

Lot of things are illegal but still happen everyday. The violation has to be known to lawmakers and they have to have the will and resources to enforce the penalty. That's not the case here.

Who is going to speak up? I've worked in these environments before and it's career suicide to object to DEI discrimination.

Maybe two-party recording laws in California needs to be removed.

Maybe, but they haven't been. That's what matters.

Doesn't apply if the parties have notice of the recording. Offer to take notes for the meetings and tell people you're recording for the notes. People making openly racist/sexist statements usually won't refrain when a mic is on-- they do it because they've convinced themselves that what they're doing is OKAY.

Failing that, an illicitly obtained recording can still be used in court in California if its used to disprove conflicting testimony. So you sue over the discrimination, when they lie and claim they didn't say the statements in question, the recording can be introduced.

You'd still be vulnerable to the $2500 fine and imprisonment, but I don't know how likely it is that a prosecutor would actually go after someone for making a recording which exposed a crime. Personally I'd be inclined to get a recording and then decide what to do about it later, since if due care is taken the recording would be unlikely to be known to anyone but you. Obviously you should get legal advice before trying something like that.

This is a very optimistic statement, and I hope you are right, but I'd imagine the probability of a candidate who announced he'll record the interview to get hired will be approximately zero.

Personally, I'd expect the interview cut very short, if not immediately e.g. citing an existing security policy or something.

I've seen many places with "no recording for our client's privacy" on the doors.

In many states, discrimination laws only apply to "protected classes" , which is strictly defined as specific lists of races/religions/lgbt..

If you are white male, you are often not protected by these laws.

That's not what a protected class is. A protected class is something like "gender", "race", or "religion". It's not "women", "black people", or "Jews".

Discriminating based on gender or race, regardless of the gender or race in question, is illegal in most (probably all) states in the US.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group for a lot more details.

Incorrect. The protections against employment discrimination by protected category are at the federal level, and are not tied to any specific race/religion/etc.

> Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices....

The relevant piece of legislation is not state-by-state but the Civil Rights Act of 1965. It defines protected classes, and it defines them as attributes that you cannot discriminate along, not groups; whites and blacks are (de jure, not necessarily de facto) equally protected by race's status as a protected class.

In many states,[...] which is strictly defined as specific lists of races

Can you provide a specific example of a state where a protected class is limited to a specific "race" (as opposed to "race" in general)? There are states where minorities have a presumption of being discriminated against, but that's not the same thing.

I trust you've been adequately corrected now by the sibling comments... but I'm genuinely curious how you came to believe this?

Yes

> Isn't this illegal?

Yes, but it's not actually enforced or prosecuted in these cases.

To add to your list:

- referral bonuses, but only for diversity hires

- hiring freezes, except diversity hires

Referral bonus to fix a problem of a funnel ... Does not sound wrong. Sound actually very smart.

Hiring freezes except diversity hires ... Sounds wrong.

Financially incentivizing people to hire people of a particular race or gender doesn't sound wrong to you?

If it were "white" or "men", people would have a cow, and rightfully so. But encouraging discrimination in the reverse direction is just fine?

It is about the funnel and not the hiring. I assume here that the funnel is anyway full of white men and the hiring decision itself is non discriminatory.

What does "cow" mean here? Online dictionaries weren't helpful

I have mentioned this on Hacker News before:

At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.

Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.

Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.

Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.

Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.

This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.

"Pale". What a great word to catch the East Asians, in addition to white people.

There are morons in a lot of jobs. It sounds like you had one making the decisions. It's only an anecdote though.

How many anecdotes have you heard of hiring committees explicitly discriminating against blacks or women?

This is plainly illegal according to the Civil Rights Act, but the courts have watered it down repeatedly. Hopefully the Supreme Court picks up these cases and confirms that Civil Rights Act meant what it said when it said:

>It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. (b) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employment agency to fail or refuse to refer for employment, or otherwise to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, or to classify or refer for employment any individual on the basis of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

No. Not I. But I will say this:

> pressure on HMs to hire more women despite 95% of applicants being male

is something I've done myself, not to hold anything against the applicants coming in but because HMs have a significant amount of control over the funnel of applications coming in. I want them hustling to encourage women, minorities, veterans, old-timers, re-inventors, people with nonstandard educational paths--people from ALL walks of life who are qualified, to get them to apply. I want it because I firmly believe that will make the engineering departments I work for more healthy.

> people championing all women teams as a win for diversity

I have been on many all-men teams in my career. I wouldn't consider it a specific diversity goal, but I do not think _one_ all-woman team is likely to put a dent in balancing, let alone over-balancing, the scales.

> women getting a salary premium

ROFL, I would _love_ to see an instance of this.

You divide candidates into such stereotypical categories why not throw all of that labeling away and get to know each candidate as unique humans with different skills/personalities and make judgements on those?

It's like you are judging a tasting contest by the color of icing instead of eating it.

When it comes time to determine qualifications, we of course do that. But if that's the point where you decide to start caring about the pipeline, you've already lost.

> I want them hustling to encourage women, minorities, veterans, old-timers, re-inventors, people with nonstandard educational paths

I'm a vet. This is a band-aid and I'd discourage you from thinking this way because it's short term at best.

If you want to hire more vets then companies need to find where vets are. Some of us use our VA benefits and get a degree, others meet the stress of post-separation and collapse. Both will still end up in the field, but companies will not train or treat them the same. That's why companies are now doing that whole, "atypical background" search. Apprenticeship programs within companies would also strengthen vet (and other DEI category) numbers given the absence of an industry wide apprenticeship program.

It was always my opinion that if the goal is more diverse hiring then more diverse sourcing is required.

That's exactly my point! But to find these additional sources, recruiters have to do the work; these are sources they may never have explored before.

As a white man in tech, I often ask myself “do we want to hire more white men?” When I’ve interviewed 5 white guys in a row, for a team comprised of mostly/all white guys, that kind of reflection is important.

I’m not trying to discount your experience in any way and it’s certainly possible that everything you’re describing was actually toxic but I don’t see over-indexing on diversity is as problem in and of itself.

Diverse perspectives are an asset, full stop, and representation matters. Our industry clearly does not know how to address this in a way that makes everyone happy so, in the meantime, if the only reason I’m passed over for a job is because I’m over-represented there, so be it.

Totally agree with you. It's becoming toxic in many companies.

Anecdotally I have seen this in person at a large tech startup.

The recruiting team was all women, mainly white, and they were incredibly cliquey. Every hire was a woman. Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.”

All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.

I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

Men were turned down with vague excuses like “not a culture fit.”

That excuse might have been entirely accurate though. Most men are indeed not willing to participate in such a blatantly sexist culture.

Sure there are. Just not a blatantly sexist culture -they don't fit into-. There are plenty of male dominated companies, with male dominated recruiting teams, that still hire mostly males.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's okay either way, I'm just disagreeing with the idea 'most men' won't participate in such a culture; most men (oftentimes unwittingly) do.

True, though the study addresses that point too, and that demonstrably does not happen, in Sweden at least.

> that demonstrably does not happen

what exactly doesn't happen?

Can you name any of these male dominated companies that hire men disproportionately to the gender demographics of their applicants/interviewees? The issue isn't the distribution of employees, it's whether there is sexism present or not and the first thing you'd probably want for evidence of sexism is disproportionate hiring of a demographic compared to their applicant/interviewee demographic.

Just because something is more represented by a demographic does not make it sexist. e.g. Nordic countries seem to be generally celebrated as being socially progressive and ridding themselves of sexism, yet female representation in STEM fields is incredibly low.

This really isn't a problem anyone wants to solve. STEM especially has unique issues where if you take extended absences things such as your skills or research will be invalided over the short periods you may be gone. Tackle that with a lack of a childcare and you have a system set to ensure the failure of women. Retention is close to impossible as the cost of childcare is impossibly high.

I'd say this is more industry-specific than STEM. In software I can jump back onto a project I left behind years ago and get productive immediately. This is something I've done with multiple projects. But there is a difference between some of those and other kinds of projects where the deadlines are tied into hardware cycles, like, automotive engineering. And generally in engineering, childcare is affordable because your salaries are high.

You missed a part.

From GP: >The recruiting team was all women

I guess this is what you get when you outsource hiring.

In house HR is predominately female nowadays as well.

Fair point. I guess the ideal for getting actual "culture fit" would be for the good applications to somehow reach the team needing the new hire without being filtered for "culture" by a completely unrelated team elsewhere in the company. Come to think of it, I believe that's what an in-house referral is...

Hopefully someone becomes rich for solving that problem without needing a friend of a friend to get your foot in the door.

> That excuse might have been entirely accurate though. Most men are indeed not willing to participate in such a blatantly sexist culture.

Right, but that's exactly the sort of problem that these inclusivity initiatives are designed to tackle (they aim to forcibly change the culture to the point that it is no longer prejudiced). That this one was doing the opposite is highly ironic.

For some reason I suddenly have to think of Twitter and Firefox. Dunno why.

So what, let'em choose to work with whoever they want. If it's all women, so be it. Only men? Whatever. I don't wanna work in either of these organizations.

I think the best answer to these divisive, sexist or racist behaviors is to show them in practice they're dumb, kick their ass in the market.

An open-minded, welcoming organization is going to attract the best minds. Collectively, these people will kick those ideological-driven asses.

EDIT: my point is we cannot legislate change to these people's minds. The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society.

If I see a lot of racist behaviors against blacks, or latinos or whatever, I'd be glad to join them and work hard to kick these racists out of the game.

Why can't we legislate away discrimination? Make it illegal, and prosecute the companies that engage in it.

How do you prove it?

The same way the study did: send identical applications with different genders, and see if there's significant discrepancies.

In the public realm, we must legislate equality to all.

But in the private realm, I think it's not sustainable. It's better for us to work hard and make people learn from reality.

These people are extremists. If we try to legislate change in their private realm, they'll get even more extremist internally. They'll crave for a chance of revenge. Even if it takes decades or centuries. It's unsustainable.

If only we had some laws that were enforced:

  * Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

  * the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;

  * the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older;

  * Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended (ADA), which prohibit employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in the private sector, and in state and local governments;

  * Sections 501 and 505 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities who work in the federal government;


  * Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), which prohibits employment discrimination based on genetic information about an applicant, employee, or former employee; 

  * and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which, among other things, provides monetary damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination.

Good luck proving a company has discriminated against you for reasons that are entirely contained to an individual's brain.

Let’s zoom out a bit. The big picture is that by using discrimination they are not hiring based on merit and therefore the ability to produce the best goods and services is impaired. If these discriminatory hiring practices put them at a productive disadvantage, then companies that hire out of merit should, over time, outcompete them in a free market and put them out of business. No regulation required.

This is a privileged take that only works for people who have options to shop around for jobs.

I'm not employed. Not shopping for jobs either.

By the way, I'm available to assist whoever is a victim of these shitty extremist behavior. And I can do and say whatever I want. Everything I do is my responsibility and my property. Not my employer's, because I chose to not have one.

> I'm not employed. Not shopping for jobs either.

Wait, isn't this the exact definition of privilege?

You're imagining wealthy enough not to need to work. There is also homeless.

Or retired.

So... Let me double check I understand correctly:

I'm privileged if I have a job.

I'm privileged if I don't have a job.

What a privileged rationale!

The challenge I have with this is that performance in "the market" does not correlate so easily with the kind of team composition the GP is talking about. And as someone who has worked for large corporations, these companies rarely seem to suffer that much from dysfunctional teams and rotten eggs in key places.

>"The only sustainable way forward is to let reality teach them. If we try to impose change like this, it'll only lead to more divisions in society."

I'd argue that changing minds does not need to be an objective of legislation. Sometimes there's just a behavior you want to prevent and it doesn't matter if people truly agree with the reason why.

> The challenge I have with this is that performance in "the market" does not correlate so easily with the kind of team composition

But clearly, hiring nominally asserts that it seeks the strongest applications. So it's contradicting itself with DEI discrimination.

Somewhat, I have experience working with HR and recruiters and from what I've encountered filling a position is a lot more about finally finding someone sufficient rather than someone exceptional. This is not to say that employers don't look for the best and the brightest, but rather, they often settle for the first few acceptable candidates because to hold out for an even better applicant has tangible costs for the business and is often not worth it.

If the average person actually knew what these initiatives meant they would be against them. In practice what it does is make it so members of designated groups typically win by default whenever they & other candidates meet minimum requirements for a position. It’s not even good for the people who get promotions faster as a result imo because everyone around them knows things are rigged in their favor.

And who has benefitted? This stuff was supposed to help people that lacked opportunity but for the most part it’s people who were upper middle class (predominately white women) to begin with reaping the benefits & using these policies as a political weapon to get more influence inside companies.

I’m personally hopeful that the upcoming Supreme Court case involving Harvards admission practices also affects the private sector and that these types of policies simply become illegal.

This is my observation as well. Most women don't want to be hired on account of some eng diversity target. It gets really toxic when a company is simultaneously engaging in this kind of discrimination while also harshly cracking down on anyone who points it out.

In 2015 I worked at Dropbox when DEI discrimination was ramping up. Among other things, we only interviewed boot camp grads if they were diverse. We also have diverse applicants two tries at the phone screen instead of one. The onsites we're pretty fair, save for a couple hiring managers.

If you asked someone in person, nobody would ever admit to anything. But the company did a poll on whether the hiring process was biased against men and 83% responded yes. What did Arden, the head of HR at the time, do? Rant about how offensive this was to women and how we're all sexist.

To reiterate, most women and URM did not want these policies. There was some more support for affirmative action supporting URM, which makes sense to me and I largely agree with: things like lower college attendance and family income are concrete examples of systemic disadvantage. Women, on the other hand, attend college at largely the same rate and the disparity is due to choice rather than lack of opportunities.

In general it’s also a problem with what is considered diverse. If you’re a white man from a poor family with no college education, the policy is to explicitly discriminate against you. If you’re a white woman from an upper middle class background, you’re considered diverse and given advantages despite the fact that you could have gone into any field you wanted, could probably afford to switch on a whim, and don’t have to worry about things like family members potentially dying because they can’t afford their insulin.

Yes this is what bugs me. I and older "white males" were mentioned in DEI surveys as something to fix, by an org full of mostly younger and more privileged backgrounds. AFAIK I was the only person in engineering who had been on welfare as a child, literally lived next to a toxic waste dump, etc. When I was a kid, us "nerds" were picked on/beat up for liking computers. This sort of thing really turned me off on most corporate DEI, as it's frequently not about real diversity.

I’m younger but from a similar background. I don’t have many opportunities available to me, and my family is going to be dependent on me financially when they can no longer work. It’s extremely stressful to have all of this hanging over my head & be expected to applaud it.

Every totalitarianism claims the opposite virtues, right ? Dictatorship are always named "People's *". Woke diversity is the exact polar opposite of any reasonable meaning of the word.

It's a strange thing for the adjective "diverse" to apply to a single human, in any case. It's a descriptor that applies to groups; the only way I can see it applying to one human is with genetic mosaicism or something.

In this case, "diverse" simply means "not a white male."

Not white male and not Asian male either. Some recruiters at the company went even further and categorized Asian males as "negatively diverse", a category below even white males.

Or Indian men

Ah, maybe that is why I could never get an interview at dropbox? Maybe I should get rid of my profile pic on linkedin and change my pronouns to "they/them"?

Biggest boost would be to change your name to an ethnic or predominantly female name. Recruiters had compiled spreadsheets of names correlated with women and URM exported from census data. Also spreadsheets on ethnic fraternities and sororities.

Women attend college at a much higher rate than men.

This is why the Civil Rights Act passed when the congressman from Virginia (can't remember the name) tried to kill it by including women in the bill. A law designed to save the endangered black family was instead coopted to boost the career prospects of successful women, so I guess the poison pill worked despite the bill passing.

The black family was only endangered because of those very same people who wrote all sorts of asinine rules for the social safety net programs that penalized stable households, penalized married couples and penalized above the table jobs.

Were they poor? Sure. Were they marginalized? You bet. But the single mother, the child without a father figure and the idle black man were not serious issues, let alone stereotypes, until after people tried to "help" them.

Seems like they purposefully created people now dependent on these government programs in order to secure electorate.

No, it's more complex than that. Racism in large portions of the united states still exists today. Individuals are not given opportunites in the u.s. simply because of something as simple as their last name. While people may base on DEI initiatives in the majority of America in non large corporate and even on those companies they are still refused if any opportunities which add on each other resulting in inequality.

I don't understand how anything of what you wrote (which, BTW, I agree with) contradicts my point.

Those programs are given to people based on economic situations not race.

Just as another sibling comment this is both obviously true and doesn't contradict my point in any way.

More likely, the misplaced notions of how to easily fix a complex problem created people dependent on them these government programs, which have in turn perpetuated an electorate.

I don't mean to say that good intentions justify the policy, as the 20th century disproved time and time again, but your phrasing attributes malice or cynicism where none is needed or helpful.

Also horribly flawed. In several states if you are not white your resume is just thrown in the trash. There are several studies on this. People simply do not like others who they do not see as equals or as similar to them.

So that somehow justifies unequal treatment of people in another state? The only long term solution is not being part of the problem by discriminating on anything except on value brought to the job.

I don't think we can attribute as much of that happening to racism only. With all the DEI initiatives happening its becoming more so the case that people are seeing through the experience and realizing a lot of the accomplishments by minorities are due to favoritism and "help" than actual experience. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant because people believe it.

I personally feel bad for the dedicated, accomplished and smart minority developers that I've met. They get drowned out in all the noise caused by these DEI drives.

Worst of all, we can't even talk about it.

I wasn't meaning to imply that federal legislative action was the solution; I considered that question to be outside the scope of my comment.

And still not much is being done to help them in practice. There’s a deep culture of classism in American corporations which these initiatives completely ignore, so the people who really need help and more opportunities don’t get much.

Most women leave the startup space regardless due to the sacrifices required by the system. It's the same with men but less so due to the cultural norms in American culture. This also applies to corporations. The lack of childcare leads to the inevitability as families are forced to decide who needs to stay at home to take care of their offspring. Typically it's the women as we condition them to take jobs with lower paying fields but also more complex issues such as lost experience and other issues that force them out. I'm not saying it's entirely sexism but rather a systemic issue that effects both men and women. A lot of feminist arguments are just plain wrong. It makes me wonder who is controlling those narratives to ignore the real issues for issues such as pay as we see in companies such as google when you account for experience and job titles the standing does not hold but my example is also flawed as google forces women to take certain careers and only hires women for certain things. Still very complex.

My wife worked for a permanent-part time placement firm...it's 'contract', 4 days a week, 6 hours a day. She was able to send the kids off to school and be there when they got back and continued to have a Programmer/SQL job with no gaps in her resume.

When the kids were old enough to not need it...she stayed in that position. The extra time lets her volunteer and it's been a pretty awesome arrangement.

>And who has benefitted

It benefits the people who gain power and status by using virtues as a social weapon.

It also benefits those who rail against "cancel culture", diversity, and the like

If making a mistake benefits your enemies, your enemies can hardly be blamed.

It's always the case for political extremes-- the one extreme can't exist without the other to act as its boogyman. Everyone else is caught in the crossfire.

>And who has benefitted?

The rationale being promoted to the corporations by management consultants is that the company will make more money.

>Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organ...

> All while aggressively pushing DEI initiatives and interventions on the tech side.

> I don’t think the irony of this ever crossed their minds.

They were likely thinking of it in terms of “righting wrongs” in the overall sense by increasing the percentage of women in the company.

Publicly, everyone will swear up and down that “diversity” doesn’t mean “fewer whites/men”, but in practice, it’s how those “ideal” demographic ratios are achieved.

I’ve seen the same anecdotally. Marketing in particular at multiple companies was all white women whereas other departments (even stereotypically non-diverse departments like engineering) where a mix of genders and races.

It was reinforced every time there was a self congratulatory post in the company wide channel referring to the “marketing ladies” great work.

I've worked in 2 companies that were majority white and asian women. The degree by which they explicitly favored women and minorities probably bordered on illegal, but you'd have to be stupid to bring it up to anyone. Yay, diversity!

I can also attest to this, I just left a pretty well-known tech company who leaned hard into DEI in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. The exec team essentially set up quotas, with every race+gender group getting priority over white males. Execs were given bonuses if they increased the percentage of non-white male employees.

The crazy thing was that white males were NOT over-represented in the first place. 2 years later, they are the most under-represented group, and the overall org is now more unrepresentative of the population than it ever has been. There are 3 times as many asian females as there are white males in the org, even though there are ~10x as many white males in the population at large (which is allegedly what the org cares about), which produces a representation disparity between the two groups of nearly ~30x. Most white males left the org, as they could all see that advancing at the company would be nearly impossible given the incentives put in place.

For the record, I think it's perfectly fine if asians are over-represented in a tech company (i'm asian myself), I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.

I think it would be helpful if you name the company. Nothing bad about sharing that info.

> I just think this type of thinking that is informing hiring practices is pretty gross, and is actually moving things farther away from the stated goals.

If someone ever believed the stated goals they are not capable of rational thinking.

I know plenty of smart people who sadly go along with this BS just because it's what all "reasonable" people are doing and don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The same people don't think about politics and parrot what left wing media tells them.

The activists themselves are not capable of rational thinking.

comparing to the population at large isn't the most valid thing to do. Many fields are dominated by women - nursing to name just one. Even within nursing, there are a lot of latino and phillipino nurses. by your logic, the largest ethnic group of nurses in a country like the US or UK should be white women.

There are many more factors at play here.

You misread what they're talking about.

They're saying that nominally, what diversity efforts care about are people being underrepresented relative to the general population. That's the bar they're using, yes, but they didn't choose it.

To be clear, that's not my logic, it is of my previous employer. I don't think trying to index hiring decisions to the broad population distribution is a good thing.

But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020.

The protests that summer sent a cultural shockwave in urban/upper-ish class society, and the social pressure ratcheted up for orgs to favor non-white male groups, particularly for one particular non-white group. The issue was that this particular non-white group was not overly abundant in the pipeline, so there wasn't as defensible of a position for the discriminatory policies the company felt they had to put in place, so they resorted to indexing to the broad US population. (which I flat out don't think is defensible myself, but I'm empathizing with the mindset that they were employing at the time)

> But if you HAD to index to a population distribution, I think it should be tied to the pipeline of competent candidates. However, my previous employer was already fairly representative of the pipeline in the summer of 2020.

Most companies are representative of their pipeline but then if you set that as the benchmark - well those DEI people would get fired and never be able to have a job or be able to start a culture war over a mostly non-existent issue.

So are you saying DEI logic is overly simplistic and doesn't take the complexities of the real world into account?

HR department at a previous workplace was like that. All women, all friends, all worked with each other or were relatives of someone... their personal lives were entirely intertwined with work. Most weren't at work most days and this was when they had a no work from home policy years ago. Loud personal calls all day long.

I wasn't even in that department and the drama that came from it was exhausting.

They would often take longer than their allotted meeting time in meeting rooms because after their meeting someone in there was crying ... why? Who knows... it was only known within that group. It just kept happening over and over... Along with folks storming down the hall all upset, again who knows why. Now stuff happens sometimes at work, no big deal, but running into these exhausting people couple times a week really takes a toll on you.

When were moving offices the tech support team was seated next to HR. At one point HR invited the both all of tech support and HR (at least those at that building) to a meeting to discuss why tech support wasn't "social enough" and "spent all day in their cubes", I duno maybe they're working... Thankfully that got cancelled quickly after a number of people (me included) noted to a VP that "No matter what the reason, there's no way this meeting ends in anything but a total disaster."

Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team and how much work they put into it and so on... I even left those events early because it's a lunch event and I don't want to eat veggie pizza only, I can only take lunch for so long.

My team goes through something similar with our sister company that's in the same building. Their product is made better by being ran by social types so their organization is entirely personable, outgoing, and very social. They constantly complain that we don't join them in multi-org events but none of us (including our manager) want to join them. If I had to consistently have small talk with a bunch of socialites, I would quit.

Workplace culture is a weird thing.

Sometimes a group's workplace culture is ... not a lot of culture. Depending on how things are going, that might not be bad.

Sounds like an incompetent HR department. I've have experience with similarly composed teams, but they handled themselves professionally at work, and recognized that company events need to be sensitive to the needs of different types of people.

People who don't consider the needs of others are bad employees, regardless of their gender.

> Then came the litany of complaints that HR sponsored events (where HR planned everything to HR's preferences) were not attended enough by the tech support team

At some point we have to start recognizing that forcing employees to attend work parties and lunches and other events by using social shame tactics like this creates a hostile work environment.

Managers who enable this are toxic as hell.

Agreed. The event should be attended if folks find it appealing to do so. So it should be on the event to be that way, not everyone else.

Fortunately for me at that workplace HR eventually realized nobody was listening to their complaints / we weren't going to entertain them.

"Your margin is my opportunity."

Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?

If so, this should be exploitable by a competitor. Assuming you don't have the bandwidth to directly work for or advise a competitor of this type, you might still be able to benefit as an investor.

If not... I have a hard time getting worked up about this. It's contrary to the dominant narrative, but if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job, I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses, because it's not like there's currently a shortage of those.

[additional note, in response to comments: I agree that this behavior still constitutes an injustice. However, among the numerous injustices in the world, one has to prioritize what to fight. My main point is that, as a practical matter, there are plenty of instances of biased hiring that ALSO reduce overall economic efficiency; let's fight those easier and more broadly profitable battles first.]

> if this female-dominated organization is actually doing a good job I'm inclined to leave them alone and pay more attention to biases that actually harm businesses

So your only metric for biased hiring practices being problematic is business performance??

you start businesses to lose money?

,,Is this behavior significantly reducing the startup's competitiveness?''

No, if money is used politically. In a free market you would be right, but with the amount of money printing going on, we're not living in a free market.

So if a blatantly sexist organization that deliberately only hired me is still doing okay, that's not a problem?

My favorite is when, during a quarterly DEI meeting, the DEI team would show a slide with the pie chart for "diversity when hiring last quarter" - "We hired 70% women! Yoohoo! we're super diverse!" :)

A lot of tech companies prioritize hiring women (whether officially or not) in roles like HR and admin to make their overall diversity numbers look better.

Can confirm, my last company's HR department was 100% women, but it still didn't offset the 90%+ male engineering department enough to satisfy DEI targets

I've been a programmer for 10+ years and I'm yet to see a male HR.

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

Thanks, I at least know they exist now :)

It isn't irony, it is hypocrisy. And they have considered it. When you put the thumbscrews on them, they say things like "You can't discriminate against men" and talk about punching-up versus punching-down, etc. They have a bunch of thought-terminating cliches in place to deal with this already. They will talk about the "larger context" of society, and "every day is already men's day."

There's a pretty funny picture of the HuffPo team at one point and it is just ... young white women. That's it. That's your diversity.

Read the summary. The finding was driven by female-dominated professions. Presumably things like teaching or nursing. Definitely not tech. Research was also done only in Sweden. I've never seen a US tech company that wasn't overwhelmingly white and male.

It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis. I provide some data points having lived in several countries that may offer some insight. Draw your own conclusions.

I got my undergrad degree in Iran (a relatively conservative society with an ultra-conservative even anti-women government), where the ratio of women to men in our computer science class was roughly 60/40 in favor of women. The ratio was similar all across the board in STEM and non-STEM fields as more women were admitted and graduated from universities than men. To get admission in Iran everyone has to go through the same standardized test nationally. Women were scoring better and better in the nationalized test than men every year until they passed men the year I went to school. (The trend continued later even prompting the government to introduce legislation to cap the ratio of women at least in certain programs.)

When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.

I let you judge what caused this discrepancy. But I hope we can all agree the issue is much more complicated than some want to make you believe.

>I got my undergrad degree in Iran (a relatively conservative society with an ultra-conservative even anti-women government), where the ratio of women to men in our computer science class was roughly 60/40 in favor of women [...]

>When I went to Europe for grad school (to a very progressive university in perhaps the most progressive European country) to my surprise I had only one female classmate who was a non-European international student in a class of 40.

also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

It's because in poor and conservative countries women must choose a high paying job if they want to escape oppression and arranged marriage.

However, the more egalitarian and wealthy a country is, the more women are free to choose which job they like most and they are not so interested in Engineering it seems.

EDIT: Ha, looks like this is just a Jordan Peterson false claim. Women seem to be strongly represented in science and engineering in developed countries. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/women-in-science/

or that society is pushing women against science in all countries but in developing countries this is countered by the need to get a high paying job. in wealthy countries you can live comfortably with a regular job so women are just expected to do that. no one is encouraging little girls to choose science; there is no need

"It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis". You proceed to answer with a random unsourced assertion that seems to go against current sociological studies.

So I'll answer you with another unsourced hypothesis: you're a man, and you just justified your position in the industry by waving your hand and saying "they don't want it anyway!". They are not interested in engineering you say? Would you mind giving me an hypothesis off the top of your head as to why that is? I'm sure you'll have a very interesting assertion here aswell.

"Woman does not wish to turn aside from her higher work, which is itself the end of life, to devote herself to government, which exists only that this higher work may be done. Can she not do both? No!" -Lyman Abbott (1903)

That's a guess, where's the validation?

There is merit to this claim: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

But that's not the point. Issue is Europe pushes for equality at outcome when things are broken on at the entry.

There are very concerning patterns developing at the moment in the DEI space. DEI efforts, and often those leading them, are increasingly the most biased and close minded parts of the organization. Spreading selected stereotypes and often solving concerns about “discrimination” by being very biased and inequitable.

For example at my last company a report showed that slightly fewer of a certain minority were promoted. This was pointed out and discussed extensively. However when someone pointed out that the same data showed that there were zero of the same minority in performance plans and that everyone on performance plans was a white male, the conversation was shut down. As in it was incredibly important we address this very minor statistical gap on one end, but when the same data suggested that we might be biased against older white males the same DEI department (which had no older white males by the way) shut the convo down immediately.

DEI can’t just be about selected DEI that meets a certain biased definition that is, ironically, not inclusive.

Sadly this battle is lost. I understand affirmative action and the need to do it if there has been some systematic bias preventing outcomes but this has become such a touchy topic that how it is done is not debatable lest you be seen sexist.

I have sat in hiring debriefs where the criterias used for selection have been very subjective but no one will want to acknowledge that they are trying to do positive bias to do affirmative action.

More effort is put on taping things at the end of the funnel rather than fixing things at start, if there are things that need fixing. When metrics of managers and DEI employees are measured on short term impact, why would they not take the easy way out.

I don't think it's "lost." At least with regard to racial preferences in the workplace, they remain unpopular even among the very groups they seek to help: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe... (Black people oppose "taking race and ethnicity into account ... in order to increase diversity" 54 to 37, and Hispanics oppose it 69 to 27).

Separating people into groups and giving preferences and demerits based on skin color is social engineering mainly being championed by the same people who have always favored social engineering: affluent, college-educated white people. Those folks hold a lot of power in some circles, but are routinely defeated at the ballot box: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/526642-hispanics-shock...

After conducting an interview, before I had a chance to write my review (which was customary, while it was fresh), I was sat down by someone more senior than me who said, explicitly "we are hiring this person." There was a "wink wink" dynamic to it. This person was pretty inexperienced, but a woman. This never happened with any of the male candidates. We hired her.

Unrelated, it turned out to be a horrible fit for her, because she went way out on a limb to move to the area and take the job, and the company shut down a few months later. She was now in an expensive city with no contacts or prospects.

Getting a job and then immediately loosing it is obviously a bad fit for everyone, running the whole hiring process in the first place that close to folding seems pretty dishonest.

I remember there was a conversation about this from some of the managers. It was basically, "we don't know if things will go south, so we need to operate as normal." It did definitely feel wrong.

> DEI efforts, and often those leading them, are increasingly the most biased and close minded parts of the organization.

That's a feature, not a bug. As Ibram X Kendi says, "the only remedy to past discrimination, is present discrimination".

Coarse grained discrimination based on some visible attribute is fundamentally destructive to producing value of any kind, and always ends up with terrible outcomes for anyone that cares about anything but the metric of 'what percent matches this coarse grained attribute'.

We call it race when it's based on appearance markers we associate with race, we call it sexism when we base it off gender, we call it ageism when it is off apparent age, we call it nationalism when it is based off national origin.

And it's always wrong, and left unchecked, it is always destructive.

That's right, and the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination x)

> "the only remedy to past discrimination, is present discrimination"

this is probably the dumbest sentence I have ever read in my life.

Is present slavery the only remedy to past slavery?

> That's a feature, not a bug. As Ibram X Kendi says, "the only remedy to past discrimination, is present discrimination".

Not only is this logically fallacious (has Kendi really considered every possible remedy?), but it is belied by historical fact. Chinese people were heavily discriminated against in America at one time. Today, Chinese people and their descendants are among the most successful ethnic groups in America, but have never received any sort of affirmative action program. In fact, Chinese people are still discriminated against (by e.g. Ivy League admissions offices) for being "too successful."

My experiences with DEI acolytes who follow the likes of Kendi, Crenshaw, Coates & DiAngelo is that they respond to these inconvenient facts with mystical assertions about successful non-white groups being "white adjacent" or beneficiaries of "white supremacy."

That Kendi quote is incredibly polarising, but makes sense when you think about his view of the world. The Kendi quote that helped me understand where he’s coming from was “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”

Some comments on this post mention the irony of diversity initiatives that discriminate. Kendi’s argument, I think, is that there’s no good reason for occupations to be skewed towards one race or gender or age or whatever, so additional / opposite discrimination simply undoes the initial bias.

I think that’s a challenging POV for a couple of reasons.

First, for those of us in well paid or high status jobs, like software development, it’s a POV that suggests “maybe you don’t deserve it quite as much as you imagine”. That’s a tough thing to consider, doesn’t feel great and probably isn’t going to be popular.

Second, it’s really hard (impossible?) to know the extent to which culture has affected distribution into occupations. But some people seem confident that our status quo is natural and fair and some people seem confident that it’s unnatural and unfair. When people with those different POVs talk to each other, they’re starting with a big gap in how they understand the world.

Hear hear.

If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot.

This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a pronouns pin and writing them off immediately just as much as seeing an old white man with a camo mouse pad and assuming the worst.

Don't do either of these.

You'd be surprised what differences can be bridged if you approach those different from yourself with patience, love, and toleration.

Remember, it's not really toleration if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept. It's not an impressive moral feat to extend welcome to those who you already felt were on your side.

My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.

At some point, it's federalism live-and-let-live or it's war, kinetic or memetic.

> My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.

Alternative? The people who promulgate the messages are quite aggressive about imposing their values on everyone else.

Genuinely asking: Is there a limit as to viewpoint diversity that should be tolerated in perceptions of diversity? eg. Should viewpoint diversity be extended to welcoming "women shouldn't have the right to vote" or "black people are not human beings"? If so, how does one value an opinion and also the opinion that some opinions are worth less than others?

How could either one of these viewpoints possibly come up during a job interview?

You'd be surprised! I once had lunch with a candidate who was glad no women were interviewing him, because he found salads distasteful.

> was glad no women were interviewing him, because he found salads distasteful

I think it is fair to not spend time and resources engaging with such ideas, as long as there is a good "decision record" documentation explaining that this subject was already discussed, decisions were made, and there is no point coming back to it. Same as with flat Earth - have some documentation thoroughly debunking the idea and point to it anybody trying to start the conversation again. Tell them they need to first read through all of it. If they are still not convinced after that, they are free to lay out their argument, but it is on them to make the argument strong, which should be, like, really hard, given the plethora of evidence we have that Earth is not flat.

In the examples you gave the "decision record" would be fairly simple - we assume that human rights [1] are a given.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

You're genuinely asking about the most extreme and uncharitable interpretation of the GP's post? Your question sounds like "If we should be kind to everyone, what about serial killers?" It is so out-of-place in the picture that's being painted, that I (and I'm sure others) am skeptical of the question. Maybe you can first qualify it by explaining how it is relevant in anything other than an extreme thought experiment?

I don't personally ascribe to the idea that diversity of thought must be a value without the caveats I've ascribed above. The reason why I ask it is because I don't actually think my examples are that extreme; I've been presented with those literal ideas IRL by people who are otherwise quite normal. It's very common to essentially view other people as subhuman for their demographics. Therefore I'd like to know how to manage this fairly common human thinking pattern which functions to exclude other viewpoints, if we want to ascribe value to diverse human thinking. I've never been able to square this circle myself, therefore I am curious how other people square them.

To be clear, if the answer to "how do we both value human diverse thinking and also modes of thinking seeking to suppress other human diversity" is "well this clearly never happens", I think that entire premise risks being itself an extreme thought experiment with no grounding in reality.

A discussion around who should have a vote in a system is fair. If we forbid discussion 100+ years ago women would still not be allowed to vote.

Should kids have the right? Should some votes count for more than others? Should animals have a voting share? Should we have a free vote? Should women and/or men have the right to vote?

The original voting system only included landowners. You had to own land and be male to vote. Since this group paid the tariff taxes (income taxes do not exist at this point) they were the ones voting. Society has changed/taxes have changed, the one person one vote movement was won and will continue until a crisis.

Thanks for the question -- it's important to grapple with even though it can be very uncomfortable and answering it is basically one can of worms after another. If you entertain it seriously, it really gets down to the philosophical roots of how to treat others from different moral systems and worldviews.

I don't think this is a problem any society has ever elegantly solved, definitely not permanently, and I think it's a distinct possibility that a solution that feels "clean" the way good software design can is not possible.

Abstractly, a culture consists of core tenets that it considers literally unquestionable. For most of history, this list of tenets would include things like the existence of a god or gods, the moral imperative to respect the rulers, the prohibition of things that were thought to harm the group such as murder, theft, or adultery, and so on. More recently in the Western world, we might include things like "women are equal to men" or "people of all races are equal".

It is very difficult to defend these types of propositions and values in any sort of universal or non-self-referential way.

Even things we assume to be moral universals in the Western world like the sanctity of the individual (bodily integrity, freedom of conscience) or the importance of intent in our judgment of wrongdoing (manslaughter vs. murder) are, if you examine the historical and anthropological record, not actually universal at all. (Check out The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich if you're curious about these specific points.)

The US Declaration of Independence is a classic example of this. It asserts: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If you don't also find those truths self-evident, all following reasoning based on their axiomatic status might very well seem wrong to you. What if you contest the existence of a creator? What if you contest the idea of innate equality of rights and dignity? What if you contest the focus on rights rather than obligations? Or what if you assert the existence of a different creator who explicitly singled out one tribe as the most holy, righteous, intelligent, etc.?

Because the core tenets of a culture are to some extent arbitrary and thus susceptible to replacement with a different set (like Christianity displacing paganism or atheistic rationalism displacing Christianity), there is a strong inclination to defend a particular set of tenets by making questioning them a taboo. That's the underlying purpose of the concept of heresy and its accompanying social shaming.

Unlimited viewpoint diversity does actually threaten the continued existence of a culture if its defenders are not able to meet the arguments of its critics in a way they and their audience find compelling. If you say "I think gays shouldn't marry because it goes against God's will" and your audience mostly thinks "I don't believe your God exists, so that's an absurd argument", you won't convince very many people and soon people will stop adhering to a core tenet of your culture, perhaps eventually leading to the death of that culture altogether.

In the Western tradition, the probing of a culture's foundational values and assumptions has been the domain of philosophy at least as far back as Socrates being sentenced to death or exile for showing impiety toward the gods of Athens and corrupting the city's youth by prompting them to ask questions that must not be asked.

So what does this rambling mean for toleration of viewpoint diversity?

Its absence can prolong injustice (abolitionists faced lots of censorship in the 19th century) and undermine scientific and creative inquiry (see Socrates, Galileo, McCarthyism, etc.). At the same time, its presence leaves all of your holy cows, carpenters, and civil rights vulnerable to ideological attack.

Those are two difficult tensions to reconcile.

I come down on the side of erring toward more viewpoint diversity because I think it encourages reflection into why you hold the values you do and teaches you to defend them vigorously or, sometimes, change them to something you find more compelling.

This isn't something everyone wants to do all the time everywhere, though, so I understand not wanting your company's Slack to devolve into constant philosophical debate or even less productive forms of disagreement.

I think we've been running into such trouble with this recently because many of the existing implicit boundaries separating parts of our culture were washed away by the great cultural homogenization of the internet and especially social media platforms. It used to be more possible to have fierce debates on university campuses about contentious issues without that instantly bleeding over into industry, non-profits, schools, knitting clubs, etc.

It's like Douglas Adams wrote: "the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Sometimes boundaries are healthy.

The best answer I've encountered is moving in the direction of a more federal system in which cultures can live as they think best AND individuals in each culture are empowered to move to different cultures if they don't like where they are.

This is not a perfect solution, though, because it still requires the universal enforcement of certain moral propositions, like people should have the right to their own body and mind and choice of home. Those propositions would not have been accepted in slave-holding societies or even recent collectivist societies like the USSR, which prohibited its citizens from emigrating without permission. This is, realistically, an iterative improvement that would only apply to cultures that already accept foundational Western moral attitudes.

Viewpoint diversity is very, very important. But for a large contingent of the workforce, their viewpoints are already represented in the numerous implicit and ideological supports that our society has developed, without them even needing to be present: this is called "hegemony".

If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. But one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you. Your status is not threatened by people of different backgrounds coming together and critiquing the processes and pathologies that dominate today (and that white men typically grow up in, and so are already comfortable navigating to the point they assume that it is the natural way of things). It will make everything better for everyone if we take the time to put effort into including (injecting) the diversity of viewpoints that you find so valuable, and that is precisely the aim of DEI.

This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit.

> If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair.

This is a non-trivial objection. I struggle to think of many acceptable scenarios in which we have to choose between acknowledging something which we don't believe as true, or living in an unfair system.

Likewise, I don't know of any people personally who object to DEI efforts to make fields more appealing to a wider audience, or bringing in more diverse perspectives, or even critiquing existing processes.

The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. For instance, saying "our engineering team is largely Asian, we might be missing other perspectives" is a good call-out, and I can think of nobody who'd oppose calling that out. Enacting a policy that said "for the next engineer in this team, let's make sure we hire a non-Asian employee", that is the source of a lot of the umbrage with DEI efforts.

In my experience, opponents largely agree with the goals (more diverse viewpoints), but disagree with the methods (pandering in the best case, and preferential treatment by group in the worst case.)

You are correct that there is no inherent cost to learning about and bringing in different perspectives. There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained.

Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender). In these cases, the cost is even greater, since one can't address the situation by bringing in more perspectives; if the company says "we need more non-Asian employees", it is a really big cost (and one you can't avoid) if you happen to be Asian, regardless of how many heterodox opinions you might otherwise bring.

Nobody I know opposes thegoals of DEI, but it's not hard to see how policies enacted which disadvantage people based on immutable characteristics might be reasonably considered unfair.

You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively successful corporations systematically exclude minorities, and that you need minorities to be more successful?

No field needs to be more appealing to any audience than it already is. Software does not need to have more women or black people in it; that has nothing to do with software. Basketball doesn't need more Asians; teaching doesn't need more men; chess doesn't need more women; the entire concept of a group needing more of something else, as though every group must be diverse, as though cultures and genders have no inherent preferences at all, is strange and absurd. The goals of DEI are useless, and any policy made to actively reach those goals is a waste of time and resources, at best.

> One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful.

This is just a wildly baseless assertion on the scale of disinformation, not even misinformation. It's not worth the time to go into the rest of this comment but the quote above summarizes it well.

It is one of those things that gets "proven" by one or two politically funded studies that shows a mild effect size with tiny sample, then magnified 100x in headlines until it is "common knowledge". There is no such proven source like you believe and imply. The effect sizes shown are on the order of those showing eggs raise cholesterol, eggs don't raise cholesterol, dietary fat causes obesity, sugar causes obesity, chocolate is healthy, chocolate is unhealthy, masks work, masks don't work. It's noise; the data is trash. There is not even any historical or anecdotal reason to believe it's true, in this case. It exists in the mind of the public entirely because it's politically expedient for it to do so.

Another completely made-up assertion. Just saying it doesn't make it true.

>Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

>...

>Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to the documents.

https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...

> I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team.

This is really interesting to me, and is honestly a viewpoint I don't think I've seen before, I'd like to learn more about this.

It seems to me that there are self-evident wins to be had by appealing to a larger group. For instance, I really like jazz music. If all of a sudden (through no intervention or modification to how we approach it), jazz music were really appealing to everyone, that seems like an easy win to me: I get more jazz to listen to.

I can understand the viewpoint of saying "We shouldn't need to change anything or take any action with the goal of appealing to more people". For instance, if focus groups said "Featuring pop-singers on jazz albums will broaden the appeal to teenagers", it's fair to oppose that in preference of the way jazz is now.

It is new to me to say that one would be opposed to appealing to a larger group, though, even if the cost of that appeal were zero.

I almost wrote "having a diverse team", but that's incorrect. I have no real problem with anyone having a diverse team. I specifically take issue with seeking one, actively, like you elaborated on.

The problem I have with broadening appeal, at least for hobby type things, is that you're spending a lot of effort to attract people who are by definition not very attracted to your hobby. You're working extra hard to attract people because they're different, not because you want more participants, but because you want different kinds of participants. This is not a goal I find desirable or worthy. I like playing chess; chess is mostly male; I would benefit if chess had more players; getting more people into chess is good. Yes, all this I agree with. But then, somehow, the course of action becomes 'get more women to play chess'. Do you know how few women enjoy chess? Very few. For every dollar spent on 'women in chess' initiatives, women's chess scholarships, etc, you could have attracted probably 3 times as many players if you just focused on 'chess' instead of 'women in chess'. You'd attract mostly males, but that is okay. There is no reason to want the diversity! It's about chess, not gender!

Likewise with many things, including the workplace. If you market jazz everywhere, the people who like it are going to get into jazz. You don't need to specifically have a 'young asian teenage girls jazz' marketing division. Who cares if that specific demographic is underrepresented in jazz? What the hell does that have to do with jazz? Just attract people to the thing by advertising the thing; leave DEI crap out of it.

> The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal.

That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here.

> There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained.

This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole. On a societal scale, there is significant and obvious opportunity cost to excluding people from the workplace in systematic ways. It is, in a word, selfish.

> Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity

This is where the pathologies ossify, and I agree we should address this issue to make the endeavor even better. In any other setting, though, we would not collectively conclude to dissolve the initiative entirely because of this. This may be why discussions (debates) on the matter go so poorly: critics use language which suggests they want to do away with the matter entirely, while advocates are fighting back only against that proposed solution and not against what you have identified as a deeper (and definitely fixable!) problem. If conversations were to start there, and SOPs set up to encourage outcomes that do not have that quality, we could get a lot more done. I acknowledge that there are some who would exclude white voices based on whiteness alone -- every movement has that element -- so conversations may be non-starters in certain situations. But there's clearly a lot of hurt and trauma on both sides and the way we come together to discuss it looks basically exactly like how DEI advocates suggest anyway, so you're only hurting the cause if you decide to exclude yourself from these conversations when they are available to you.

One last point about the unfairness: there is a distinct tension in the collective mind between considering outcomes from individual vs societal perspectives. We love to hear about rising tides but hate to hear about one person getting unfair benefits. But that's just a matter of statistics, fortunately or otherwise! Do we want more equity, or do we want such a strict ranking of individuals that social mobility is made impossible? Individuals may have bad outcomes because random things happen, individuals may have good outcomes because random things happen, and there are always people moving up and down the ladder. Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.

> This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole.

This is a reasonable stance, but is also the one that I personally object to the most (if this is the core of our disagreement, then I think that's fine, and that reasonable people can disagree on this.)

In my view, it is not fine to disadvantage individuals for their immutable characteristics, regardless of societal benefits. It is fine to disadvantage individuals for their mutable characteristics, if it benefits society. I agree across the board with your point of focusing on social mobility, and that is precisely why I'm opposed to DEI policies that focus on immutable characteristics.

For instance, if we were to say "under-resourced communities tend to produce fewer STEM grads, let's invest more in STEM programs for those communities", that is great! It may be the case that a majority of the benefit from such programs would be to traditionally under-represented groups. This is great too, but it isn't the objective of the policy; the objective of the policy is to provide the same opportunities across the board. In this circumstance, there is no disadvantage to anyone. If nine-in-ten members of these communities are from under-represented groups, then awesome: you're helping more members of these groups get opportunities in engineering. If one-in-ten members of the under-resourced community happens to be Asian, though, they'll receive the same benefit as anyone else from the new investment. Wins all around!

What I object to, though, is the idea that we should prioritize actions based on the immutable characteristics of individuals for social benefit. For instance, saying "Black communities are traditionally under-represented in STEM: we are going to offer opportunities only to Black students". The only difference between the scenarios, in my mind, is that the latter case explicitly disadvantages the one-in-ten Asian members of the aforementioned community who also is under-resourced.

> Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.

To be clear, I'm not trying to direct vitriol at anyone here, nor to nit-pick cases where individuals got "unfair" gains through chance. I'm merely trying to point out that for the stated set of goals (which are largely to make sure we're incorporating diverse viewpoints), directing policies to address circumstance rather than identity is far more likely to actually achieve these goals in the long-term. It also has the side-benefit of largely being perceived as more fair.

DEI is never focused on viewpoint diversity, though, it's focused on racial, ethnic, gender, disability, etc diversity. The latter kind of diversity does not imply the former.

> one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you

Attributing all questioning/resistance of DEI to emotions and sensitivities is pretty condescending. GP was clear and reasoned about the contradictions they saw in DEI efforts, and your dismissal of them is quite frustrating and unproductive.

Also, are you saying that the work that needs to be done is, in fact, ideological? Ideology should be nowhere near this.

> DEI is never focused on viewpoint diversity, though, it's focused on racial, ethnic, gender, disability, etc diversity. The latter kind of diversity does not imply the former.

I strongly agree, but then, how do you measure the diversity a person will contribute before you have incorporated that person into your organization? Obviously a moving target like "viewpoint diversity" cannot be acquired in that setting, so we resort to proxy measures. I would say race and class diversity achieves that better than alternatives.

> Attributing all questioning/resistance of DEI to emotions and sensitivities is pretty condescending.

Didn't imply "all", but it is certainly a factor, just as it is a factor in literally every other concern. As well, it is certainly no worse than the bad faith, straw man arguments all across this post, so in the interest of equity let's make sure to point those out, too.

> Ideology should be nowhere near this.

Ideology is everywhere, all of the time... it's the stuff worldviews are made of. My point in the previous comment was specifically about the chronic lack of acknowledgment of that very crucial issue, and the resulting line of criticism that starts from an inappropriate place. Of course, someone who believes their viewpoint is natural, inevitable, or rational will reject this concern as irrelevant. That is the treachery of ideology -- everything you say and do is contextualized on your own personal model, so much so that it is like the stories of the fishes talking about the water. It is so all-encompassing that it cannot be distinguished until your own exposure to a critical mass of alternative viewpoints has made it clear just how few people you share a common ground with.

The backlash we see here and elsewhere against DEI is coming from those who are insulated from truly alternative viewpoints to the point that they cannot conceive of valid arguments for the other side. They judge the validity based on their brand of rationality which is of course correlated very strongly to the kinds of things they have exposed themselves to thus far.

There is no diversity in seeing a million faces and meeting a million people, if those people already think and speak with concepts derived from the same foundational framework as you. Disagreeing about how many cops to have is a policy issue; disagreeing about whether to have cops is still basically outside the Overton window, so people have not really been exposed to the substantive arguments at scale that make a conversation about that productive. The aim of DEI is to bring that conversation into the workplace, where real material consequences are felt and where everyone is together (ostensibly) working in good faith toward a common goal. It is saddening but not surprising to see the reaction to this initiative.

The point is that DEI groups can seem very homogeneous, without diverse viewpoints, and they can weild large amounts of power.

Posters above you have illustrated how issues of DEI are not investigated, if they happen to not fit into the agenda of the DEI group, e.g. examples of Ageism, or things that discriminate against rather than for white men. Such effects exist, as the OP article illustrates.

To say that the DEI groups don't need any white voices because they are some form of silent majority is to elevat the white voice too, which itself seems inequitable and problematic wherever you stand.

What is your point? As you seem to have not engaged with the viewpoints above, it seems you are more reacting against perceived sentiment, rather than trying to discuss ideas

> is to elevat[e] the white voice too

Elevate?? We are not assigning authority to the white voice, we are assigning hegemony. It is a material fact that whiteness and maleness are the centers of Western philosophy, and everything else is measured based on deviance from that perceived center. There are by now centuries of literature on the matter.

> if they happen to not fit into the agenda of the DEI group

What you call "agenda" I call "bandwidth". Think about it: a fledgling DEI group, small to start, must tackle a lot of metastasized workplace issues. But they're not going to get anything done by spreading their forces too thin. So they focus first on what will make the most material effect with the least effort: call it "productivity". Ageism does fall down the list of priorities, for the simple matter that older people tend to have a larger net worth and so are more insulated from material consequences writ large. It is those who are poorest who need insulation from poverty first, who get help first: this is called "triage". The rising tide starts at the lowest point, right? Without directly asking for everyone's net worth, which is extremely illegal as I'm sure you know, we must resort to proxy measures.

Would you join an engineering team who was constantly switching contexts instead of focusing in on particular features during particular sprints? No, that would be counterproductive. Afford your colleagues the same consideration, even if their goal is not a webapp but compassion in the workplace.

Whiteness and maleness are not and cannot be material facts and it is a category error to insist otherwise, nevermind elevating them as the axiomatic center of your worldview.

The inequity resulting from the material consequences of appearing in, being raised in, and interacting with society as white and male is a well-established statistical fact.

There are important differences between material and statistical facts you would be better off not glossing over.

And more centrally, whiteness (in particular) and maleness are still not facts. You're in voodoo territory if you center them as such.

A nice bit of wordplay but that's nonsense. The difference between statistical facts and material facts is, one is a(system-scale) summary of the other (individual-scale) measure.

I fail to see the nit you're picking at with that second bit. Are you saying they are categories? Suppositions? Made up? Do you mean to imply then that they are "spooks" and their presence in the minds of physical agents has no bearing on physical outcomes?

But the dei perspective is the one that is hegemonic at this point. Something off a paradox for those possessed of it, displayed in such absurdities as believing that viewpoint diversity is the (precise) aim of dei.

> If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity

Viewpoint diversity is already included, that's the whole "capitalist take" for why diversity is good for business. With enough different viewpoints informed by different life experiences you uncover solutions to problems a heterogeneous group wouldn't have thought of. So obviously it's not even an issue, right? This is already something that's already done. Well no, because "you know what I mean" -- the literal phrase viewpoint diversity as it's applied in real life is a dog whistle designed to dress up "people don't want to work with the guy who thinks his bigoted takes are just alternative views" in words that the "blue tribe" uses. You people like diversity, right?

> if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept

Look, if you or people who know are actually getting discriminated against because of camo, boots, pickup trucks, hunting as a hobby, or wanting lower taxes. that's just straight up prejudice. Working in the midwest that kind of thing would be crazy since that's like half my coworkers. But again, in real life these kinds of thing only come up when the subtext is "you call yourself tolerant but don't tolerate my intolerance, you hypocrite!"

No doubt I'm sure there will be plenty of disagreement abound in this thread, so to make the discussion easier can we please make the abstract more concrete. I am sincerely open to being way off base so please hit me with all your personal experiences and the views that haven't been tolerated. I am primed and ready to be righteously mad on y'all's behalf.

This is why I'll be voting Republican

I'm not American, so I'm not as deep into the exact political party differences, but why do you think that's the solution?

> do you think that's the solution?

I don't think it is and I don't think they'll actually do much about it, but at least they're saying they're opposed to it.

Republicans believe men should not compete in woman’s sports.

That woman have babies.

How either of those are controversial is beyond insane.

I have a similar opinion as the person you replied to. There are many issues that I care about, but this is probably the most important to me because it will affect the educational and career prospects of my children. Unfortunately in this country the only meaningful votes are "blue" or "red", and "blue" is the side that is pushing DEI to the detriment both of my family and (in my opinion) the competitiveness and efficiency of the entire country.

So even though I don't agree with all of the politics of "red", I will vote for them until "blue" stops with DEI.

Thanks. It's unfortunate that is has to be so polarised. In the end a more inclusive society is good for everyone, but if your only options are "fuck yourself over" vs "avoid all progress" then not a lot of good is going to happen and people will forever be passionately offended at both extremes instead of meeting closer to the middle and working on the future.

> "blue" is the side that is pushing DEI to the detriment both of my family

> I will vote for [red] until "blue" stops with DEI.

And this is why equality in America is still an issue.

It depends on how you define equality. My definition is "people are judged on their abilities and character, not by the color of their skin, gender, orientation, etc.". Not "every pairwise combination of race and gender is proportionally represented in college admissions and high-paying jobs". As an Asian, I don't expect that Asians are proportionally represented in the NFL despite the fact that I'd love to have a job that pays me millions per year. But I also don't see a problem with Asians being overrepresented in Ivy Leagues and engineering jobs.

I haven't seen any evidence that red is hindering equality, but DEI to me is the opposite of equality. So to me, voting for red is actually a vote for equality.

> I haven't seen any evidence that red is hindering equality

So, I’m going to provide a single example of how it is, to provide it is, but there’s more than one.

The very easy and historically obvious example is American slavery. One group of people -judged by race not ability or character- was forced to be slaves. this is first case of being judged on race. Easy obvious and hard to argue with.

We freed the slaves but “grandfathered” white people with the rights to vote. They did not vote pro-slaves, they voted for their own interests. Surprising no one, former slaves with no rights (who are still tormented and killed by white people) did not advance economically or educationally - regardless of their abilities or character.

Once they got the protected right to vote, it was mid 1900s. That’s 100 years. 100 years of being unable to protect their interests due to their race. Along the way they had redlining, keeping them without growing wealth in poor neighborhoods with poor education. This limits their ability to go to college and grow, like those Ivys you mentioned (pretending there wasn’t explicit race based admission).

Historically black neighborhoods were redlined, keeping them black. You can look up a map and find the explicit lines of race in most cities. They’re poorer with worse education. This was all explicitly due to race.

Today, you can find red gerrymandering along those historic race lines to break up the voting blocks so this group of people have weaker voting power.

Voter ID laws, voter registration scrubbing, tons of examples of continuing disenfranchisement.

That’s due to race. 150 years since the civil war.

It’s very easy to say you want your race over represented in Ivy league schools but you’re ok if not all races are, and other races can have the NFL. How do you feel about legacy admissions at Ivys? The same group of rich white ivy grads in office that want to end DEI will certainly protect legacy system a lot harder. It’s about “merit” until it’s the next challenge to their children’s admission.

Red spent a long time keeping black people from having full rights and full ability to succeed based on their true ability. Breaking down DEI rules used to help push up black people may let Asians shine now, but you’ve seen how other people are treated, so be careful who you lay with.

Based on what I see from across the ocean, USA politics is binary: only 2 choices, parties have opposing opinions on almost everything. One is pushing DEI, one is opposing.

The worst thing is that based on what I see from outside, both sides have something right and something really wrong, so there is no good choice overall. It does not matter who wins the elections, something will be worse.

LOL as if politicians are going to solve this. There's already enough laws governing this stuff for companies or groups of people to self govern while having a reasonable DEI policy that doesn't harm anyone. It's a cultural problem and voting for trolls is not going to make it better but worse, as it will elicit a panic reaction on people that hold power and are scared by the trolls spewing vitriol about how everything is wrong with "X".

I don't like government bureaucrats and I don't like paying taxes for stupid bullshit like everyone else but thinking "voting republican" is going to change anything is as deluded as thinking that "voting not republican" is going to save us from the end of the world.

These DEI policies can only exist because judges have ruled that racial / gender discrimination is legal, even though the text of the Constitution and civil rights statutes clearly say that it is not. These judges are mainly liberals appointed by Democrats. All we need to end this crap is judges who will enforce the law, and then any company running such a scheme will be sued into the ground.

I think DEI efforts can greatly vary. I know that we've worked really hard to ensure that we don't disadvantage anyone -- but it's harder than it sounds. DEI is often dealing in zero sum spaces.

For example, most of the staff is white males. We try hard to hire the best person for the role, but we've instituted a policy where we mandate interviewing underrepresented groups. Not that we will hire them, but that we will interview them. But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male. OTOH, most of our personal hiring networks are all white males -- so if we rely on speed to find the next good candidate it will almost always be a white male.

I personally think the middle ground we found is good. But still not perfect.

Interestingly the best way IMO to fix DEI is to align underrepresenting minority interests with poor white interests (obviously this doesn't work so well for things like sexual identity issues). The fact that poor whites and poor blacks aren't aligned on issues that impact them both creates a tough situation for DEI.

> But because of this the interview process can get lengthy and white male candidates maybe tire of waiting and go elsewhere. So in some sense its not fair to the white male.

Isn't it equally obnoxious to everyone? I'm not sure why only the white males would be put out by the wait. The wait, while due to the lengthy interview process, isn't due to them being white males. Unless you interview the white males first for some reason.

If you need to wait for someone who is 1% off the population you might be waiting a while.

I don't think they are trying to catch 'em all like some sort of human Pokemon, it sounds like they are instead simply making an effort to interview instead of automatically rejecting those who may have no otherwise been interviewed.

> most of the staff is white males

I'm a computer programmer. Since about the late 90's, virtually all of my coworkers have been Indians. Yet I keep hearing from the DEI group that white males are overrepresented (and that this is bad). I never hear from the DEI group that Indians (or asians) are overrepresented (and whether this is also good or bad).

From that we can conclude that you work at a very unusual workplace, but not much else unless your workplace also includes a noticeable fraction of all software engineers.

Actually, ten different "very unusual" workplaces in a row over the course of 25 years.

I would not agree with that. There are many of these shops. But there is different cultures. There are companies which are 90% indians/asian and then there are companies which are 90% white.

Which make DEI a bit silly until you look into Higher Management or other departments. Or until you realize that this pattern does not apply with latin or black people.

So are you suggesting that some poor people have the wrong interests on certain issues and they need to fix that? Which issues specifically?

I do agree that we should try to be inclusive on interviewing. It's always good to have more candidates to pick from, as long as the process doesn't last too long.

> So are you suggesting that some poor people have the wrong interests on certain issues and they need to fix that? Which issues specifically?

Here I meant that often times issues are raised specifically as race issues, when really you can make the issue more inclusive and get better traction. For example, Black Lives Matter. While I can understand wanting to make the focus on race, it is hard to get traction on that beyond lip service. But if you make it about police accountability in general -- you suddenly find that you get much broader support across the board. And while there may be some nuance that you can't capture with this, you'll find that you'll still make more overall progress even as it applies to Blacks.

The same applies for just about any issue related to poverty. If you make it about race, it becomes divisive. If you make it about just helping anyone in poverty then it has much more general appeal.

Raising all boats is important. It's also important, and maybe this is where DEI's most important role can be, to track that some classes of boats aren't being systemically left behind -- and adjust policy, not to benefit specific groups, but to make sure all groups are benefitting (within some degree of proportionality).

Should companies give hiring preferences to candidates who currently have a low income? Or who grew up in low income households? Or come from certain Zip codes?

I agree we should provide people with greater opportunities, but as a practical matter what are you proposing that employers actually do?

I don’t think employers should do any of the sort. I think employers should not discriminate in their hiring (based on race, gender, etc…) and be mindful that they’re not doing so.

One of the most important thing companies can do for DEI is pay their fair and expected tax burden.

For example, some well known tech companies focus their hiring on people who have graduated varrious highly exclusive institutions. Yet few people get into those schools unless they came from at least somewhat affluent families.

Make sure you offer interviews to people at least whos professional experience appears to justify it, regardless of if they went to a megabucks school.

Doing so can also help the racial diversity of the candidate pool some without introducing any racist criteria simply because it reduced a form of non-racial discrimination that has a high racial correlation.

> Not that we will hire them, but that we will interview them.

to the extent that the policy causes you to interview people that are obviously less qualified and won't get hired... damn, that's really bad news for the candidate.

Can you imagine that you're a Star-bellied Sneetch and waste day after valuable day of time interviewing for jobs that you won't get hired for, brought in because you happened to have a star-belly and not because you were among the most obvious fits for the job? Talk about being disadvantaged by systematic racism.

In the aggregate, sure, its still probably better for them to be extended the interview... but the wasted time chews up a chunk of that benefit.

Since your post expresses the view that you go through more interviews due to your laudably-motivated-diversity program than you would otherwise, which means you're also wasting more applicatints time than you would otherwise... perhaps you should suggest that you company pay a reasonable wage to ever person that makes it to an in person interview as a way of offsetting the negative externality?

I don't think it would be all that unreasonable once you consider the man-hour cost you're already putting in to interview the candidate, ... paying the candidate would have a similar cost to having one more person on the panel and would go a long way to make sure you're not burdening job hunters with your interviewing practices.

I work at a FANG that is ramping up DEI efforts. Their recent campaign was about being diversity conscious and having less "white culture" (whatever that means).

The thing is, this same company is hiring mostly for India, my coworkers and manager are from India, when they aren't they'll be from China, and occasionally from Europe. We have like 4-5 white guys in an org of +50. employees in the US.

At this point (aside from hiring women), hiring white/black people is how we'd rebalance the diversity of our team yet for obvious reasons you can't say that out loud...

50 people in a FANG doesn't sound like being anything close to large enough to be representative of the whole org by random chance. Enjoy being the weird corner case?

Got hired at a place that apparently only hired anything except white men. Unless they were non cis.

Apparently an exception was made in my case because they were absolutely desperate for someone qualified to do the work.

Company meetings were mostly just complaining about straight white males. Figuring out ways to force the males to do extra work to make up for… I don’t even know. Mocking their own customers constantly based on same.

Most toxic bigoted place I’ve ever been. That’s when I became aware of how dangerous woke culture was.

Grew up thinking to treat everyone as equals. Now I’m (nasty words) for that.

Fixed their technical issues and left fast as I could.

Name and shame.

This comment section is gonna be a RIDE...

To actually comment on the topic at hand: the reason there's still male-dominated spaces is that women are weeded out far earlier than the hiring stage. See, for example, statistics about women in STEM and especially computer science and realize that hiring managers don't even have to be sexist for male-dominated fields to exist, even though they still are.

>women are weeded out

>especially computer science

By choice or by force? N=1, but I still remember teachers saying "all the girls that should be in CS are going to math instead, they think CS is a boys' club" despite repeatedly catering 'women in tech' and such. According to some anecdotes I heard, this also changes outside Western countries, where women pick CS much more quickly.

>statistics about women in STEM

Actual statistics would show women aren't underrepresented in STEM as a whole, or not nearly as much as people claim. This discussion keeps being raised and they conveniently omit fields which are very much science, and have far more women than men coming in. Medicine, veterinary, agriculture, biological science are all fields women tend to compete or dominate to a certain degree. See https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio....

I wonder if all the “women in tech” programs simply serve as warning signs that there aren’t enough women in tech, and there’s a good chance a woman going into tech is going into an all boys club.

> "all the girls that should be in CS are going to math instead, they think CS is a boys' club"

One of my female classmates who took an intro CS as an elective hated how the class was run. Essentially half the class was already proficient in programming and were expected to solve the problems on your own without talking. This was different than my math classes which were more likely to have female teachers and we were to work in groups to solve problems (this was how precalc was done).

She said she felt scared by the expectation to already know these things before the class begun and all the silence while working.

The assumption in the "weeded out" rhetoric is that girls are on their way into tech in equal numbers and diverted out by some experience or more nefarious dissuasion. This has not been sufficiently demonstrated and usually is presented without evidence.

It's unclear what people make of the fact that certain STEM disciplines, say Biology or other Life Sciences, have an over-representation of women. Curious why the "weeding" only occurs in certain STEM disciplines.

Well, there usually is some kind of evidence, but it's generally anecdotal, people reporting instances of obvious sexism that they observed.

Women's representation in tech matches the graduation rates of relevant fields. Which matches the rates at which women indicate tech as their preferred field in high school and middle school.

I think it's in incorrect to say that they're "weeded out". That implies that women are being removed from the field, rather than exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.

DEI industry relies on that narrative to support itself.

Do you have a source for your claims?

Women's representation in tech fields varies from the low 20 percent to high teens. It can vary since "tech" is a nebulous designator.

Computer science: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

Electrical engineering: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_325.45.a...

Mechanical engineering: https://www.bu.edu/eng/about/dean-lutchen/engineerings-gende....

And this?

> Which matches the rates at which women indicate tech as their preferred field in high school and middle school.

> A recent survey by Junior Achievement conducted by the research group, Engine, showed that 9 percent of girls between ages 13 to 17 are interested in careers in STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — which was conducted from April 16-21 to about 1,004 teenagers.

> This is down from 11 percent from a similar survey in 2018. Teen boys’ interest in STEM careers increased to 27 percent, up from 24 percent in 2018.

https://www.govtech.com/education/Female-Interest-in-STEM-Ed...

> exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.

If we accept this as true, fields dominated by women should receive the same grace.

And they are, right? How many times have you seen people push for quotas among pediatrician, veterinarians, or crime scene investigators? I certainly haven't seen any. And even if such agendas exist, they rarely manifest in overt discrimination like I've not only witnessed, but actively instructed to carry out.

You're conflating two issues: discrimination and self-selection.

Discrimination is never ok. If a woman applies to a job as a developer, she should absolutely not be discriminated against because of her gender.

Self-selection is always ok. If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine.

This paper is evidence of discrimination, not self-selection.

I understand that. But if we have no problem hand waving discrimination away as self-selection when the exact same conclusion is drawn for other groups, I don’t see how this is suddenly different.

Half the top comments on this very thread decry DEI efforts while calling this wrong without the slightest hint of irony.

> But if we have no problem hand waving discrimination away as self-selection when the exact same conclusion is drawn for other groups

We're not hand-waving away discrimination as self selection. If we saw higher call back rates among male applications as compared to identical female applications then there would be a case for discrimination. When we study the call-back rates in tech companies, the results typically show no bias and sometimes show bias in favor of women [1].

What's happening is that people are alleging discrimination on account of nothing except for disparities in representation in tech. You're right: tech shouldn't be any different. Do we conclude that veterinarians must be rife with anti-male discrimination because they're 80% women? Why do we make the same arguments about tech?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644

> If women in aggregate are more interested in biology than computer science, that is fine.

Do you think there is something innate in women that makes them less interested in computer science? Personally I find that extremely unlikely. The only other explanation for why they would self-select away from tech is that they feel they're being told to. That might be fine by you, but I think it's a problem.

> Personally I find that extremely unlikely

Why? Do you believe that men and women are biologically differentiated, but mentally identical?

If so, do you also not believe in transgender identity, as the entire concept is rooted in there existing a mental difference between genders?

There are several differences in interests between sexes, just google for studies and you will find plenty. It is a fact, not extremely unlikely.

> rather than exercising their own agency

There is no free will. Society implanting ideas about which jobs you are capable of succeeding at is an especially obvious case of this. Why do you think women are going into different fields?

On the whole, the weaker the gender roles in society the lower women's representation are in STEM [1]. I'm nearly 30 and there was ample messaging to try and get girls into technology when I was in elementary school decades ago. I disagree that society is implanting ideas in girls that they're not capable of succeeding in tech. This is a disparity that persists despite ample efforts to try and encourage girls to go into tech.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

> I disagree that society is implanting ideas in girls that they're not capable of succeeding in tech.

Then why do you think girls are self selecting away from computer science? Unless you believe they are somehow biologically wired to enjoy tech less it has to be because they're receiving messaging that causes them to believe they will enjoy it less than other fields relative to boys, right? I guess from your link you're going for the "women are biologically wired to enjoy math based professions less" but I find that difficult to buy

> This is a disparity that persists despite ample efforts to try and encourage girls to go into tech.

I certainly agree with this, it's just not working. It's quite clear that we are trying very hard to message to girls that they can succeed, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to be getting through convingly, since there's still such a huge disparity.

Is it really hard to believe that, even without external bias or force, women might on average enjoy some things more or less than men? Your question is rooted in a gender-essentialist assumption that anything other than 50/50 representation has to be the result of some type of bias or external influence, and this is an assumption I do not share.

When you take this to the extreme, it's like, "men should enjoy another man's penis as much as women do if it wasn't for those damn external societal pressures." It's like... there can't ever be biological differences or biological reasons for any kind of preference at all?

It doesn't add up. If you acknowledge men and women are different then you have to acknowledge there are biological reasons for why some people might prefer some other things than others. If you don't acknowledge any differences then you must not believe sexual orientation is real - in which case, you're fucking crazy.

>computer science? Unless you believe they are somehow biologically wired to enjoy tech less

Millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution has predisposed women to be more interested in people and males to be more interested in things. This is supported by research and has been commonly known for most of human history; you can thank 2-3 generations of postmodernist propaganda and a healthy dose of insecurity for the rabid denial of even the possibility that women are just less interested in these domains.

Men and women are different. It has consequences. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality. The evidence is overwhelming and ubiquitous, but we try desperately to handwave it away by looking for of sexism under every rock because to acknowledge these obvious truths would destroy the foundation of the modern progressive push for equity. It's insulting and purely political.

Has anyone here ever been married to a woman who isn't a software engineer? (Or at least talked to one? The fuck)

> Then why do you think girls are self selecting away from computer science?

Why do you think? Hypothesize. Do you think women/girls today are being told in-large they're too dumb or stupid to do such? (Especially considering girls actually get better test scores and grades than boys from an early age - choose whatever reason you want for that existing but it is the case)

It really isn't the case. Women choose other things because they're interested in other things. A lot of women don't want to work in STEM or tech because it's not particularly sexy. The ones who do work in it usually don't find it sexy but are instead, "Yeah, I'm pretty nerdy and into nerdy stuff. So, this is what I like to do." but most women aren't like that. A lot of social factors are involved but overall - women are known for being more social than men and STEM is very well known for being the least social of about any major field you could go into. Why would you go into something that wasn't very social unless you were less social yourself?

I mean you know what I think. Girls ignore explicit messaging and understand that society sees math based professions as manly so they self select away from them.

> Unless you believe they are somehow biologically wired to enjoy tech less

Duh? Women and men are not the same (on average, in aggregate, #NotAllWomen etc. etc.) I find this blindingly obvious and I am a woman.

>I think it's in incorrect to say that they're "weeded out". That implies that women are being removed from the field, rather than exercising their own agency and choosing different fields.

That's simply the language used when a freshman takes some intro courses, feels overwhelmed or disinterested, and then chooses to change majors early on. Very few freshman actually fail their classes and get ejected from the university, they just realize they are paying a huge premium to learn something they feel they don't want to or can't keep up with.

But yes, I agree that if we're focusing on the problem at the hiring lever you're way too late. But that's the mentality of publicly shared companies that simply want a good shareholder report next quarter. Investing in middle schoolers takes years to reap what is sown.

Are weeded out, or do they weed themselves out?

I've been on both sides of this, having been in a male-predominant industry and then in a female-predominant industry. In the male world, there was plenty of "mansplaining" and in the female world - I was actually really surprised at how female colleagues approached me. There were hilarious moments of "reverse mansplaining" where a group tried telling me all about the industry I had just come from, when none of them had any experience in that field. I remember a moment too where I was offering a business opportunity that would benefit all of them, but they very clearly did not think I was qualified simply by being a male - but would have been totally on board if I brought in a female partner. On the other hand, there were places where they wanted my opinion because there were (to me) weird gender role things at play - something like "we need a big strong man to defend us here, so let's get his opinion."

Men and women approach things in very different ways that even now with 40 years of life experience continue to surprise me. I think some of the bias is not intentional, but rather a lack of awareness, and frankly acknowledgement.

Can we please change the title to what the paper is actually titled?

"Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case"

I've worked in a predominantly female team and there was discrimination against, well, me.

I've worked in a team with lots of older folks and the younger members weren't taken as seriously as they should have been.

It also happens when a company has lots of outsourced programmers.

I think there is a lot of emphasis on discrimination made by young white men because they simply are the largest demographic in IT and, of course, they don't generally behave as they should because they are immature (as young people tend to be).

The solution, if it is to be accepted widely, is to work on the group dynamics that all groups show.

Yeah Unconscious Bias training is one of the DEI policies that I think is valuable to everyone, that's if it's training and not indoctrination.

Is there rigorous evidence that supports the idea of unconscious bias and the effectiveness of training in reducing it? I’ve seen it advertised in academia and wondered if it’s evidence-based.

It's a form of 'original sin'. It's valuable as a form of control, but it's flimsy science---indistinguishable from the null-hypothesis.

My company presented a DEI slide a couple years ago showing black employees on the rise, and white on the decline, with targets of 35% black employees by 2025.

We also have intern roles that specifically require you be black, or lgtbq. It’s wild.

I looked into what it would take to report the job postings, but from what I can tell you need to be discriminated against personally to make any claims.

35% is almost 3x the share of black people in the US population (assuming you are talking about a US company).

The left in the US has a very broken mentality when it comes to this. How it is:

*Sees picture of company that's 50% white and 50% black*

"Wow! How diverse!"

*See picture of company that's 50% white and 50% Asian*

"My god, it's nothing but white people!"

You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. I've seen plenty of articles from mainstream tech blogs and the like talking about how very white tech companies are, even though they're actually less white than the US population as a whole. The articles often do their best to ignore the Asian population present.

Two thoughts on that:

Yes, that is an overcorrection on representation. Many places that are highlighted are having things like 1-3% black employees in any capacity. Yeah getting that to 13% with qualified people would be neat!

Secondly, when it comes to being above the national average I think the local area should be considered. When having a company in an area with a greater % of minorities already, with credentials and other marketable skills, then its not really proportionally. Obviously only if the goal is to be equitable or brag about being equitable, as this kind of proportion would be at the expense of the white population national average.

The main goal is to recruit from areas that are being overlooked. There are plenty, they exist. Not just pester a minority that a recruiter found.

And probably larger than the pool of black software developers, to boot. But yes, the goal is as high a number as possible, not population or career population representation.

This is the wrong conversation.

The problem is not discrimination - the problem is that recruiters can do the dirty work of discrimination (or harassment or false advertising) and entirely shield these companies from lawsuit. The companies can simply claim ignorance to have known what was going on with the recruiting firms. The recruiting firms aren't big enough to sue. You wouldn't get anything out of them monetarily and you'd be unlikely to generate much publicity suing a recruiting firm that no one's heard about.

If we're going to move forward with this model where recruiters are run out of firms not associated with the company, the main company needs to be liable for any abuse on the part of the 3rd party recruiters they hire.

I’m glad I scrolled far enough to catch one of the few thought-provoking comments in this thread.

In my experience, I've always found it quite strange that HR and recruitment is a field that seems to me to be female dominated, at least in the part of the UK where I am, and I can't help but feel that the imbalance at this level of the process reflects who gets hired.

HR & recruiting are female dominated simply because hiring women in these roles is the easiest way for a company to get their diversity numbers up.

Proof?

100% this. At my company they created all these product manager type roles and fill them w/ women and minorities and then count them as part of the software engineering team to get their diversity numbers up.

I'm really skeptical of this. Women as a percentage of the workforce in general isn't low, and just as some fields seem to attract a lot of men, some fields attract a lot of women. Even if you believe that societal pressure is part of this, that still means that by the time you're talking about "who applies to companies for X jobs" there's self-selection at play.

Nah, that's not why.

Women, on the aggregate, like professions that are people-driven.

HR is that. Recruiting is that. Nursing is that. Programming isn't.

I'd agree with the comments that reflect women's skills in networking and team consensus, rather than saying it was because of any sort of diversity quota. I've been at recruiters frequently where it was all-female offices, and, at risk of labouring a cheap point, it's sometimes been difficult to get my technical skills understood, outside of buzzwording.

It's pretty amazing how useful working with the military has been in changing my views of a lot of groups/demographics. I probably would have assumed nurses = female almost entirely, but there were a lot of nurses who were male, both the specialty types and more generalist nurses.

(Also, I grew up in a suburb where it was basically "different white ethnicities", with the exception of some black students from nearby poor areas bused in as part of our special education program (since we were rich and had lots of resources comparatively.). I then went to school at MIT which is basically white/asian predominately (although a fair number of international students.). Then Bay Area which is again basically white/asian in tech occupations. In the military, especially outside combat arms, there's genuine racial and geographic diversity across a lot of roles; good and bad people of every type. IMO, a useful experience.)

The tech industry knows they are far behind on the DEI metrics and they overcompensate playing this culture wars chess move where they make everyone sick of hearing them virtue signaling about diversity so that they can't be questioned. They loose even when compared to "conservative" institutions. It's not only the military, in San Francisco the police department is more diverse than Lyft, Uber, Google. The club I go shooting to in Richmond has more black people on a weekend than what I've ever seen inside the same room at Lyft. Richmond is a moderate democrat city where everyone that doesn't work for the government works for Chevron.

Until I started shooting I think I had only interacted with three black people in the Bay Area. One from work, one from co-living and another one that hangs out with a crew I party with. Of course all those circles lean tech-heavy. First "conservative" thing I dare do and there's loads of latinos and black people and we are all confused as fuck as to where all the evil white people we keep on reading about actually are.

In the US, male nurses are highly valued. I am not sure why this is not so in Sweden. On the other hand, people are wary of male preschool teachers. These two fields seem to be equivalent in Sweden.

In the US - Cleaners are not well paid. I am not sure why men want to join this field. The best cleaner I ever had left as soon as she landed a better paying job. I see plenty of husband and wife teams where the wife does the cleaning and the husband does the gardening. The husband is typically paid at least 30% more than the wife. Maybe this is a higher status job in Sweden?

Cleaning had, at least in theory, lots of flexibility.

> I am not sure why men want to join this field.

Because having a job is better than not having a job. You could say the same thing for being a dishwasher, say. Just because people typically don't want to make an entire career out of a job doesn't mean that discrimination isn't problematic.

I just did a quick check and on average cleaners in the US are paid less than warehouse workers (and for that matter dishwashers).

I also used to buy into the theory of male blue collar jobs disappearing until I saw all the well paid blue collar jobs that men won't take. (After all, I supported Yang.) I think even Yang now disbelieves his own theory and is looking at other reasons why men are dropping out of the work force.

> In the US - Cleaners are not well paid. I am not sure why men want to join this field.

There are some well compensated cleaning jobs in some (definitely not all) hospitals and schools.

This OC isn't grinding an axe.

I may be wrong, but it seems this paper's contribution is using analytical techniques (whatever "correspondence testing" is), with the customary roles reversed, to better calibrate those techniques. If so, I think that's genius.

So many times I've found myself facing a (ethical) problem with nothing more than noob wild-ass-guesses on how to solve it. Perhaps better understanding hiring discrimination in all contexts will help divine context-free rules. Neutral strategies we can all agree to use. That'd be awesome.

Because right now the only notion I have for tackling bias is using lotteries (eg sortition). And that's a hard sell even for me.

At my last company all hands, our CFO was talking about "increasing diversity" at our company.

The entire C-Level or our entire company are people of colour. 4 out of 5 department heads are PoC. Customer success team are majority PoC and mostly women. Out of our entire engineering department, there are only 2 "white" people - myself (anglo-Canadian), and another man of Swedish ethnicity..though I suppose all white men are the same...

Engineering is the only male dominated department, we used to have a few women developers but they left for better opportunities and hiring is currently frozen. 2/3 of our QA department are women and PoC.

> Engineering is the only male dominated department, we used to have a few women developers but they left for better opportunities and hiring is currently frozen.

Other than C-level, what's the best-paid department/position in a tech company?

Food for thought, if you were take the total of money paid to men vs women in your company, and really think hard about it, how would that balance out? Even if you took C-suite, really think about the answer

But if hiring for that department is frozen, as GP stated, how do you expect it to be fixed?

Food for thought. Read through all of your comments and count how many of them are condescending. I mean across all your throw-away accounts. Really think about the answer.

> what's the best-paid department/position in a tech company?

In our company specifically: sales. And like every non-engineering department at the company: female dominated.

Also, just a few months ago there was a downsizing of the engineering department in order to stack our sales team. We've also lost 20% of the remaining engineering team since then from attrition/austerity.

> Other than C-level, what's the best-paid department/position in a tech company?

Vice presidents?

Or if you're excluding people management positions, I'd say probably product managers?

I'm not going to bother with the actual study itself - as it's not really what a lot of the discussion here is about.

Instead, I'd like to ask this: Why do we have DEI measures for race, gender, and sexual orientation but none for socioeconomic class/upbringing? I have a thought as to why but still - I wonder what others here think.

A few workplaces ago the company was hiring from a recruiter instructed with bringing only female or non white people.

When I opposed that I was pointed to the actual UK law for positive discrimination which explicitly allow discrimination.

I never had faith in society, but I had no idea we fell so low.

I think most western countries are completely lost and will never get back. With woke activists controlling big tech, universities and the press, there is truly no hope for western countries.

I moved to a country where society is a bit backward for modern standards and I'll look into moving again once they catch up with the modern world.

> I never had faith in society, but I had no idea we fell so low.

I can see an argument that tolerating discrimination in the universe direction as part of a scheme to deal with the lasting impacts of a long history of discrimination against certain groups is flawed, inadequate, of incomplete progress compared to the period of discrimination.

I can't see the argument that it is a fall, though, unless one views the preceding discrimination as a good thing in itself.

Funniest quote I read recently:

We wanted diversity and inclusion, all we got were white women

I think we should play diverse more on financial background, not on racial/gender.

Of course, there is discrimination between the sexes, sexual orientation, nationality, politics, or any other religion or philosophy. People hire their friends, they will hire people of like mind, and fairness be damned. (Don't me get me started on age discrimination.) I think it is demonstrable that women have it tougher than in most fields, especially in the art world.

We are all created equal under law but who "watches the watchmen? And how do you regulate decisions? Even algorithms that declare a certain race percentage be balanced are discriminatory.

There are a lot of examples of illegal hiring practices in this thread. I recommend speaking to an employment attorney if you are affected by these somehow.

The DEI movement started with good intentions and did a lot of good but in the long run dividing people along categorizes like gender or race is way too simplistic. For example I am white male but my life experience is probably more similar to a lot of black males vs people like Tim Cook or Elon Musk. And I have no connection to a white male that grew up in a poor mining town in West Virginia. If you want to define groups I think it makes way more sense to do that by income. A woman who makes 1 million will get more respect than a male who makes 20k. I feel we are changing the preferred groups from white males to other groups but in the end we aren’t creating more equality or inclusion. We are just shifting the in groups.

In my area, 40+ developers basically fall into two groups:

- Burnt out developers who still like their job. These people often have a background in some STEM field, may hold a PhD etc. They can be difficult to work with due to the odd outburst, but their approach to problem solving is pretty constructive.

- Burnt out developers who hate their job. This is the most difficult group of people to work with I've encountered in my career. These people struggle on a daily basis and cannot be properly integrated into a team.

Now, if I became a recruiter, I would be aware that hiring 40+ developers can be a gamble. I know I will probably be one of those guys some day, and I don't see a non trivial approach to solving it. The software industry simply sucks.

The approach to solving it is to get promoted a lot. All of the directors and many of the staff+ engineers at my company are 40+. They are highly respected, receive eye-watering compensation, and if they move more slowly and cautiously than young folks it's chalked up to experience rather than senility.

I've worked with plenty of 40+ developers who aren't burnt out and match neither of these categories

How would you characterize 15-25 year old developers?

15 year olds: they "yeet" and make weird noises when you merge their code. Shouldn't be allowed near the beer fridge.

25 year olds: good at inverting binary trees and writing Javascript.

why do you assume burnout by default?

I'm not assuming, I'm just saying a vast majority of 40+ devs in my area fall into those groups. It's a different story at tech hubs where there's actual career growth.

I see. This conversation tends to be focused around tech hubs, so I figured you were talking about tech hubs by default. Which goes starkly in contrast to my exprience with senior developers.

At least in tech hubs, it seems like by the 30's they'd burn out. Those still kicking in their 40's seem to still enjoy their work, IC and mangement alike.

reading the comments, if you think software jobs are bad, try getting a job in a design field

*In Sweden

This is in line with earlier findings in different countries. In a meta-analysis of hiring discrimination studies during 2000–2014, Rich [9] documented high levels of discrimination against men applying to jobs in female-dominated occupations in China [13], France [14], England [25], and Australia [11].

I don't disagrees with the conclusion, but these studies only prove it in their respective countries.

If somebody was really good and presented themselves well, why the hell would they want to sling code for somebody else when they could go into finance or medicine? Yeah, being a tech founder can be amazingly lucrative but for anything else the non-tech roles are better respected and paid quite well. Think of a good quant or surgeon.

Last two companies I have been at simply do not hire any white males, and blatantly give bonuses for hitting targets of DEI.

It’s no longer about merit or skill, it’s about woke crap and identity politics.

About 10 years ago, I consulted for a huge company in St Louis. St Louis’s racial makeup is approximately 50% white and 50% black. In the company’s IT group, the makeup was 50% white males, and 50% Indian. The only African Americans were the security guards.

If companies were serious about DEI goals, they would require their contracted IT consultancies to have a representative racial makeup of the local population.

I’d happily support any company with that DEI goal. Anyone know of one?

When discussing discrimination, the concept of intersectionalty discrimination is something I find needs to be addressed more.

And in male-dominated occupations. Discrimination happens on the individual level.

The study found no discrepancies in mixed and male dominated industries.

> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.

People are encouraged by society to discriminate against men.

It's more so that as a man society expects you to be self reliant at all times

46% of the Swedish legislature are female. About the same in Finland and Norway. That's an indication of not only numbers being roughly balanced, but power and influence as well.

About 25% of the US Senate and House of Representatives are women. That looks bad. But it is about the same in technical roles in US companies. The percentage of women in leadership roles in tech companies is much lower.

Work remains to be done.

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