"Occasionally make eye contact with women" should probably be a reasonable expectation for professional employees, who should be expected to work well with diverse (not the identity politics meaning of that word) teams.
It's one thing if someone outright ignores an interviewer (that is hugely disrespectful). It's entirely another if someone is forcing their values on someone else over something as trivial as eye contact.
This whole thing sounds hand-wavy and virtue-signally to me. And in a bad way.
It may not make you a bad person, but it would probably make you a bad hire.
> It's one thing if someone outright ignores an interviewer (that is hugely disrespectful).
If you read the entire twitter thread, you will see that this is exactly what is being discussed. And if you haven't seen this behaviour in person before, you haven't been paying attention.
Ah yes, so the very people who champion "diversity" and "empathy" show their true colors by selecting against people with some kind of social anxiety or traumatic experience. So much for that!
> If you read the entire twitter thread, you will see that this is exactly what is being discussed.
Well it definitely wasn't described that way from the outset, which is an indicator of the Gergely Orosz's biases. Perhaps he should apologize and undergo some bias training.
> And if you haven't seen this behaviour in person before, you haven't been paying attention.
Or it could be that the field that I work in is largely a male presence and I haven't been on the interviewer side of the table with a woman.
The social justice types are funny to me. They issue proclamations about *ism from their ivory tower, all the while assuming the worst intent from anybody who doesn't act like they do. It's actually laughable. The moral puritanism needs a rest.
Intentionally ignoring was already covered off on. Yes, policing someone's eye contact during a potentially high-stress situation (like an interview) is moral puritanism.
Policing eye contact, absent any other context, sounds like a massively negative impact on the workplace to me. And if someone does have some legitimate circumstances that make that a subconscious (or even consciously difficult) behavior then it sounds like your otherwise "equitable" workplace stops being equitable the moment someone is different than you in a way you don't agree with. It's "equitable for me, but not for thee."
We already know that interviews are nervewracking for some people. Add some other crap on top of that and I could see how someone well-meaning makes a minor blunder like failing to make eye contact with a woman. Where is the empathy that the equity types are clamoring for?