A good read for some additional context on caste discrimination in the American tech industry: https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
One question I've always had is, how do you know you're Dalit if you were born outside of India? How do others?
Especially, say, when meeting other Indians in some tech company in the US?
How do others know: it’s not obvious. Dalits either change their last name to something common enough to not have any caste indicator. They’d avoid any discussion on caste. So effectively, they hide but there are some who don’t and keep their last name. Still, not every other Indian could tell, but a more caste conscious Indian who belongs to the same region can tell. On top of it, it’s common among Indians to just plainly ask other what their caste is.
For the most part, people treat people equally but I've seen this kind of behavior on here and in person on a few occasions.
Non-Brahmin Hindus are not allowed to wear the sacred thread.
Turbans and burqa do not have such intra-religious restriction.
Comparing the sacred thread to turbans/ burqas is a false comparison.
But only Brahmins have the right to wear it.
Wearing a "sacred thread" in a society that wants to eliminate caste based discrimination is promoting and condoning discrimination.
As an extreme example, how is this different from a klan member choosing to wear a "hood" in public.
Presumably it is possible to be Brahmin, without supporting caste discrimination.
A better analogy would be: Do you feel it should be illegal to mention have a degree from Yale or Harvard? They're both markers of status, and people absolutely discriminate based on that, but I don't think "I have a degree from Harvard" automatically makes you complicit in that.
A college degree is earned, a Brahmin caste status is inherited much like the klan claiming supreme status by blood.
> Are you saying that you'd stop being a Hindu if you give up your Brahmin identity?
Surely there are many kinds of Hindus? To each community what’s important is different? And an answer to this question also depends on how the individual makes sense of his religion?
While jati as a feature of the Indian landscape has persisted for a few thousand years, I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent. But as it happens, when one talks about being anti-caste today many times it is to call out and disparage one’s Hindu identity. This makes any conversion about caste extremely muddled, with folks arguing past each other.
My comment was in response to the parent who brought in the word religion into the discussion, as some means of justification of inheriting the religion of their parent is the same as inheriting the caste. ...and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
This is exactly the kind of deflection used to 'muddle' the conversation, as you put it.
If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
None of this is new. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this decades ago and yet, here we are, with google claiming the same thing you are -- that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
By that I meant for some group and people jati intersects with particular theologies and for others it doesn’t. What does that say about jati and theology?
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ?
Million dollar question. Why do some identities persist and others don’t? For jati, endogamy plays a significant role and it will disappear with the current out marriage rate in a century (that’s of course being optimistic). Making it about Hinduism or Brahmins will not get rid of jati. TN has the lowest ICM in the country despite a 100 years of non-Brahmin movement.
> It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
Lol, let’s just say we read different things about the subject or even read the same things and come to different conclusions.
> that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
If it ends up disparaging people with Hindu religious identity, one could argue its Hinduphobic (which happens sometimes with these conversations).
Social status for some and Reservation benefits for others.
Just because I bear a name commonly used by people of my community, does not make me complicit in the ills of the community I belong to.
Or are you also judging a person by their surname?
Why should this be a right?
Inherited "wealth" is not considered a unrestricted right in many societies.
The wealth tax is a great example of how society regulates "concentration of power" through inherited wealth.
Caste based inheritance of wealth has no such regulation.
Soundarapandian Nadar of Justice Party (and after whom Pondy Bazaar is named) campaigned in the Nadar community to get rid of the thread: https://alchetron.com/W-P-A-Soundarapandian-Nadar
Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.
What we need is a system based on laws with checks and balances that ensures the poor and the marginalized get their fair shake?
I know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it. It is just that almost all brahmins do it and the practice has reduced or stopped in the other two varnas.
And from what I see, he didn't compare the thread to burqas. He compared the calling of the thread as sign of discrimination to calling the turban as a sign of terrorism. There is a difference.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/india/hinduism-denies-spiritual-ri...
That's the comparison.
>know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it
I know but all Brahmins wear the sacred thread.
False. I may have only anecdotal evidence, but even one counter-example renders your statement incorrect.
It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
All previous fights against discrimination shared one phenomenon: priveledged start to whine that they are reverse-discriminated. And at some point they probably are discriminated against. But the funny thing, that without their cooperation in a fight against discrimination there are no other way to win but to discriminate in reverse.
And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
Not unless I go running around naked
> And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
How exactly do you infer that? You don’t know me. I care about discrimination just as much as the next person. What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
1. You show that you care about tradition. And you show not a slightest attempt to care about people. Words reflect mind. Not perfectly, but there is one more consideration:
2. I heard a lot from privileged. I said some of that talk myself, and I know how mind must work to say it. I changed myself and rejected my priviledge, my mind works in different ways. I do not belive my reasons to do something anymore, I have found then the only sensible way to judge my inclination to discriminate is to assess my actions and their consequences. In my previous conment I applied the technique to your actions as you described them. It is possible that you lied, but I believe it is unlikely.
> What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong.
When you switch to an emotional talk, it seems to me to be an additional bit of evidence, that you are lying to yourself about how you care about people and discrimination. It is a very predictable reaction.
“Caring” about tradition (whatever that means) is equivalent to being complicit in social ills. Ok got it.
No you didn't.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_South_Asi...
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kevins-murder-...
Why do they do this, and what do they hope to gain out of asking that question?
Related question -- I would have thought that high-tech Indians in Silicon Valley would detest a system like that. Is that not the case?
Answer is a bit twisted. Lot many just ask as a innate curiosity and to find a cultural base to connect with someone new and not exactly for any sinister reasons. There are like thousands of sub religions, cultures, languages in India that it helps people sometimes to know which caste a person belongs to level with them. Not exactly something to be proud of but happens.
At the same time, lot many are orthodox and do ask to get a perspective into someone’s personality and culture to find a stereotype they can base their decisions on - for ex- inside interviews, business meetings etc.
> Unlike race, it’s easier to hide your caste, especially in a new country. Many dalits change their official last name to something common enough that it’s hard to identify them.
My mother's ancestral Norwegian last name wouldn't have worked particularly well in English, my own last name of Danish origin survived unscathed for obvious reasons.
>"Europe
Scandinavia
Wang is also an unrelated surname in Sweden and Norway. It is a variant spelling of the name Vang which is derived from the Old Norse word vangr, meaning field or meadow.
Germany and Netherlands
Wang is also a surname in the German and Dutch languages. The name is derived from Middle German wang/ Middle Dutch waenge, which is literally "cheek". However, in southern German, its meaning, "grassy slope" or "field of grass", is similar to the Scandinavian surname."
Guess the country :)
In Spain there are many people with foreign or uncommon names... that are also biblical names. Abraham, Sarah, Aaron, Jonathan or Josuah (Josué) were unheard half a century ago. Now they're usual.
Why? In part, because Evangelical missionaries were more successful in poor quarters, specially among gypsies.
Also there's the famous actors thing. But now Vanessa also sounds natural enough.
Actually not even foreign names. IIRC only names that were insulting or prone to be laughed at were forbidden.
That being said, these were civil servants under a fascist catholic dictatorship, so you can imagine that the range went from "only catholic saint names in spanish" to "if it sounds spanish-enough to me I'll allow it". Foreign names (John) were not allowed in most cases, just like they didn't allow names in any of the other languages of spain such as Joan (catalan), Jon (vasque), Xoán (galician).
If the latter, is it reasonable to assume that Brahmins in power are likely not only discriminating against those who are Dalit, but also discriminating against those that they know are not Brahmin (Indians and non-Indians) in favor of Brahmins?
Do you need identifying papers?
Is there a big market for forgeries?
Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
You will be shown your place very very quickly. Love marriages are quite deadly and parents killing their own children and the lower caste grooms are extremely common. You can search for "honour killings in India".
Please read "Annihilation of Caste" by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Its around 50 pages of an undelivered speech, later published.
If you want to learn about caste, please make sure not to ask for explanations from an upper caste person. This is extremely important!!
Example of this enforcement: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-15997648
I'm not Indian, but I read a lot about this when the Cisco stuff came out. The gist that I picked up from interviews with Indians dealing with this was that there is A LOT of cultural background that you'd be very unlikely to know if you hadn't grown up in a certain caste.
A (likely shitty) analogy: You can learn about WWII all you want, but unless you were deployed it would be hard to fake that you were at a specific battle or did a specific training. There's probably minute details that were not written down, but people who were there would casually know. There may be habits or turns of phrase that would have been picked up. Maybe a certain landmark or destroyed thing that had a funny nickname. Maybe it's knowing a certain soldier or commander by a nickname that hasn't made it into the history books. "Oh you trained at X? Man I loved tuna Tuesdays even though noone would touch the stuff. Do you remember when private Y did..."
Through casual conversation, it's very difficult to keep the ruse up. Now if the interlocutor is actively trying to root you out its basically impossible. In the interviews I was listening to, the best case scenario was that the higher caste member came away not knowing what caste your from, but definitely knew you were not a Brahmin... Because if you were, you'd casually bring up X, Y, and Z and use these phrases and these gestures and and and...
Only older heads who immigrated here are the lions share of individuals perpetuating this caste based discrimination. Please state your sources if you disagree with my assessment of first generation born Americans of South Asian descent working in big tech and Silicon Valley.
Your comment supports my observations. The newly-arrived Indians really don't like reservation and therefore care about caste. Second generation non-Brahmins in the US don't care about caste because it doesn't affect them.
India is a big country. Where in India is this a common practice?
This may sound uneducated, but do Indians in the US only eat Indian food? How would someone know if you rotate through different cuisines every day?
I highly suggest that you consult the works of Patrick Olivelle and Susan Bayly to get at the real History of "Caste" (Varna vs. Jati etc.). That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) :
Recent scholarship suggests that the discussion of varna as well as untouchable outcastes in these texts does not resemble the modern era caste system in India. Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions and credited with modern translations of Vedic literature, Dharma-sutras and Dharma-shastras, states that ancient and medieval Indian texts do not support the ritual pollution, purity-impurity as the basis for varna system. According to Olivelle, purity-impurity is discussed in the Dharma-shastra texts, but only in the context of the individual's moral, ritual and biological pollution (eating certain kinds of food such as meat, urination and defecation). In his review of Dharma-shastras, Olivelle writes, "we see no instance when a term of pure/impure is used with reference to a group of individuals or a varna or caste". The only mention of impurity in the Shastra texts from the 1st millennium is about people who commit grievous sins and thereby fall out of their varna. These, writes Olivelle, are called "fallen people" and impure, declaring that they be ostracised. Olivelle adds that the overwhelming focus in matters relating to purity/impurity in the Dharma-sastra texts concerns "individuals irrespective of their varna affiliation" and all four varnas could attain purity or impurity by the content of their character, ethical intent, actions, innocence or ignorance, stipulations, and ritualistic behaviours.
Olivelle states:
Dumont is correct in his assessment that the ideology of varna is not based on purity. If it were we should expect to find at least some comment on the relative purity and impurity of the different vamas. What is even more important is that the ideology of purity and impurity that emerges from the Dharma literature is concerned with the individual and not with groups, with purification and not with purity, and lends little support to a theory which makes relative purity the foundation of social stratification.
The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
I worked in the health sciences before and I saw a lot of this, and got so fed up with just abjectly horrible most workers were who got a pass because of their surname. It's odd, my colleague was a MSc in Microbiology and was Indian, too, but we both had to claw our way into the Industry (in different fields) and she was always worried he H1 Visa would be the only thing that kept her in the US.
My only conclusion was she wasn't a high ranking member of the caste system which is why she was just as hungry as us undergrads in the 2008 financial crisis. She ended up quitting her role in a Govt agency, and did her PhD last we spoke.
PS: The study of the subject itself is fascinating and you can start with the wikipedia page i have referenced and then follow the links from there.
This sums up your world view. I am sitting here thinking we are all debating with someone who wants to improve society for all humans...
Reminds me of one of my favourite passages from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London;
“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
Whether or not Hindu scriptures really support these practices is a matter for believers, the concern here is how it's actually practiced in the real world and the resulting discrimination harming actual people.
That's why i said in another comment that it makes sense to discuss this in the Indian Workplace more than the American Workplace.
The issue is that Indian (or Indian-American) workers are bringing these prejudices into American workplaces. People in Indian workplaces know about these issues, non-Indians in American workplaces very likely don't, which allows the discrimination to go unchecked.
That is THE assumption which is being challenged; the reasons in my other comments.
I feel sad and sorry.
Like all unjust discrimination, this one triggers on things one has no control over. Doing that to others is completely unacceptable.
I have no problem with this, after all immigrants are by no means obliged to be assimilated. It becomes a problem when politics come to play. E.g. Turkish nationalism, Erdogan has pretty solid approval ratings among German based Turks. This doesn't affect German culture much, so. In case of Indian nationalism, heavily leaning on India's caste system, it is different. Indian immigrants tend to end up in managemebr positions more often than, e.g., Turks do. So they affect company policies and culture more. And in the case of caste discrimination, something most non-Indians have a hard time understanding, it can co-opt whole organisations. And in the case of social media it can have a massive impact on culture in general.
That's why those talks, like the cancelled one at Google, are so important.
This is nothing unusual for emigrants to support the preserving, conservative and strong-arm political position for their former home countries because many feel obligated to do so.
The demographics of formerly rural Turks that immigrated to Germany is also relevant but I think the feeling of obligations for such "defensive" choices is a main driver. You can see this trend with a lot of immigrants, Turks are just an example here.
Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.
So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.
Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian workforce, I have witnessed that QA heavily skews female.
I didn't even notice until I have been on interview loops with Indian men that I thought were nice and that I had professional and personal respect for and this weird tiger came out when it came to interviewing women (for dev roles) that didn't come out when interviewing men. This is just anecdotal, not all not all.
This comment itself is going to get flagged or downvoted, but I can't put a caveat on every sentence.
https://feminisminindia.com/2020/03/02/sexism-in-engineering...
> A couple of women who I knew had studied STEM subjects but had changed their career trajectory after graduating, explained the systemic sexism that women face in universities in India which deterred them from pursuing it any further.
And then I see those pressures in the hiring loop (for devs), we didn't interview QA, it would make sense that they get pushed into QA or get pushed out entirely.
Sexism in tech is much stronger than men realize, women are fully aware.
I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist?
My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part affinity and in part discriminatory which operate as a yin-yang.
Another hypothesis is that the existence of under-represented demographic segments in certain fields of study/occupation such as STEM means that the over-represented demographic segments are under-represented in other fields. Changing representation has classically focused on importing under-represented folks into high status fields. This effectively overstuffs some fields which decreases effectiveness. A better approach would be to make the other fields more attractive/high status so that the over-represented demographic segments in fields like STEM grow interest in other fields.
A single anecdote is sufficient to merit "at least partly."
You can say it's not generally proved. But it also wasn't a universal claim.
Do you realize how absurd language would be if what you claim is true? For example:
- Is is true latino men are discriminated against when applying for florist positions?
- Yes, it happened once.
Literally any group would be "party discriminated" in every possible scenario according to how you define "at least partly".
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
Entirely seriously, here is your proof:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/12/modeling-salary-and-gende...
Now switch to some other attempt at distraction via reducio of the actual argument.
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103186... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.5... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018839203698 [4] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4... [5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23339-007
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
1. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gender-and-Race-Prefer...
One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
How do you know this to be true?
> cultural bias
What definition are you using for this term?
Goto LinkedIn and search for QA engineers in Indian cities. I think that should be a very good proof for you
We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
This page for cultural bias is as good any any other definition for my purposes here, which was purely to say that “cultural bias” is less inflammatory than “sexism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?
This and “cultural bias” and “sexism” are all pretty well established terms you can Google, and are taught in social studies and history courses.
Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex. I’m using sex here more or less interchangeably with gender right now, but there are times where that distinction matters.
> it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
There’s no question about whether sex bias has existed, nor whether society wants it to stop existing. Those are facts not being debated. The primary example I had in mind when I said 100 years is women’s suffrage: the right to vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) When women were legally barred from voting, or owning land, or initiating divorce, those things were sex based biases. Women gained the right to vote in the US a while ago, but it took longer before women started to appear in C-level corporate roles, that is still changing today.
> Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards?
Please read the link I posted. Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups. It can be, but is not primarily about people from different cultures in the sense of, say, Indians vs Americans. Indians have certain cultural biases, Americans have their own separate cultural biases. The idea that nurses should be women is an example of a cultural bias.
> What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards
The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board. I don’t know what you mean by “imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times”, but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical. It might be described as imposing minimum uniform standards, perhaps.
I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA? Why or why not? Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
I am a mind in thrall to delusion.
> Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex.
Using the word “prejudice” to define “bias” doesn’t help me to understand the term.
> Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups.
Okay, so different people having different assumptions which they use to judge phenomena.
> The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board.
There are lots of things that lots of people will tell me are hurting them. Personally, I don’t care about any of them. But how do you prioritize one claimed hurt over another?
> but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical
Probably, I was just guessing.
> I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA?
I don’t really care. The hiring/promoting practices of 2022 American QA departments doesn’t interest me. Let the Harvest Gods have their day.
> Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
Depends on the context. Does disqualifying the woman help me to get what I want, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, I don’t care.
Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.
> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields
It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.
> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
There is a broad trend that as women are more empowered, they are less likely to go into STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
I’m rather skeptical that it’s truly “broad” in historical terms, it’s still changing much too fast. I’m skeptical that trend for 1 or 2 decades is likely to continue and not change direction again, since it’s already changed direction in the last century. Women going into STEM went way up from the 40s to the 80s. In computer science it’s gone down since the 80s in the US, while in India it’s continued going up, and even exceeded 50% one or two years. The numbers in the US vary wildly from field to field, it’s different in CS than it is in biology or math. All of this is further undeniable proof that today’s causes are primarily social and not sex based.
The deeper problem with this article is that it flirts with some vague concept of different interests between men and women without addressing the well known fact that social norms influence interests. You simply cannot separate attitudes from cultural biases, it’s not possible, and it’s either ignorant or willfully misleading to suggest otherwise.
Presumably you wouldn't know without a study, thus you do the study.
Often perpetuated by women as well as men, so this isn't man-blaming.
And having a few token women in dev doesn't change the situation so much as it cements the status quo in place.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.
Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
What makes you think it isn’t?
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
The biggest problem I've encountered is that they are sometimes socially isolated because Western colleagues don't know how to approach them, when they're really easy to talk to and have a lot to say!
What does this mean? I thought Patel was a surname.
For ex, if there are a bunch of Indians in a work place and a few of them are from lower caste, they will not be invited for lunches, dinners or any socialising event by their upper caste counter parts. Implicit untouchability.
I have read that in the US tech companies this is far too common and since their white (only white specifically. Because they don't care about what their black/asian/latino colleagues think.) colleagues don't understand caste, there are no repercussions for any discrimination.
"Etymology The term patel derives from the word Patidar, literally "one who holds (owned) pieces of land called patis", implying a higher economic status than that of the landless,[6] ultimately from Sanskrit paṭṭakīla,[7] with the ending -dar (from Sanskrit "धार" - supporting, containing, holding) denoting ownership.[8]"
My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.
A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.
The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.
An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done?
Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic.
Or.
Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else.
Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you.
So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions.
And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.
-There are lower-paying sports where fitness does matter, and they all have fit athletes at the top.
-There are way more conventionally fit folks than there are pro athlete slots; It's not like the select few fit people in the world are being exhausted before they can fill the ranks of all professional athletics.
If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
At $5 million over 42 years, you bowl because you like it, not because it makes money. People who are fit but are otherwise not good enough to play high-paying professional sports can probably find better paying jobs elsewhere.
Professional bowling is populated by the people it is populated with partly because this is as good or better an option than others that they have.
I would speculate that most top tier bowlers do have the arm and upper body strength to do it well.
They also have a variety of body-fats and other attributes that don't particularly impact performance.
>If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
Why do you think that would be the case if it doesn't impact performance?
If chess paid like the NBA, we still wouldn't expect top players to look like NBA athletes.
And the reason I used bowling is because it is a physical sport. And with physical sports, better overall physical fitness can give you an edge.
Hell, even in chess they're beginning to consider how physical conditioning impacts performance.
But now you're kind of at the point of arguing the metaphor. There are more desirable positions in software development and less desirable ones. And everyone is applying for everything. And if one group is cut off from the more desirable ones, they will start to become over-represented in the less desirable ones.
If you hire based only on competence, you will probably get more people that suffer discrimination than the average. The stronger the discrimination, the higher the odds.
> "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example]
> "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position."
> "I asked for feedback from ..."
A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know.
A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything.
We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly?
Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea.
It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.
My reply here is meta given the topic, but I almost didn't submit my original comment because I've seen how these threads go. Any additional information in my comment would lead to even more complexity/areas to pick apart. Less information becomes easy targets for flame. I can understand why the talk was pulled, because they often seem to result in negative PR, more than any potential positive influence. I felt the same with submitting my comment.
Thank you for offering positive suggestions and discussion to the topic.
Thanks for submitting your comment. It's so valuable to have someone openly discuss these things.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.
So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
I would say, that on average, QA is a lower skilled profession than software development. If I were to make an analogy, QA is the nurse to the developer's doctor.
And, yes, it is a lower tier. You hire developers before QA and fire QA before developers. But, like you said, it deserves respect. Just like all professions. And I'd say that a competent QA staff is the sign of a successful organization. Because while you can have your developers test, it's better to move those responsibilities off their plate so they can focus on their core work. Just like you could have your employees take out the trash and sweep up, but once you're beyond the "5 people in a garage" setup, you're going to hire a cleaning service.
To the point of the higher up comments.
It is an issue. Even if QA were more difficult, challenging, etc than development, we can't get around the fact that it is perceived as supplemental to development. It is a place where organizations put people who want to be developers but the organization doesn't want to be developers. Or a dumping ground for 1x developers. And it seems, a way to tweak diversity numbers without actually doing anything.
As one familiar with the Indian education system (which is heavily rote-based and does not generally encourage understanding-based learning, especially before the tertiary level) and the mentality it produces in comparison with the western mind, I would say (and please don’t misunderstand me; I’m making a dispassionate assessment of why it might be so, not whether it should or should not be so) that this is actually a pretty good match, and it would not surprise me—nay, I would expect—to find Indians and especially Indian women fitting in better into that style of QA department than into other fields such as development; and when you have a large fraction of people who think in such-and-such a way, it will tend to be self-reinforcing and -perpetuating. (This is also a significant factor in why these sorts of effects in how you think as a whole have a habit of lingering for a generation or two after transplantation into another country.)
men discriminating and harrassing women? Sexism, check.
White discriminating people of color? Racism, check.
One Indian being a dick to another Indian? A personal thing between those two people. Only that ot is not, it is so much more, we Westerners just don't see it. And since we don't see it we have a pretty solid chance of intervening on the wrong side, if we intervene at all.
Effectively, the idea was "Don't be a dick." That is a reason right there where a person can intervene if they are in a position to do so. However, the issue as you raise it is that this is not a law.
There are laws about sex, racism etc that can help people in low power situations exercise some power. But we don't have that equivalent knowledge/ability regarding caste.
I also think it's counterintuitive to fixate on this stuff. It doesn't have to be sexism- it could be a fluke.
Generally speaking, the more authoritarian someone on the left is, the more likely they are to be sexist. Stalinist tankies are the rock bottom.
In her own language. Just after she's asked us to take her to her ethnic group gathering that is pretty much her only social outing...
Hypocrisy has many shades and people compartmentalise attitudes with issues.
I actually had a pretty balanced department that only slightly favors women. As a male QA/QE I tend to hire for detail orientation with a back up of actually caring, and a level of either assertiveness or grit in holding the line.
Anecdotal survey of 10 years of QA, and I haven't found any corrrlation with sex and QA, except that women have tended to be easier to work with on average, and the men I work with are either really good, or meh. Amusing historical point though: programming was considered women's work originally.