Infosys asked HR not to hire 'Indian-origin candidates', 'women with children'

What the other poster meant is that you'll end up hiring out of the upper castes and they'll display a lot of bias towards other castes.

It's to the point that many from India won't admit to the caste they're in.

Fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly. I don't see any caste discrimination in my line of work (urban IT companies). Nearly none of my coworkers know my caste, they don't care, neither am I.

It does happen in rural villages, specially inter caste marriages are still frowned upon. But it getting less effective over time. Determined people go make money and caste is not a hinder in many cases.

He said the problem isn’t with hiring Indians, it is with cheap labor.

> All good so far. But then you say that it is a problem, and this is where I am lost.

…Is not referring to a problem that has, at that point in the story, been revealed. It is being evocative in a sort of dog-whistle technique - before jumping into the generalisations that follow.

I have no idea why this is, but you can see it in literally any Indian engineering lecture recording on YouTube. It definitely does not inspire confidence they know the topic they are teaching.

Having said that, actual conversational skills in English were lacking even in Delhi. You can throw out words and hope there's enough of a shared vocabulary to get ideas across, but the majority of people aren't fluent, or even conversational in it. I've heard the Southern part is somewhat better though, as Hindi is less pervasive, and English is used more often as a second language if you travel out of state and the likes.

Me speaking with an Indian with a non-{US, British} accent means that very little information is going to get across during the conversation, because this problem shows up in both directions.

Of course, the issue essentially vanishes when the conversation is written down. Unfortunately, many native English speaker that I've been in touch with fail to understand the cognitive cost of oral communication.

I disagree, but then I would, I'm English. ;)

Tolerance of mispronunciation is one of the great strengths of English.

Even within the UK we have a plethora of different regional pronunciation. Even with the strongest accents only takes a couple of words to pick up what they're saying[1].

It's the same for those comping to English from another language. I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world, including India, with various standards of English. With a bit of practice on both ends it all works out.

That doesn't seem happen so much with other languages such as French. Even practicing with tolerant French or Belgian friends, my mangling of words is very hard for them to understand. They're not being difficult either, it's a case of get it exactly right or they can't understand you even with context.

1. If you're thinking Rab C Nesbit or that 19080s Nissan Sunderland advert the Japanese translator[2] you get what I'm talking about.

2. It was an advert for a new Japanese car plant in the UK. The joke being that a Japanese guy is translating a deliberately over the top English regional accent back into "English" for the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiK5BWmKSqE

My next question would be if they are doing this to Indian woman or every woman?

This line of thinking seems logical but is missing out on the human experience part of the equation. It doesn’t address why things are the way they are today. Affirmative Action, for lack of a better phrase, does a lot of things:

1) It provides representation for the future. “Mom went to college so so can I!”, “Wow, if Susan Wojcicki can run Youtube, then I can do something like that too!” Seeing people you can identify with being successful affects how you view yourself.

2) One of the reasons diverse teams are more productive is it helps stamp out the “oddball” feeling. If you are the only person in your peers that looks like you, it can have a chilling effect on how you interact with the team, how your success is measured, and your mental well being. If you don’t believe this, go to a club where no one looks like you and see how much you feel like standing out even more than just existing there.

3) It normalizes it. The only reason we are talking about it is because people in these positions are extraordinary. Normalizing it reduces implicit bias, gets other, previously discriminated against people back into the conversation and is the path towards it being a nonissue. The most powerful force for gay acceptance was Will and Grace because it was primetime gay people just being there and it being normal.

4) Last, resume vs resume can be apples and oranges because it cannot account for their path to that. Was there significant harassment, discrimination and other social tribulations to earning whats on the sheet of paper? The stronger candidate may have unseen potential because of the social barriers they had to climb.

There are important reasons for these sorts of hiring decisions that have lasting consequences. And if we want to make the issue disappear we have to start at the top, not at the bottom.

If there are few women in tech, and few women professors of computer science or engineering, there will be few girls taking tech courses. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, and you need explicit action to break it. Affirmative action is one of the only known ways of doing this, as it has been at least moderately successful at integrating black people into high-status positions and jobs after the centuries of slavery. Explicit programs to encourage STEM education for girls in school are another, but less proven.

* The things you were exposed to as a child. Whether or not you know/see people who look like you in a certain career path.

* Whether or not you feel like you fit in at certain classes in school.

* The biases of your mentors and whom they choose to invest in. People favor other people who they feel are similar. This impacts who gets opportunities for further training positions. Who they write recommendations for. Who gets opportunities for internships. Each of these choices compound, as people with more opportunities look better than people with less.

* The biases of your peers and coworkers. Who gets blamed when things go poorly. Who gets credit for successes.

On the individual level, it's usually difficult to point out exactly where the injustice occurs to know how to address it in real time. As a population however, you can tell that it occurs. People within these groups get no benefit of the doubt. They will have to overachieve to get the same opportunities as others. With that in mind, it becomes much more reasonable to essentially reverse discriminate. Given two people with the same resume, with person A being from an underrepresented group and person B who is not, the best candidate is likely A who has had the additional burden of biases.

Doing this at large actually will reduce the biases. As it becomes normal to see the underrepresented group in a career path:

* More kids will see people like them in the career, leading to more trying it

* Classes will be more diverse and welcoming so more will stick to it

* Mentors are likely more diverse as well and will give opportunities to other people that look like them

* When you don't stick out, it's more likely you'll be treated fairly by peers and coworkers

Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.

I know it's monkeys, not people, but experiments have been done:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

> We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization.

It seemed like a cultural issue to me, like it was just too boyish and bro-ish for women to want to enter the programme. Sausage party effect.

Judging from the department photos of graduates from past years, you could see that there were way more women in CompSci the 70s and 80s.

And by most people's definition of good and bad, this can't be incorrect. Unless they don't believe in good or bad as truthful labels, which is fair but makes things more complicated.

It is right to try to take systemic steps to equalize access to opportunity across the board. The best (but imho still incredibly flawed) way of doing this is to use "anti-biased" hueristics to increase representation of certain people. In school admissions, for example, this might mean prioritizing applications from poorer areas. In other places this means having minimum quotas for hiring certain genders or ethnicities.

Yes, to be utterly semantic, it is discriminatory. I don't know how this sits with me, but it is technically true. But, whether it sits well or not, it is virtually impossible to fiddle ourselves out of this quagmire of inequality without taking proactive _opposite_ steps. We need to somehow equalise the playing field, thus equalising access to merit, thus equalising the soundness of the so-hailed "pure meritocracy" that so many seem to uphold as the ideal.

The problem is that there's so many variables in this equation that it can't simply be resolved in a simple "racism bad" or "discrimination bad" and "if they really wanted to they could but in reality they don't want to". It's a bit more complicated than that.

I can’t count how many Ivy League classmates I knew who thought simply being admitted was the end game that proved they were superior. Cheating was rampant. 5.0 weighted GPA perfect SAT Eagle Scouts dropped out.

People angry at the morality of an imperfect collectivist fix in favor of an imperfect collectivist filter are on grounds of curious firmness.

In clearer words: I think you made this situation up without considering other factors because you have an ideological agenda.

To ignore all of that context and to treat them as exactly equivalent is reduction to absurdity, to the point where debate involving in any matter of subtlety is impossible, from my perspective.

Furthermore, I would encourage you to state the equivalent case on your side. Why should I ignore all context and subtlety, and treat the two scenarios as morally equivalent?

I mean affirmative action for white people is effectively why white people are so ahead in this country (red lining)

But it’s still a good argument to point out that discriminatory diversity policies are discriminatory. Because that forces those that advocate for them to lay out their justifications and also at what point the policy is no longer needed.

I’m not against affirmative action where it makes sense, but it’s a heavy handed policy and as such needs very good justification and constant re-evaluation.

Anyway, surely you don't think legal discrimination necessarily moral discrimination? After all, Jim Crow was perfectly legal.

What I'm hearing from you, dendriti, is that slavery wasn't wrong when it was legal.

That definitely seems a hot take in 2022.

It's the same attitude that makes it hard to recruit women and people of color into the industry, they can just look at one of the most well known platforms for discussing the industry and see the rampant sexism and racism