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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

Probably worth noting this story was first published by the New York Post. Take that for what you will.

That said, this is a pretty wild turn of events. From the initial and continued sexual harassment/assault to the racism, and subsequent retaliation. More curious is the very direct "your team is too male" and the encouragement to fire someone. I've heard this hinted at before, but never said out loud for obvious reasons. If all of those claims can be proven I'm pretty sure this guy won't work another day in his life if his lawyer can read sentences and make it to court on time.

I would like to hear Google and Mrs Miller's side of the story before I cast any judgement though. I don't suspect we'll get that until court.

View on HN

>More curious is the very direct "your team is too male" and the encouragement to fire someone.

My friend who still lives in the Valley says this kind of sentiment is incredibly common there nowadays, e.g. advertising an open position and having discussions internally that a man won't be hired for the role.

It's pretty surprising to me, because statistics show that most major careers have a gender imbalance in one direction or the other:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/software-deve...

Yet the gender imbalance in software engineering receives unique attention, to the point where people are willing to violate ethical rules in order to try & even out the genders in that particular career.

Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?

My suspicion is that there is no good justification that holds up under scrutiny, and it's all just a moral panic fueled by social media.

This general phenomenon is not just a moral panic, and is not caused by social media, though it may have a role in its spread. It is caused by a number of deep-rooted factors compounding on one another. One of them is the increasingly bloated managerial class in Western societies that are trying to hold on to their power. This is done by sowing division in the society, dismantling its former institutions (religion, civil society), and instilling a new set of values which they can enforce. Another one of them is the legacy of the two World Wars of the previous century, in which the West lost belief in the values it once believed in, and postmodernist values took their place. One of the most prominent values among these is a view of any sort of heterogeneity as oppression, and that there is a moral imperative to "correct" it by any means possible. The elites, fearing that they might lose power if people became more class-conscious, channeled this sentiment to certain issues that would not harm them too much, such as gender and race politics.

I think you might have meant to type homogeneity rather than heterogeneity

> My friend who still lives in the Valley says this kind of sentiment is incredibly common there nowadays, e.g. advertising an open position and having discussions internally that a man won't be hired for the role.

Your friend (and your friend's HR organization) should be aware that this is extremely illegal.

It's not actually illegal. For it to be actually illegal, governments would have to enforce the laws but they don't. Left wing governments can't get rid of the laws but they can easily appoint woke allies to enforcement positions, to ensure the law is only enforced in one direction.

I've been in a company all hands, which was broadcast to the whole multi-office company via video link, where the CEO himself announced that the next person to fill a very senior executive role had to be a woman and it would remain empty for as long as it took to do that. Did he care that he just admitted the company would break the law, on video? No because it's not illegal, it's outright encouraged.

Fundamentally, you cannot have left wing people in charge of enforcing equality rules, whether it be legislation or company policies. They point blank will not do it because they think that handing women or racial minorities unique powers is the most morally virtuous thing they can do, and that the system they're tasked with enforcing is immoral.

It may or may not be legal but it opens the corporation up to stockholder lawsuits. Once a corporation begins hiring on criteria unrelated to maximizing stockholder income they've gone down a path that will bring down management.

DEI initiatives harm corporations long-term and will always ultimately fail because the corporation is no longer maximizing profits. This is not a new idea: IIRC even Adam Smith had something to say about such kind of activity.

Yes in theory, no in practice. Such lawsuits are incredibly rare, and this sort of thing is often done with the explicit acquiescence of the board anyway! And in many places they just change the law to explicitly make it legal, like in the UK, where they passed an Equality Act actually makes discrimination legal.

Yes it harms corporations in both long and short term but the people who do it don't care, because their moral code states that corporate harm either isn't real or is actually a good thing. You can't win when arguing with someone's fundamental moral code.

> Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?

Probably just because $$$. Have you ever seen someone advocate for more female coal miners or truck drivers?

> Have you ever seen someone advocate for more female coal miners or truck drivers?

All the time, as they should.

They also let women be engineers, geologists, farmers, doctors, etc.

Is this surprising to you?

[1] https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2022/Rio-Tinto-female...

[2] https://www.macktrucks.com.au/community/blog/2017/february/m...

Considering the fact that only 4% of Australian truck drivers are female[0], you'd think there'd be more of an effort.

0. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-26/qld-push-for-female-t...

Not everyone embraces the long haul trucking lifestyle, there's a much higher percentage of women in fork lifts, bob cats, and the uncounted by that poll (which is freight haul trucking only) dream job - remote 100 tonne haul pak operator.

These are all closer to home, have better hours, somewhat better pay for the light machines and exceptional rates for the Haulpaks.

>Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?

My conspiracy theory is that software engineering is the last real, single, meritocratic, growing career path that costs a lot of money for employers and they'd rather tank the market by making sure the other 50% of sex is able to participate to wreck wages.

Nobody cares that nurses and teachers are majority female dominated fields ripe with discrimination and harassment because they don't make enough money. They're overstressed, understaffed, and underpaid and society needs more of both yet the bar is so low and so biased against men that nobody is even trying to fix it.

I still hope for the day when somebody will decide we need 50% teachers and nurses to be men.

I don't think your argument quite works. Suppose I'm a superintendent worried about the teacher shortage. Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?

I think maybe there's a workable argument along these lines: Both nursing and teaching are bureaucratic industries with heavy government involvement. The price system doesn't function effectively in those industries, which means that a shortage of workers doesn't cause wages to rise. And the overall dysfunction means that managers in those industries don't think strategically about how to increase the supply of workers, the way managers in the software industry do.

EDIT: Another point is that the oligopolistic industry structure in tech means that big players have a stronger incentive to do things that benefit the industry as a whole.

>Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?

I think at this point salary already doesn't matter as wages are already depressed. In other words, fishing for true workplace equity isn't an altruistic endeavor as much as cost savings. Once that is achieved, it's irrelevant who populates the industry. Nobody is interested in hiring male teachers as costs are already down and there's plenty of female applicants lined up, even though they actually should in the interests of equity and workplace representation.

Your government bureaucracy argument brings up an interesting tangent. Government agencies should be one of the most inclusive workplace environments, (looking at some US administrations, they generally try to espouse that trend [0][1][2]) so it's only reasonable to assume that the same principles would trickle down to heavily regulated industries. If anything, heavy government involvement would mandate such quotas. But they don't. Which leads me to believe there's something else afoot.

[0]https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[1]https://facts.usps.com/postal-service-diversity/

[2]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/28/racial-ethn...

the tinfoil hat stays on and secure

>Nobody is interested in hiring male teachers as costs are already down and there's plenty of female applicants lined up

Not exactly, teacher shortages are widespread in the US.

Software engineering is a high prestige job. Rightly or wrongly, most female dominated jobs are not.

Eh in my experience it's a highly paid job but there's 0 prestige in it.

I tend to agree with that. Lawyers have more "prestige", I think. Of course, a huge majority of people studying law are female. However, despite what the general public thinks, lawyers are not highly paid. (I'm talking about the UK. Some lawyers are highly paid, of course, but lawyers are not highly paid on average, particularly if you divide their pay by the hours worked because the famous law firms that offer reasonably high salaries also expect a lot of unpaid overtime.)

CEOs and politicians are even higher-prestige jobs dominated by men, but the sense of moral urgency around achieving gender balance in those jobs seems significantly lower.

Police officers have a lot of power in society & are mostly male. I think there's a strong case to be made that bringing women into the force would be very beneficial, in terms of improved handling of sexual assault cases and reduced police violence. However, I haven't seen a peep about the need to make policing gender-balanced.

That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

It's often mentioned about UK politicians too, ie the gender balance of cabinet positions.

Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

>That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

Fair enough, I've never seen discussion of police gender balance here in the US.

>Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

I doubt that's it. I feel like I've seen a lot more coverage of "Women in Tech" in mainstream news sources than any other "Gender in Career" pairing.

I've thought about this and I think I agree with you about the amount of noise around tech rather than other careers. But what I don't want to do is jump to a conclusion about it, it seems like a nuanced question.

My mother made a left field comment a couple of years ago that I've thought about a lot. She was a programmer starting in the 70s through to the late 00s. I mentioned the lack of women in tech thing and she said "Oh. I've never noticed. I always considered it completely equal and never felt treated differently."

:shrug: The first computer scientist (IMHO) was a woman - Ada Lovelace [1]. It's also my understanding that, when computers were first introduced, they were mostly seen as aide to secretarial work, which is why a lot of the early computer pioneers were women - it was actually women-dominated at that time [2].

So there's (IMO) historical evidence that it's not inherently a "male" field; which I see as evidence that the imbalance is unexpected and undesirable.

(That said, I can't speak to why it's an "urgent" priority)

[1] Babbage invented the mechanical calculator. Ada realized you could do calculations on something other than numbers. IMO that makes Babbage the first computer engineer, and Ada the first computer scientist.

[2] one article of many on this: https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens...

That's not really a point relevant to the discussion. What matters when it comes to hiring, is that for any open CS role, >90% of applicants are male.

Looking up the funnel, about 80% of CS graduates are male (even though females outnumber males in college attendance).

At the bottom of the Seattle Times article I linked is a list of occupations that used to be male-dominated and are now female-dominated, e.g. veterinarian.

Can we conclude that the gender imbalance among veterinarians is unexpected and undesirable?

It's a good question, and I am troubled by not having the same reaction.

I would say tho that yes, I think it's unexpected and it's probably undesirable. What I'd want to check is how the male veterinarians felt about it. Do they feel like they're running into issues doing their job because of their gender?

> Probably worth noting this story was first published by the New York Post. Take that for what you will.

I think that even just five years ago I would’ve agreed with you on this, but when the attacks on elderly Asians began to happen during the pandemic, it was one of those painful things that it was the NY Post that could be counted on to make those visible.

As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t become more conservative. But I’ve realized that the left side of the spectrum is a lot sicker than I realized when I was younger, and to not automatically discount everything that goes on in the right, wince-worthy as it may often be.

For whatever reason folks think I made a political jab. I did not. Here's what I said to someone who posted something similar to you:

Frankly, I read this article this morning when it broke on the NYP. The NYP stays in my feed but when I read their stuff I almost always cross it with other sources. There are none though because all that exists of this story right now is the docket. Miller, Google, and Olahan aren't talking.

How victims are portrayed in the media matters a great deal. Media can skewer a case by either poking holes in it or by flatly not investigating. The latter is what I feel is going on here. They could've interviewed potential witnesses at these NYC events, they could've interviewed some Googlers to find out if this "your team is too male" attitude actually exists in any contingent. They didn't do that though, instead, they plugged the hottest claims of the docket which all come from the plaintiff.

My statement was ambiguous on purpose. It says two things simultaneously:

1. If you don't believe this article, wait for better reporting.

2. If you believe this article, wait for better reporting.

I was hoping that might remind some people to temper their expectations until more information is known, which is why the last sentence is the way it is, and why I cited each of the allegations.

> As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t become more conservative. But I’ve realized that the left side of the spectrum is a lot sicker than I realized when I was younger, and to not automatically discount everything that goes on in the right, wince-worthy as it may often be.

Changing perception is usually exactly how one would become more political.

It me quite a while to realize by "not work another day in his life" as actually meaning he will win large sums of money and not have to work, instead of my initial parsing as "he would never be allowed to work somewhere again".

I hope the first is true; I know the second is unfortunately probably also true

> Probably worth noting this story was first published by the New York Post. Take that for what you will.

Instead of an ad hominem dogwhistle, please describe how the paper's political leanings could bias its reporting here.

At face value, it's workplace sexual assault allegations with a power imbalance.

> Instead of an ad hominem dogwhistle

I don't think that's what "dogwhistle" means. IIUC, dog-whistling is surreptitiously sending a message to some readers, but having plausible deniability and/or non-recognition for the rest of the readers.

Try this:

>I'd like to point out that CoastalCoder wrote this comment. Take that for what you will.

See? Highlighting with this phrasing aligns exactly with your definition. The framing is defaulting to negative-neutral.

I don't think this is a case of dog-whistling, because AFAICT the author isn't trying to conceal his point.

I.e., he intends every reader to recognize that he's saying that the publisher might be biased. He's not being explicit about what that bias is, but presumably he expects curious readers to look into it themselves.

It's flawed (by your own definition) to say that just because you don't detect a dogwhistle that it's not a dogwhistle.

>the author isn't trying to conceal his point

False. The parent asked you to draw your own conclusions!

To me, all these new terms that have no actual meaning to what they are trying to describe is very annoying. Terms like "phishing", "gaslighting", "bike shedding", "yak shaving", "dog whistle", "gatekeeping" are extremely confusing to understand because there's no direct connection to what they are trying to imply. You literally have to memorize what it means and it's generally unguessable.

Terms like these are often not intended to be understood from just context. They're short references to complex topics that it is assumed the listener is already comfortable with, and will need to be explained if they are not. Just like understanding technical terminology improves your ability to share complex ideas in a technical space, political/social terminology improves your ability to share complex ideas in the social space.

That's what language is though.

Think of the word melancholy it has a complex definition and connotations but how could you guess what that means.

I think there is a general consensus that the New York Post has a credibility gap, so it is not "ad hominem dogwhistle". From it's Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post):

"In a 2004 survey conducted by Pace University, the Post was rated the least-credible major news outlet in New York, and the only news outlet to receive more responses calling it "not credible" than credible (44% not credible to 39% credible).[65]

The Post commonly publishes news reports based entirely on reporting from other sources without independent corroboration. In January 2021, the paper forbade the use of CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as sole sources for such stories.[66]"

65: Jonathan Trichter (June 16, 2004). "Tabloids, Broadsheets, and Broadcast News" (PDF). Pace Poll Survey Research Study. Archived (PDF) from the original on June 23, 2004. Retrieved June 7, 2007. 66: Robertson, Katie (January 13, 2021). "New York Post to Staff: Stay Away From CNN, MSNBC, New York Times and Washington Post". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 1, 2021.

Let me get this argument straight.

When someone cites [x, y, z], that someone is not credible instead of being not credible along with [x, y, z]?

Besides, the parent's whole point is that NY Post is the source, here!

I don't know about the New York Post. Maybe it is guilty of publishing false and dishonest reporting.

But I would also point out that a lot of people here on HN (in past discussions) and elsewhere have noted that the New York Times and the Washington Post also publish creatively interpreted news (or outright creative writing) at times.

Despite this news articles from these sources are considered independently without outright dismissal due to past reporting.

I'm struggling to see how that would be relevant to the assertion the New York Post is not a credible publication. Seems like whataboutism to me.

Calling for a consistent standard is not whataboutism.

This has to be one of my biggest peeves online. It's such a pervasive tactic to shut down discussion of a topic that's disadvantageous for the "other side". To use a topical example I see pretty much all the time: say there is a reddit thread that has the title "1 in 4 women experience X". There is a pretty heavy implication, and it's there no matter how much people want to deny it, that by extension men don't experience X either at all or to such a degree. Yet, if you point it out that "men experience X just as often though?", you won't be refuted or shown statistics that show they don't, you'll just be accused of "whataboutism" ("what about the men?" - well, the fact that it takes an article like this to start some people saying "woah woah woah... this hasn't been proven yet!!" should tell you something) when what you were pointing out is that aforementioned subtext that men DON'T experience it.

I absolutely despise the word now, to the point I'll cringe a bit even when it's used legitimately.

It's a tabloid and it is not left-leaning... and it published true and embarrassing things about the Biden family up to the last US presidential election. It also regularly publishes true things about crime (and about who commits it). This is more than enough to explain why some people distrust it.

In my book, it is much more reliable than the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In my book it’s slightly more reliable simply because it’s a tabloid and any political leaning takes the backseat in favor of headlines and blood.

>takes the backseat in favor of headlines and blood.

Great phrasing. Reporting dirt on a faction will drive clicks to FROM all factions, including the smeared faction.

The New York Times has always been very political and utterly unreliable:

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

Of course I'll take a tabloid that might be slightly right of center over that.

I think OP might be pointing out the New York Post is seen as tabloidy

Ambiguous at best.

Tabloidy/political/all the same.

Frankly, I read this article this morning when it broke on the NYP. The NYP stays in my feed but when I read their stuff I almost always cross it with other sources. There are none though because all that exists of this story right now is the docket. Miller, Google, and Olahan aren't talking.

My statement was ambiguous on purpose. It says two things simultaneously:

1. If you don't believe this article, wait for better reporting.

2. If you believe this article, wait for better reporting.

I was hoping that might remind some people to temper their expectations until more information is known, which is why the last sentence is the way it is, and why I cited each of the allegations.

Trying to reason with someone who flat out rejects nuance might be futile.

Who rejected nuance?

The parent expressly left their comment un-nuanced.

Are you redefining the term?

The OP said previously he wasn’t talking about political leanings.

I’ll would add he was referring to the positioning of paper’s history of being more “low street”, sensationalist with lower journalistic standards as opposed to the high standards gold standard harbinger of Truth publications like the NYT. The reason this description looks so out of place now, it’s because the others suck so much and the Post continues being the Post.

> More curious is the very direct "your team is too male" and the encouragement to fire someone.

Everyone in tech knows this is happening, and it's illegal, but nobody will do anything about it. Similar to ageism back in the 2000s.

Have you seen this first hand?

I have.

Only once or twice this egregious. Most of the time however it’s explicit diversity incentives for executives if they want to hit their perf targets. If you can’t get the hires, the other way to game it is to shrink the denominator if you fail to increase the numerator.

I have witnessed first hand discrimination based on race and gender. Ageism too.

I work at a FANG and there was a reshuffling in my team of 30 people as a new manager came in - there were 5 women/25 men. After the reshuffling, the 5 women became the 5 new TLs of the 5 projects our team was subdivided into. And the manager talks all the time about how he wants to empower women. Not sure if that counts. I guess it could have just been coincidence.

Is TL a Teralitre, Turkish lira or Teen's Love?

Tech Lead

Team/tech Lead?

I saw this in academia over a decade ago.

Someone who was the ultimate decider said that the group already had enough "pale males;" a look was given to me and guy in the wheelchair because, by virtue of our disabilities, we were presumed to already be on the Yay Diversity! Squad, despite our pallor and penisness.

That was the phrase, I was in the room, etc. It doesn't just happen, they don't really try to hide it now.

Had a manager at one job tell me explicitly that they gave an interview to a candidate but knew it wouldn't move forward to a hire since they wanted to hire a woman. I felt gross hearing and knowing that but it was said and not written so there was nothing I could do about it. And I probably would've gotten fired for raising an issue even if I did have that in writing.

By you sharing you have added some good to a bad situation.

Question for this sort of situation: could you send an email to "confirm the case" to your boss and your boss'boss for this? They would need to respond and get this in writing. At that point, if they fire you they will have a big problem, if they don't hire the person, they will still have a big problem.

I understand that it creates a whole set of bad situations, so just asking what's the theoretical appropriate way to handle this

No. Don't do this unless you have a backup job, or can survive fine for a while on unemployment. If you do want to report the behavior, report the pertinent details to the EEOC (or whatever is equivalent for your country).

Wouldn't the company be in big trouble if they fired you after that email?

Why go through all the trouble when they could just make you quit?

Perhaps you could build a case for constructive dismissal if you document everything including the sexism email

They could just not respond at all to the email. They could say the person receiving it didn't understand what the email was asking so deleted it. They could say that the managers never made any such statements and thought the employee (who they would also say had other performance or HR issues) was trying to entrap them, and that they fired the employee for the alleged entrapment.

Document and report. Don't try to catch someone unless you're advised to do so by a lawyer or law enforcement or the like.

Oh sure, I implied to sue only if a response was received

> Similar to ageism back in the 2000s.

do you believe ageism "solved", or do you mean it's something people talk about openly these days? I thought it was discussed in the 00s too.

I think it's much less of a problem these days, partly because the talent crunch forced tech companies to hire older employees as well.

It's still present, but not as rampant and intense as it was. Also, note that it was discussed and acknowledged at the time, but that didn't magically make it go away. Zuck stated on record that if you're over 30, successful companies should not employ you, and he was the founder, owner, and chief exec of a major tech corporation.

Everyone knew it was going on, it was also acknowledged, and it was illegal, yet nobody did anything about it, and it kept going. Dispels your illusion of how illegal / immoral practices just go away when they are exposed. The current trend of gender and race-based discrimination won't just go away by itself, either.

The ageists of the 00s now are running the company, but also nearing their 50s. So less ageism.

Once during a hiring panel at a previous role, the hiring manager asked us to be sure we reviewed the candidate as a junior. After we gave feedback, they mentioned they were being pressured to hire a woman and that this was why we were asked to judge the candidate below standards. Ultimately got the job, and while she turned out to be a quick learner and great coworker I still remember how shocked and… helpless I felt to actually witness it for myself. Several other candidates, all male, were not hired because we only had one remaining headcount. I feel like I was party to discrimination and still feel vaguely guilty about it.

After 16 years at Google, i'm pretty sure he doesn't have to work another day in his life.

You'd think, but then you read stories like this, about people who have worked 16 years at Google but still need the job badly:

https://www.businessinsider.com/laid-off-engineer-says-googl...

That article doesn't seem to say he needed the job badly.

Not in those words, no. But if you're that resentful about being laid off, and talking to the media about what a cosmic injustice it is rather than, "oh, well, I guess I can start spending some of the interest on the fortune I built up from 16 years at Google", then yes, you do still need the job badly.

Hm? If you need work and are laid off you don't get mad: you get another job.

You get mad if you were working for prestige, connections, or power-- things you can't just replace by getting another job.

>Hm? If you need work and are laid off you don't get mad: you get another job.

Some people do both -- from the context, it sounds like Moore also hopes to replace it with a similar job, while also venting to anyone in the media who will propagate his framing about what a horrible injustice it is that Google can pay him a fortune and keep him around for 16 years.

>You get mad if you were working for prestige, connections, or power-- things you can't just replace by getting another job.

And this fits your model of someone eager to trade personal time for the prospect of power even when his material needs are met? From the link:

>>"This also just drives home that work is not your life, and employers — especially big, faceless ones like Google — see you as 100% disposable," Moore said.

>>"Live life, not work," he added.

> hopes to replace it with a similar job, while also venting to anyone in the media

If so, it's a foolish move! Venting in public absolutely makes someone less employable -- making it a freedom that people with less need of employment have more of!

> And this fits your model of someone eager

I don't know him so I could only speculate and I don't really have any speculation specific to him to offer.

The reason I replied was to dispute the position you took that being mad meant he needed the job. I stated it too strongly: I should have just said "people can get mad about losing a job even when they don't need it, e.g. if they were working for prestige, connections, or power-- probably more so since these are things you can't just replace by getting another job."

In other words needing it may be sufficient, but it's not necessary. I think those other reasons are stronger reasons to be mad-- they're harder to replace than a job.

> "This also just drives home that work is not your life, and employers — especially big, faceless ones like Google — see you as 100% disposable," "Live life, not work," he added.

I've heard statements just like that from people who I know have eight figure net worths and continue to work for someone else. ::shrugs::

People who are laid off or fired can get mad for a variety of reasons other than those three you listed. Someone I know worked a lot to build a particular business and was promised by the owner that he'd always have a position there. Then he was let go when the economy went bad. He felt betrayed. Betrayal engenders anger, too.

There are reasons beyond compensation to like a job (fulfillment, relationships, status, etc). If you want to do Google-scale anything, at best you've got 4 other companies to choose from. So you're going to feel hurt if you lose that opportunity for reasons you feel are beyond your control. Especially if you've put 16 years into it and you feel the loyalty is due back.

I don't think he talked to the media. The article appears to just be quoting from his LinkedIn post, and other parts of his LinkedIn page. Also I'm not sure he's saying it's a cosmic injustice.

He wasn't an engineer, so I'm sure his compensation was much lower than what you think.

You have it backward.

Eng managers, directors, and VP's make tons more money than engineers.

Olohan was promoted to managing director of food, beverages, and restaurants

Mate, he was a director and he has 7 kids. He must be at least well off. Probably extremely well off.

> he has 7 kids

In New York City. You're right, that requires a big income. And puts a sizeable dent in it.

I worked at a company a few years back where the hiring manager for the engineering and product teams proudly exclaimed that she would actively go against hiring a man, until the teams were at minimum 50% women and would maintain this ratio once she reached that goal.

Totally admirable intention, for sure (if only viewed from the lens of strict equality). But I’m sure the 90% of applicants that were male wouldn’t see it that way. So, poor execution.

Edit: clarified some incendiary phrasing

> STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women

So that women prefer to pick other fields is STEM's fault?

That women face negative pressure when they go into STEM is a real and documented problem.

Negative pressure from who?

From the peers.

The main reason why girls are not choosing STEM is because it doesn't intrest them as much. You can try to put the blame on anything you want, but that's reality.

I love technical things and am the father of 1 son and 3 girls. I of course would love to do technical things with all of them. With my son it's easy to get him excited about lego and such. With my girls? Well, maybe you should give it a try. I decided to play with my kids the things they like to play with. And with my girls it's (unfortunately for me) non technical things.

This preference is also highly documented in gender equal societies. So do us all a favor and stop talking bullshit while it's obvious why women don't select STEM: they don't want to.

PS: My oldest daughter is going to follow STEM next year. I'm happy, but mainly wish her to be happy. If she continues it, fine. If she decides she wants to do something else, also fine. She's good at math so that's the main reason she picked it.

Are your girls representative of the entire female population?

Seems like it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox#:~:tex....

This whole thread is nothing but documentation of the reverse; men being discriminated against left right and center, women being given fake interviews where they're guaranteed to get hired anyway due to Diversity! managers, team re-orgs where the explicitly feminist manager somehow totally by coincidence selects every single woman to be a TL and creates exactly enough teams for them to lead, etc.

In contrast this "real and documented" is just an assertion. I never saw any evidence of it.

> STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women

Is this a Western/US thing? Woman STEM graduates outnumber man in a number of countries. Mine and Iran for example but most Muslim countries have strong woman numbers.

I don't think STEM in the west is discriminatory to women, out of the blue. It can't be more discriminatory than Iran? Unless, there is data and research that suggests otherwise.

Not just Muslim countries but Asia’s numbers are more even too. Not sure what happened but the West got leapfrogged by a lot of the rest of the world in this regard. We like to think we’re the shining light of progressivism but the reality may be more complicated than that.

There's a study showing more progressive countries have fewer women in tech. Because when people don't have to worry about putting a roof over their head, affording food and medical bills, they're more likely to pick the career that interests them. And fewer women are interested in STEM. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... In Asia and the middle east people are generally poorer and with fewer opportunities (and there's much less social welfare there), so they need to prioritise economics over interest when choosing a career.

I can only speak of my country (still a Muslim country though more liberal than your average). The reason woman study super-hard is that it gives them freedom. It's not accepted, socially, for a woman, for example, to take a trip to another city and stay alone in a hotel. However, it's totally okay if she is a medical doctor or an engineer in a mission. The same for travelling outside of the country.

These might be strong incentives for woman to pursue STEM degrees. These same incentives don't exist for Western woman since they already have their freedoms unquestioned. Also, a little note: This is just a speculation from me (less than an opinion) might be completely wrong.

Asian countries developed much later. That is why some countries also have mobile payments instead of credit cards. Because credit cards never became the incumbent in the first place. Many western countries have a relatively unbroken history from early industrialism to post-WWII development to home computers in the 80s to early Internet startups. Japan, which developed earlier than India or China, doesn't have a high percentage of women in STEM. The US used to have a higher percentage of women in computer science in the 80s when it was a less popular field. If you instead look at gender distribution in something older like politics or the military western countries often do a lot better than the rest of the world.

I think the issue is one of hiring, promotion, and pay. It's widely reported in the USA that women generally do better in school than men.

“Totally admirable intention”

What? That’s not admirable at all. That’s blatant sexism.

“(STEM is 100% historically discriminatory to women)”

Lol no, if anything it’s clearly discriminatory towards men in the false assumption that low female population isn’t an internal cause

I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I'll post them again. Pretty much every job has a gender imbalance to some degree or another.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/software-deve...

Gender imbalance on it's own doesn't say everything. You should actually talk with women in STEM. Many of them shared their horrible experiences so far.

Source?

I agree we should work to reduce horrible experiences.

My point is that we shouldn't be surprised by a gender imbalance on priors. By itself, a gender imbalance only goes to show that software engineering is like a lot of other jobs.

BTW, my suspicion is that similar experiences happen in many industries, and industries vary according to (a) how horrible a given experience is said to be and (b) social norms around registering a complaint.

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