Hacker News Reader

Comment by naijaboiler | Hacker News Reader

are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.

Ask a "woman of color" how much of this perceived advantage they actually enjoy in real life, especially from their perspective. You will be shocked the gap between what you presume and what the reality is.

View on HN

When you sit in on staff meeting, and the president explicitly says, "we are not hiring or promoting any more white men, only women of color and those of other marginalized groups", you absolutely know it for a fact. This in fact occurred, and continues to occur, as I can personally attest, at a for-profit college in NYC. And in fact, although ~10 people have been hired over the last few years, none of them have been white men.

Obviously that isn't to say women of color have it easy (nobody has it easy these days), but it is beyond dispute that this sort of discrimination is rampant in certain industries (like higher education) and in certain cities.

And for people who say this is illegal (and perhaps it is), when a white man (not me), who was a victim of this policy (many accolades, highest performance reviews, seniority), was repeatedly passed over for promotion by women of color and other "marginalized" people, filed a complaint with the NYC EEOC office, he was met with derision.

Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.

> are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.

As a hiring manager in a fortune 100 who saw firsthand the delta between white men and everyone else in terms of the amount of justification required for hiring, promoting, and firing... yes, I do know this for a fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com