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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated.

Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company.

This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements.

That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.

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Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up.

Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...

Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?

About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.

Except no one made that claim. Parent comment was sharing a personal anectode they witnessed. You on the other hand weren't.

No, this happens because you score brownie points if you have a female workforce or a diverse (read non-white) workforce.

In many countries (UK in my case) "positive discrimination" (an oxymoron, if you ask me) is enshrined in law and actually allow to discriminate candidates based on gender.

At least 3 of my clients work with recruiters that bring candidates who are only female or non white. (I'm not white myself but I found the clients outside of recruitments, I hope I'm not a diversity hire!).

Beside, whenever you start applying non meritocratic filters, the pool of talent shrink and you are forced to pick among a smaller pool, which inevitably will have less of the most talented folks.

The fact she was proud of it and that at that time this form of discrimination was considered laudable is a signal that it was more likely just simple discrimination.

It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a job I'm fighting for them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.

You're mistaking prevalence for bias.

There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why).

However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women.

As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.

I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.

> As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment.

As a man in this field, I can pretty concretely say I have never experienced the problems getting hired or getting promoted she just described.

That’s a great anecdote for you, however it doesn’t change the fact that for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man.

The only reason people think differently is because they see more men than women, and mistake that prevalence for bias.

> for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man.

You keep making claims like this, but never with data. Got any? Because I only ever see this backed by anecdotes.

Tech companies keep trialing blind hiring, then abandoning it, because it results in fewer women being hired rather than more.

Women-only recruiting events exist.

Companies incentivise managers to hire and promote women over men. I’ve seen companies use KPIs/quotas, and companies where you are allowed more headcount if you hire majority women.

So, unsupported assertions and anecdotes it is then.

I've been told directly by HR that "your next hire better be a woman", and not in a joking way.

So, anecdatum, yes, but until studies come out like the one posted then nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes.

BTW that experience was not a fun one as it really harmed my self-image, I really felt like I was less valuable as a person and made me quite bitter for a while, I will admit that right-wing rhetoric became very comforting, luckily I was not seduced but I can understand how people could be.

That sucks, it shouldn't have happened. Assuming it happened as presented rather than being a critical look at your hiring practices it's pretty clearly discriminatory.

> nobody is allowed to even express these anecdotes

I mean, you just did and don't appear to be that concerned about someone linking it back to you.

I find the whole "we aren't allowed to talk about this" thing a bit of an ironic response here, because if you take a look at this thread it started with a woman sharing her experiences from her career, with them being brushed off as anecdotal, and obviously, she's privileged, and it's men who are disadvantaged now.

It looks to me like she got the exact same pushback the male anecdote did. Is she also "not allowed to express her anecdotes"?

I don't care because I am very intentional about the fact that I present myself as transparently as possible, it is certainly not comfortable to do so, and there is a very large part of my mind that is set on the notion that someone will put me on a list of nazi's or try to get me fired or something because I dissented against the mainstream ideology.

Please don't mistake the courage to speak up as being easy, because it's really not, it's deeply uncomfortable and a quite scary.

It's fair to liken my experiences to others, I don't think that anyone shouldn't be permitted to share anecdotes. However the major differing factor here is that there are intentional support networks along with a social understanding that we should be sympathetic to the anecdotes of women. Unintentionally that forces out the anecdotes of men. Perhaps because unscrupulous men use them as bad faith attacks to drown out conversations that women needed to have in the past- however given than there were 8 workshops explicitly for women in gaming last year in my building and 2 for any other kind of gaming (meaning women were permitted to attend 100% of the workshops and I was permitted to attend 20%), they definitely have a space to express their anecdotes.

If anyone is drowning them out, it's a fringe minority.

If this is the case why aren’t we seeing large influxes of women into software? If it’s substantially easier I’d expect us to see people taking advantage of that.

it is not the case :) you are trying to apply common sense with people commenting on this thread that have none

Common sense can be wrong. I doubt that most people pick their college major based on what will be the easiest, and those that are inclined to pick the easy route probably aren't going to pick computer science, which is extremely competitive these days.

I also doubt that any female computer science mentors are going to tell everyone that it's an easy job where being female gives you significant tailwinds, whether or not that's true.

Fact is, it's highly competitive. 18% of CS graduates are female. Even assuming that they are twice as likely to be promoted as their male counterparts, if only 10 of every 100 engineers are promoted each year, that means 4 promoted female engineers against 14 non-promotions. So much more likely that a prospective mentor will tell you that it's a hard job than tell you about their easy promotion, even assuming a strong tailwind.

Software engineering does not help Instagram posts, but does help hacking video games, for example.

You claim that, but I've seen research that shows that even when a company actively tries to hire more women, they still subconsciously give men preferential treatment, simply because they look the part.

Blind hiring studies tend to disprove that, at least in the tech industry.

When you remove all indicators of gender companies hire fewer women, which means knowing that a candidate is a woman results in higher likelihood to hire than not knowing gender.

Really? When I was in university in the 1990s, Math had more women than men.

Women were rarer in CS, but still more common than female software developers I've encountered in my working life. All of the ones I've worked with were excellent.

That's crazy about math I can't even picture it. Wild how it's swung completely the other direction in -25 years which is what, two generations? I would love to know the history of how maths even growing became such a strongly "boy" subject.

Having spoken with some truly incredible women engineers who battled through the tiers and tiers and tiers of strife and struggles and bullshit women in the engineering world have to deal with to make any sort of progression for themselves, that 5:1 in favor of women is a VERY good thing. How many 1:5 man teams have you seen? How many 0:5 man teams?

Getting more women and getting more women-majority teams is a net good not only to the hilarious gender disparity in tech but also for the individual engineers, especially women, who don’t have strong, similar-to-themselves mentors and people to look up to.

When my brother was starting his career in university IT in the very early 90s, CS was still part of the math department and most places were anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 women. Many people at the time considered operating a computer to be equivalent to secretarial work.

Such a gender disparity in tech is relatively recent and pretty much since the iPhone and the flood of zero-interest money into the industry. And yet all of the big FAANGs hire lots of women.

And as someone who has done lots of hiring across the industry, generally women don't even apply to jobs that aren't big recognized brands anymore.

> pretty much since the iPhone

I would say it's since the dot-com crash, I went to university in 2003 and it was like 100:1 men in the CS courses back then.

And nobody was complaining about that then either because there were no job prospects and the high salaries from pre-crash were long gone.

So basically, “discrimination is okay when I do it”.

It’s concerning how many people don’t see other people as individuals and instead see them as classes. This intellectual laziness results in discriminatory outcomes because it presumes that balance can be achieved by punishing different individuals within the same class.

It’s terrible that a 50 year old woman experienced discrimination, but privileging a 20 year old women doesn’t fix that. You’re ignoring the individuals that were harmed, privileging someone else that doesn’t need it, discriminating against 20 year old men to “balance” the privilege that 50 year old men received.

None of this makes sense.

The fact that this is downvoted, shows HN commentators have no idea why the current president won.

Those 20 year olds aren’t ignorant of the fact that they are being discriminated against, and they will one day be our future voters and politicians.

Can we be surprised when they want to burn it all down? Can we be surprised when they flock to anyone offering a sympathetic ear?

Reverse discrimination is a fundamentally short term and self-defeating strategy.

I’m not sure if it’s automated behaviour, but I often notice my posts go to -3 within a minute of being posted then climb back to positive over time.

There are definitely bots crawling this site for things to engage with, the speed in which votes happen compared to how long it would take to read a comment I make is inhuman.

I doubt its HN itself, and it seems positive for some things (anything that could be seen as pro-startup, pro-company, anti-regulation), while negative for other things (anything pro-europe, or political in a way that could be misconstrued as an endorsement of the right- even if the comment itself is actively admonishing the right).

I have contemplated experimenting with short lived comments (essentially: spam) to see how they are manipulated and to confirm this behaviour, but I doubt dang would approve, so I have refrained.

Case-in-point: this comment was downvoted within 1s of being posted.

I was listening to MLK's speech the other day, and he said he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. Seems like that's not what is happening today, racism (and sexism) is alive and well. Around the time in question Google fired one of their employees for publishing a memo about gender differences, Google gave in to the cancel mob and fired him (James Damore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

Are you saying women don’t face sexism anymore?

Of course they do, but as a cohort, young men experience substantially more discrimination than young women, because they are being punished for the sins of previous generations.

If you look at the general experiences of a young men, you’ll see that they are discriminated against in university admissions, in early career hiring and in early career promotion.

This is justified by data points which average outcomes over different age groups. The result may be company wide gender balance, but when you break it down by age you see that it’s not really a balance, it’s just discrimination against women in some cohorts and discrimination against men in others.

This is the root problem with DEI. You’re punishing one generation for the actions of a different generation, and pretending that’s fair.

How else do you fix it? If you leave it alone, the problem will keep persisting because there is no reason to change.

Simple.

You stop evil wherever you see it. If you see actively discriminatory practices, kill them.

However, you do not commit an evil, to right another evil. You do not discriminate against anyone, even the over-represented majority, to accomplish any goals, or they can and will one day react violently and probably win.

Fighting fire with fire burns the world down. It’s not a fun answer; people who like being activists and feeling morally superior don’t like being told to stand down, but that’s the only thing that will work.

Understand that discrimination is experienced individually.

You cannot fix the discrimination an individual experiences by discriminating against a different individual in return.

You cannot "balance" the discrimination a group of people experienced in the past, by discriminating against a different group of people today.

Doing so will just result in an oscillation, with men of the past being privileged over women, leading to women of today being privileged over men, leading to men of the future being privileged over women etc.

Of course they do, but as a cohort, young men experience substantially more discrimination than young women, because they are being punished for the sins of previous generations.

don’t be silly. insane statements like this you’d have to back with (non-existent) data. so just stop it with this absolute garbage. men, especially white, have every fucking imaginable advantage possible in this country from the time they are born until they are 6 feet under. and of course many find ways to fuck it up and then blame society for it. fucking hell

Men, especially white men, are overrepresented at the extremes.

The worst life available to you in the west is only afforded to white men, you don't even register that they're human.

the best life available to you in the west is only afforded to white men.

Stop trying to promote suffering of the former because of the perceived injustice of the latter, it's sick.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/poverty-hurts-the-boys-th...

ouch don't say that ... HN is overrepresented by white men too so you know, this comment won't be taken all too well :)

just ask yourself this - if you had say a white son - would you trade that for ANYTHING else given an opportunity? any other skin color? any other sex/gender?

Of course not so sit down until the answer to this question is different (it will never be)

Such a strange take on this.

how so? if you are a parent you only want the absolute best for your child. so if your child (based on race/sex/...) is apparently discriminated against wouldn't you want what's the best for your child? it is exactly the take that gets to the root of these silly discussions, if your child is X and Y has all these "apparent advantages" wouldn't you want your child to have them?

Insert "no, that's a completely different sentence. Wtf are you talking about?" meme here.

Yeah, experience is that women tend to stick together on teams because of the shit they experience all the time on other teams. Mentoring women engineers was eye opening at the number get asked out at work or get asked if they are engineers or other a million other problems. If people have a problem with women engineers sticking together they first have to fix the culture problem.

Great - you provide an anecdotal case of a mid tier manager showing off some metric. What I want to know: is the performance of this team/org worse, better or the same as others?

> Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately quite common in that company.

You have to ask yourself: why does nobody speak up? This is because of the loss of worker power. Corporate MBA flunkies don’t give a fuck about pay equity. If they can under pay (man|woman|non-binary) folk, they will do it and use politics/fake economics as cover to do so.

Tech workers not unionizing has fucked not only people of today. But people of tomorrow (your children and grand children).

But sure, yea let’s keep that fantasy alive of “yea we should unionize but I want to be a billionaire too and exploit others so let’s not do that. Also I get paid 6 figs to not care about others”

All the unionised sectors I know people in complains about unions extracting money for them and not doing anything

That's not the problem and not the solution.

Nobody speaks up because if you do you are canceled and branded as racist / mysoginist. Society is too polarised and freedom of speech is just a memory.

That said, I noticed (for the first time) people complaining and leaving 0 stars reviews at the last DEI training so maybe the times are changing.

Let's hope not.

Unions would be terrible for tech workers, because of the high variance in output between individuals.

Your best workers would be underpaid and leave, your worst overpaid and stay.

LOLOLOL and the union dues too, right? Guy is fresh out of Praeger U.

Good ‘ole “your best talent leaves and worst talent stays” anti-union/union busting propaganda. Have heard this many times over the years yet have not seen any data confirming this.

Plays on your emotions but besides fear it doesn’t have any legs to stand on.

Unions standardise wages.

That’s not much of a problem in most low skill roles where employee productivity exists in a narrow band, but it will never be tolerated by high skill workers.

It’s not just unions, you also see this effect when employers use pay guides to limit wages. The best employees leave because they are no longer being paid in proportion to their value.

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