this attitude, to me, is unbelievable. Of course they are human beings. What else would they be?
If you're going to make a claim about HR, make it on its merits. I have said they're nothing but a bunch of good looking girls. They have zero understanding about any of the roles they're hiring for, and no incentive to learn. Care to contradict me?
And I never claimed otherwise. But I really resent your accusation of sexism, since I believe I am extremely fair to both sexes.
It is a plain fact that the attitude towards HR departments here is mostly negative. It is another plain fact that those departments are mostly female. If these facts are sexist, then reality is sexist.
Oh, and the all-male "IT department" is also richly deserving of criticism, though not by me since I jumped that ship long ago. I look forward to your devout claims of sexism when such a criticism does occur, however.
It boils down to this: if you put the wrong people in charge of very important stuff, then (long term) you are fucked.
I believe you when you say that's what you've observed. But, whether you like it or not, it's not okay (in public, at least) to make statements which link gender, race, etc., with competence.
No fair, you (or some other reader) might say. I'm just reporting my observations. But I claim that you have a responsibility to do more than simply report your observations, and it's because people are stupid. When we read "A and B go together," we humans immediately and instinctively (system 1) draw causal conclusions about A and B. It doesn't matter if it's anecdotal evidence; it doesn't matter that correlation does not equal causation. Not for System 1, anyway. And those causal conclusions lead to making bad subconscious assumptions, and later lead to actual sexism down the road. All because of comments like yours -- "A and B go together".
So don't do it. Suppress your urge to report your observations when they could lead to others making sexist/racist assumptions in the future. Bad HR department? Say "bad HR department" and leave the part about gender out.
(I would say that this only applies to speaking/writing in public. In private, you know who your audience is, and what conclusions they will draw from your words, so you can afford to be freer.)
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the original complaint. The idea was that HR itself is a problem. It's not about people being bad at HR. And your suggestion to 'Suppress your urge to report your observations when they could lead to others making sexist/racist assumptions in the future.' deeply bothers me. If we pretend things don't exist because they look sexist/racist/etc, we get in even deeper problems of trying to figure out what is real.
(Although personally, I don't see what the gender of the HR department adds to the discussion anyway.)
No doubt, but this doesn't scale. Right now you and I both are suffering from bad hiring decisions from local government up. I cannot wait for the great wheel to turn and bad hirers to be punished in the afterlife.
> I don't see what the gender of the HR department adds to the discussion
HR is a girl's club, just like IT is a boy's club, and deserves to be called out as such. The gender is relevant, indeed central.
I think this about sums up the comment. You mentioned cute women in HR as ones who are cute and don't know about the job to properly hire.
The next avenue to attack is "denigrating" booth 'people' because we are not allowed to hilight the obvious sexuality of the (shudder) women.
I'm sure women all around the world are extremely interested in Ryan Gosling's personality.
His comment pertaining to not canning all of HR because they are the only cute GIRLS is sexist.
There are a lot more women in HR than men, and there are a lot more men in programming than women. There are many reasons why this is the case, many of which relate to sexism, but the fact that your overall result is gender-skewed is not in any way indicative of sexism in the hiring process.
So if you're going to send a spaceship to Mars for a couple of years, you'd better mix some women in there, whether you consider it sexist or not. Likewise if you're going to put some people in a high-pressure startup for a couple of years, where they're spending almost all of their time and energy at the office, you'll probably have better and more consistent outcomes with a diverse group. That means both men and women, junior and senior, deep thinkers and fast movers.