The Economist had an article which tangentially comports with her comment above:
For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot.
Without knowing much about the person who wrote the article (as it's an anonymous guest post), I know a lot of women, myself included at points in the past, can be very harsh and judgemental towards other women. There's an attitude among a lot of women, especially in youth, that other women are too emotional, gossips, obsessed with looks, and so on. Many grow out of this, and some don't. If there is any real psychological difference between women and men, I think this sort of unnecessary competition, jealousy, or general discomfort towards other people of our same gender is where it lies. I'm sure there's some interesting studies on this kind of thing out there somewhere.
For attractive women, there generally is no benefit from being part of a group of attractive women, since it doesn't materially increase propinquity with attractive men as far as I can tell, but it does materially increase competition for the alpha male.
Basically, mating-wise, men win more often when they cooperate and women win more often when they compete. Anyone know of any science to support this observation or am I way out on a limb here?
Another hypothesis worth considering is that intrasexual selection tactics of women are tolerated in the workplace but those of men are not.
Across many species and many societies, male intrasexual selection takes places as overt direct competition (hand-to-hand combat, sports, male elephant seals). With females (again across species and across societies), intrasexual selection is more often indirect due to female choice.
Direct competition is observable and easily addressed. Indirect competition is not by virtue of being indirect. This means that the modern workplace does not afford the conditions for men to compete much if at all except via promotion for doing good work. There are not the same mechanisms and norms in place in many modern workplaces to direct energy spent on indirect competition to more productive outlets.
I expect another downvote here too because acknowledging the existence of differences between genders is only frowned upon when talking about humans, but whatever.
After far as the workplace behavior of women, I've found that it's approximately the same, but perhaps more muted in Asian cultures.
Again, all anecdotal here. So take it with a grain of salt. What has been your experience?
Even if the guess that "female HR workers don't want to hire other pretty females" is correct, you have no idea whether the same would be true were the roles reversed. Would all-male HR departments be less likely to call attractive men for interviews? It's very possible.
The study you cite in no way supports the authors claim that women gossip more.
That actually sounds like jealousy.
So if it is true that women are discriminated against in the tech industry, why is that so, given that most people involved in the hiring process are also women?
The fact that attractive women are more discriminated against than plain ones is something that never occurred to me, I always believed it was the other way round. And I never considered that attractive men were treated more favorably. I think at the very least the study shows that discrimination is very hard to root out, and simply hiring along certain quotas doesn't really solve the problem at all.
And you're completely right, the issue is not simple in any way. We're stuck making half-observations, trying to make connections between disparate points, etc. But what that tells me is that we're dealing with a very vague, soft, and ultimately subjective issue. Which people are trying to measure using quantitative, hard measurements.