
Sexism, racism and bullying are driving people out of tech, study finds - anigbrowl
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/tech-industry-sexism-racism-silicon-valley-study
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wellsjohnston
I stopped reading when I saw they were quoting Ellen Pao.

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Grangar
And of course the article doesn't mention she lost the lawsuit.

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malandrew
This is such an astute observation. If you take an article about individuals
or companies the media loves to denigrate, they will take every opportunity to
not only mention other negative things but cross link to every previously
written negative story they've published, sometimes to the point where half an
article is referenced to many of the past negative things.

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Grangar
This was related to the article. It paints her as if she's proved how systemic
sexism caused her to lose her job, but she failed to lose that in court. In
fact, it's the opposite - as far as I'm concerned the court showed that she
was either making things up or blowing them way out of proportion.

You can't just conveniently leave that out.

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vacri
> _Thirty percent of underrepresented women said they were passed over for a
> promotion, a rate significantly higher than white and Asian women_

It's weird that racism outside of tech is generally considered "whites vs
everyone else", whereas racism in tech is "whites and asians vs everyone
else".

Its a bit like when google got pinged for lack of diversity, because they had
overrepresented asians and underrepresented blacks. Enough asians in fact,
that in order to have their employee makeup match the general public, that as
well as blacks, they'd have to hire more whites.

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vivekd
I think you are missing the point of the article. The article is not about
initiatives to get pre-set numbers of people of a certain race without regard
to merit and qualification (which is what your comment is about). The article
is about people who met the requirements, and were qualified, and got the job
on the merits. The article is about how these people choosing to leave tech in
high numbers because they feel the environment is racist and sexist and it
raises questions about how that can be properly dealt with by the tech
community.

If Black and Hispanic women feel as they are being passed over for promotion
at rates higher than other women despite qualifications, I think it's time to
at least look at that and investigate instead of dismissing it out of hand.
And really I think that dismissive attitude is part of what these people are
complaining about.

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malandrew
The problem I have with these reports is that they are based on self reports
and feelings. If you constantly tell people that their group is being
victimized, they will start interpreting everything that happens to them
through victim-colored glasses and will interpret many actions from actual
discrimination to non-descriminatory actions as descrimination. We need
objective measures of discrimination not feelings and self reports. Teaching
people to interpret everything as discrimination by default actively harms
them because it robs them of the opportunity of attributing the cause to their
own shortcomings (when that is actually the cause) and therefore being able to
come to the conclusion that they need to change to overcome the circumstance.
If the desired goal is success at the _individual_ level, it is simply not
productive/constructive to arrive at any conclusion where you externalize
blame.

FWIW, I'm an engineer from Latin America myself. Latin America will never be
as well represented as people from Asia, especially from China, India, Korea
and Japan, because those countries academically value (1) engineering and (2)
English more highly than any country in Latin America. Until countries in
Latin America start doing the same, I don't expect this to change.

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vivekd
>Teaching people to interpret everything as discrimination by default

I don't see any evidence of anybody doing that. What I see is people
complaining of discrimination and it being waived away and dismissed. In a
normal, non-sexist, non-racist sector, when people say they feel they are
being discriminated, it would be investigated to see if there is in fact any
real discrimination. Apparently in tech it's dismissed as "ah fuck your
feelings, you've just learned to see everything as discriminatory"

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malandrew
I'm all for measuring discrimination. What I expressed concern with is
measuring the _perception_ of discrimination which is fraught with all sorts
of biases.

In fact, just today there was another front page story today that got flagged
that is perfectly demonstrative of this problem:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14252978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14252978)

The headline is inflammatory and suggests falsely that they've measured
something that "objectively" proves discrimination is happening and I'm sure
people shared it and upvoted it based on the title alone because it confirms
their biases about discrimination being all-pervasive. However a closer
examination of the study shows that _once you account for differences in level
of the engineer_ that there is in fact no difference. I see this all the time.
Anecdotally, the majority of studies and articles claiming discrimination and
using data fall prey to the base rate fallacy and misinterpret the results to
show discrimination where none exists or where it it is small enough to not be
measurable.

I am not disputing that discrimination exists, but it would be prudent to stop
crying wolf all the time. In 2017, I have seen remarkably few "smoking guns"
relative to the amount of noise we see. What I have seen is an increase in how
everything is distorted to maximum effect by people with an agenda to say
discrimination is the cause of all the problems.

