
Oh, you’re with them? (2016) - minikites
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20161011-00/?p=94486?
======
n00b101
I don't think this kind of thing is isolated to the tech industry. Edith
Cooper at Goldman Sachs shared this recently:

"I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of
a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter.
I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past
30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs.

I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn).
I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I
got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting
(despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat
check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also
been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have
had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior
person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed
to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-
on...](http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on-talking-
about-race-at-work-2016-9)

------
Archio
This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the
administrative assistant was towards the department head.

Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech
industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems
to be there as well:

>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost
all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work
environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.

There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket
scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after
being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry
_specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and
high value fields (principally: medicine and law)?

Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men,
that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment,
and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant
in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason,
these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they
experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly
equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to
walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be
surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background.

What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine
or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and
deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our
gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which
grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students
in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men?

[0] [http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-
graduate...](http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-
gender/?dataView=1&currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D)

~~~
csours
I am guilty of nudging a woman towards the exit of CS.

In college one of my classmates was not understanding the material, and I
asked her if she thought she really wanted to do CS...

The thing is, a bunch of other guys were also not understanding the material,
and I didn't say anything to them.

I still think about it from time to time, and wherever you are, I'm sorry M. I
don't think I can fix that, but I can speak up now.

~~~
wolf550e
Objectively, if it's true that women need to perform much better than men to
get promoted, then being a woman who struggles with the material in a male
dominated field would suck, and maybe you did her a favor.

I think the cycle can be broken if current practitioners can find young women
who are willing to work extra hard (harder than their male peers) and give
those women as much tutoring as they can handle (I certainly can't study for a
full day, and I guess this plan requires studying overtime) so they can ace
tests/projects, advance in the industry, change norms and people's
expectations from women and make it easier for the next generation of women.
There will be accusations of favoritism but as long as it's clear that they
succeed because they worked hard and did the work themselves and not because
they were helped, the accusations shouldn't get anywhere. Basically, I'm
against favoring women over more qualified (or even as-qualified) men, but
helping women become the most qualified candidate is definitely fair game.

------
nl
I think about this a lot.

I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the
person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We
had person Y from that course and they were bad".

It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made
me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on
the color characteristic and project from sparse examples.

I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone
could come up with a solution.

~~~
foobazzy
I believe there's nothing wrong with coming up with biases based on evaluating
a person's technical abilities for a job role. (Isn't that the whole point?)
You know the part where the requirements mention a skill set you should
possess. If a person with a particular skill set/course wasn't able to perform
as expected, then maybe that is not what you want.

However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments
off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of
people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to
drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper
analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really
solve this. Or so I believe.

And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe
it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill
set to perform the job properly.

------
charles-salvia
If you trained a neural network to recognize "high powered tech executives",
it will likely start picking up on features associated with 30 to 40 year old
(mostly white) males wearing sweaters or "business casual" attire. It probably
would report a low value if you showed it a minority female. (Google "tech
executive" on Google images to test this out.)

Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory
data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and
racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a
female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and
therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future.

There are only two solutions:

(1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect
it.

(2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases.

Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.

~~~
throwaway399
I think treating (1) by lowering requirements is bad because now people will
stereotype that that person got there on ez mode.

(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and
it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking
about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing
is impossible.

I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or
former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were
interested in.

Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That
way there would be no need for thought police.

~~~
aaron-lebo
_I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or
former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were
interested in._

That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That
_might_ get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?

~~~
throwaway399
The whole point is changing it in such a way that everyone "wants" to do these
in-demand jobs. Chinese students aren't unhappy with their job choices.

Edit:

I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an
abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost
impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all
possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question,
they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.

~~~
aaron-lebo
We could similarly restrict all food production to rice and people would get
used to it and even enjoy it, but that doesn't mean it is a solution towards a
more diverse diet.

You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by
reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?

edit: your edit makes more sense :)

~~~
throwaway399
Thanks!

Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because

a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone

We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small
e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing
databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you
could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG
drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games
or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc

B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am
not implying avoiding increasing specialization.

------
synicalx
Sorry, but why are we immediately assuming this wasn't an
accident/unintentional? Did I miss the part where the admin assistant took off
their KKK costume and stick-on Adolf Hitler moustache before shaking
everyone's hand?

Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume
every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive?

I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or
demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand,
apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to
fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting
here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her
much.

