There is the flip side too. I wouldn't want to be known as the diversity hire. I want to be judged on my work and my skills. Not on what chromosomes I carry or what my melenin level is.
The more we keep framing things in the context of hiring to meet gender based quotas, the more people will see us as diversity hires. I would hate that more than knowing someone doesn't like me because of my gender because that persons mind I can maybe change via my skills and work.
Yes there are "diversity" hires, that is, people who are hired not based on their technical skill, but based on the desire of management to have more women/POC on the team. There are often financial incentives (bonuses) ties to improving diversity numbers, so there will of course be skepticism when a female junior dev gets promoted to senior dev, then manager in a two years. I've been on hiring committees where the team gave a candidate a low score on technical ability and said "we don't want this person" and because of some desired biological trait they posses, they were hired anyway.
That being said, I've seen it with males as well, but it has been more of the one guy on the team gets his MBA/college buddy hired kind of thing. In both cases, employees would be rightfully skeptical because of outside influences in the hiring/promotion process that are trying to purposefully achieve some end goal.
My wife, who formerly worked as a software dev, hated this aspect of the industry because there were so many women-in-tech groups that were trying to help (a.k.a. coddle) her achieve something she could easily achieve on her own by her own technical acumen. In similar vain, I've gotten jobs because of who I know more than what I know before (in my case it was because I'm a submarine vet and the hiring manager was also a former submariner), and yeah, it does undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something on your own.
Not the same, but as someone who is still as an adult growing out of being "the weird/socially inept/imposter syndrome kid":
Don't think about it. Of many valid reasons to work to change ones behavior, I don't think this is one of them. All that effort you were spending trying to change something that 1. may not be happening and 2. if it is, is "pretty damn typical human psychology" (It's as old as humanity to find ways to look down on others) and there's not really pragmatic ways to stop that short of a lobotomy. Spend that effort on excelling in what you do. Bust ass and the people who matter will respect you regardless, and it makes it easier to tune out the ones who don't.
Feel free to ignore this advice, I've long since decided to avoid commenting in threads like the overarching, but your original concerns and question made me want to try and contribute at least something marginal :)
Maybe that’s the problem of sexist and racist white men who can’t believe that a woman or PoC could possibly be here based on merit and always treat them with suspicion. It’s not the fault of people trying to fix the problem.
If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their gender and/or race, then they aren't there by merit. That's exactly what some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely warranted.
The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some statistic?
That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-inclined and less sexist team before leaving the tech industry for good. She always said the "women-in-tech" groups did more harm than good and thinks its just one big "women/POC-in-tech industry" that unfortunately won't be going away anytime soon since there is now so much money involved.
Yea, I saw the women in machine learning group at NIPS and was really wondering if this is a good thing or not.
Now they are considering Black in Machine Learning too (or something like that).
This all just seems sexist and racist. Mathematics and statistics shouldn't be conditioned on race and gender! What's next, there are too many Jews who win the Nobel prize?? Doesn't this type of thinking remind people of the horrible past?
White men get advantaged over nonwhite nonmen in pretty much all aspects of society. “Preferential” treatment towards people other than white men is really just a tiny little correction against the massive social and economic advantages white men experience. How many white men have you ever heard feeling bad because they were only hired for their white maleness (“Culture fit”)? And yet that is the dominant status quo hiring practice.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
I guess that means nothing these days.
It scares me when people start talking racially, especially like you. You call me a person of color (basically a new version of colored people). You see race first, content second.
This scares me because it wasn't too long ago that Jews were being thrown under the bus. And it scares me because now you might hate white people, but what if you start hating brown Indians like me (who have the highest family income in America), Asians, or Jews (you probably consider them to be white anyway).
This is just scary stuff man. I wonder how many of my liberals friends view race first.
I guess I’m the real racist for pointing out that racism exists?
Racism is the systematic disenfranchisement of a group of people based on their race. Correcting that disenfranchisement, empowering people who systematically don’t have power is literally the opposite of racism...
Pointing out that white people face massive advantages in the United States isn’t “hating white people”, it’s an obvious and undeniable fact. My ideal world is one where everyone is treated equally, and the road to that world isn’t just imagining everyone is treated equally and everyone enters the world with the same advantages, it is through acknowledging and correcting socioeconomic disparities.
I am just extremely wary of people who call me a person of color and who view things firstly through the lens of race. Of course there is racism in the west but correcting that shouldn't mean more racism.
Do you also believe Indians and Asians face a massive advantage in America? They are some of the most successful racial groups in America. Should their advantage be "corrected"? I guess it already happens via college acceptances...
How about Jews? Should we correct their advantage as well?
There is nothing wrong in addressing socioeconomic disparities. The lowest of our societies should be helped to a point of self sustanence and leadership. But it's just so offensive to call us all colored people, I mean people of color. Can I suggest not labeling people with higher melanin with that phrase? It reduces me down to a racial label and it makes me super uncomfortable. No kidding, it kinda reminds me of when I used to hear "Arab" or "terrorist" by right wing nut jobs as that label was also based on my race...
Here is a really good, really public example of how even the appearance of "diversity hires" can cause issues. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has ill will toward Yale, his alma mater because "I’d learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it." [0]
The more we keep framing things in the context of hiring to meet gender based quotas, the more people will see us as diversity hires. I would hate that more than knowing someone doesn't like me because of my gender because that persons mind I can maybe change via my skills and work.