You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?
Only one company had 40% threshold, the others had 33% and 30% respectively. They also didn't always hit those thresholds. But yes, the recruiters explicitly had 40% women in tech roles as one of their OKRs at one of my previous employers.
The only company I know of that has over 40% women software developers is ThoughtWorks. But they are an Australian company and it is legal for them to discriminate against men in that country. They are transparent about their use of a strict 1:1 gender quota: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-es/insights/blog/beyond-quot...
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.
Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.
I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.
If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?
When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.
I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.
Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.
And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.
You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.
The specific details of the hiring process are in question. You are running away from grappling with the (increasingly likely) possibility that bias wasn't the (only) driver in hiring disparity.
You’ve explained your position and OP exposed the holes in your logic. Please don’t pretend to take the high road when someone has engaged with good faith discussion that didn’t end the way you hoped.
Because that's where many good paying jobs are. If I buy a home in a lower cost of living area, and my employer decides to do away with remote work, I may not be able to find another job that can pay the mortgage even though it is in a cheaper area.
A house in a cheaper area may not require a Bay area salary to cover the mortgage. If employers did away with remote work, getting a job that pays less but doesn't require moving can be a viable choice but it is all a matter of lifestyle choices and priorities.
Sure, it almost certainly won't unless you buy a mansion. However, a job is still required to pay a mortgage, save for retirement, have health insurance, and cover living expenses. In a lower cost area, there are fewer job opportunities. If I spend 40+ hours a week at my job, I'd prefer it to be a job where I don't spend my days looking at the clock waiting for the day to be over every single day.
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing.
It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing. It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
I agree that the word "trauma" is overused and exaggerated to describe situations that are not really traumatic. Ironically, I think that the word "outrage" is similarly misused. I couldn't help but giggle at the irony of "outrage" being used as the word to describe the response to this.
There are lots of reasons I continue to mask that have nothing to do with COVID.
1) To keep the sun off my face.
2) if there is a lot of pollen or dust in the air.
2) If I want to avoid long chats at the checkout counter that waste my time.
3) If I want to avoid having creeps tell me to smile or catcall.
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