I get this so much, although I've had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I'm female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team. Isn't necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, it made me think of all the LinkedIn spam I get addressing me as sir, Mr., "we're looking for some cool dudes like yourself", etc.
Sadly it's not just the gender thing that's going on here as well, I'm thinking of some study they did where they attached photos with the resumes - the "attractive" people (both men and women) were rated as better skilled than the "normal" and "ugly" people that had the same resume. Although, I think that if I took some fancy photos of myself and primped myself up, I don't think it would do me any favors and I'd get some unwanted attention!
My name isn't even gender neutral, very feminine...I think I once was on some board online using my real name and people were still assuming I was a guy. When I asked how they could possibly think it was a male name, they replied, "I dunno, I was thinking it was like one of those fancy Italian names, like Fabio or whatever..Fabia..yeah, same thing...they always sound like girls names."
I've now started picking the most ridiculously cutsie usernames possible, like this one, to keep people guessing. Sometimes it backfires still and people just get homophobic, but I generally stick with it anyway for fun :)
Well, you might just be a male fan of MLP. It happens a lot nowadays!
I think it is a good thing it is harder to discriminate people on names, colors, etc. They are all superficial and have nothing to do with sexuality anyway. I think in the end just too many people care what chemical is more prominent in your body between testosterone and estrogen.
Well, that's why I said "isn't necessarily" - some people may not mind and be happy to reap the benefits, and others (like you) would (justifiably) feel offended.
In my experience it hasn't really been 100% about "just being the token woman" but I feel like I have gotten interviews and jobs that I wouldn't have otherwise.
certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team
I've certainly been someone who has looked to hire more women in my engineering departments over the years, but I can't imagine why someone would do it for token reasons. For me it was about increasing diversity of opinion and balancing out the culture so we didn't hire misogynist assholes in the future.
"Although, I think that if I took some fancy photos of myself and primped myself up, I don't think it would do me any favors and I'd get some unwanted attention!"
My brain lit up on that sentence and I clicked on your profile to see what you looked like. (Happily married and all of that but men are visual)
Perhaps the idea is that OP was actually fishing for compliments. She said she doesn't want to evoke unwanted attention because she is too good looking, but by writing that she notified the internet of being very good looking.
The first part is weird and a little creepy. Really, he should listen to what she has to say, not look at a picture and say 'Yeah, I'd objectify her, she has a point'. Plus he had to click a few links deep to find a picture, so he went out of his way to see what some other commenter looks like, solely on the basis of gender. That's at least sexist, maybe you could really stretch and say it's salient to the conversation.
The second, parenthetical statement is what tips it way over the edge. It's like making a comment about 'culturalism' and then adding a footnote saying 'BTW, I'm totally not racist'. He obviously realizes that absent any context, saying "I spent at least 30 seconds hunting for a picture of you on the internet, person I've never met" is not socially appropriate. So he tries to shore it up with the fact that he's married, so obviously he has no interest in any other women outside of clinically judging their suitability for objectification.
This is further supported by the incredible, scientific claim that men's ability to process someone's comments on a message board is directly impacted by their ability to first judge that person's attractiveness - in a purely objective way, remember, he's married. No doubt this gentleman has a Firefox extension dedicated to finding all HN commenter's faces so he can better understand the cryptic squiggles they produce on his screen.
It's like saying "I just bought a car and I"m happy with it but I still like to look at other cars at the car show or in the showroom because it makes me feel good".
Of course not. Acknowledging that two things are the same in some ways does not imply that the two things are the same in all ways. Don't be intentionally obtuse.
Which is an utterly meaningless term nowadays. I'd love to hear you try to define it in a way that wouldn't classify every human interaction as objectifying.
Seriously; unsolicited negative comments on pretty much any aspect are not ok. Sexually charged comments are not ok in most environments. But I don't want to live in a world where complimenting someone on their appearance is a bad thing.
Add: Agree. I'm truly baffled by the parent comment.
People say things about appearance all the time. And I can't think of many cases where a comment (positive) about how someone appears (if said in the proper tone of voice [1]) is not appropriate. And even in the case of a negative comment you'd have to take the relationship of the parties into account (agreeing that that's a much broader situation and safer to not say anything).
[1] Of course I can think of many other exceptions (person dying in the hospital and you say "you look great") but the parent comment doesn't appear to be suggesting fringe cases.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but you should consider that it's often unwelcome. There are things people think of as compliments to me that aren't things I actually want to hear, particularly from people I don't know.
There are legitimate criticisms you could make of the comment in question, but "I was curious what you looked like" is assuredly not a comment on someone's appearance.
>I've had the opposite experience, where when people notice that I'm female, certain companies get excited for the chance to have a "token woman" on their team
My wife noticed that too. She has basically the exact opposite experience as the author. Her name is also gender neutral, but more commonly male. As soon as she added "Ms." she started getting interviews. Comments like "it will be so nice having another woman around here", and "we have too many men in the IT department and 99% of the applicants are just more men" are apparently normal, even from men.
Summing up your wife's experience with the one in the article, perhaps what employers like the least is the ambiguity of getting a CV where they don't know if the applicant is male or female?
I do know I have felt somewhat embarrassed when I had to reply an email to people with a gender-neutral name. Although maybe that's because there are no such names in my country, so I find the situation odder than most people. But I can picture a HR person wondering about the gender of the applicant and just skipping to the next CV to avoid the uncomfortable moment, especially if there are many similar CVs to choose from.
I am female with a hybrid background in UI design and front-end dev. A while back I created a fake linkedin profile identical to mine except with a male name. Even though it has no profile picture and no contacts, the fake profile gets more recruiter messages than I do, and for more technical positions (I get ones for design, he gets ones for engineering).
You know something.. In the past I used to do a lot tech interviews and phone screens. And I think I would actually give you bonus points if my company found you via your fake profile and we ended up chatting. After about 1.5 seconds of confusion, I'd be thinking, well, this lady has some resourcefulness...
Did you ever follow up on any of those offers via the fake profile? I'm curious to know the reaction. I know I'd look at it favorably. But I might be in the minority. Don't know.
Perhaps the recruiters have some negative real-life information that discounts your actual profile but no such negative information against your fake one. Your evidence doesn't show sex discrimination.
Hm. I believe you're suggesting that they somehow recognize me from my photo or my name, neither of which is very likely as I am not at all well-known.
But that does bring up an interesting point - it could be they find me unattractive and thus having a photo is the negative factor (which is still gendered, but in a different way). If this were a true psych study and not one person's curiosity the fake profile should have a photo of a man of a similar age and attractiveness (as judged by a previous study)
You should make another "fake" account (this time, with a feminine name, but with the same wealth of information as the macho-fake one) and see which of the two fake ones gets more (professional) attention and compare them with each other, not your real account.
You don't have to be well known to be traceable. Perhaps your Facebook gets updated a lot during the day. Perhaps someone with your name is listed as a felon. Perhaps you have a terrible credit rating. There are a ton of possibilities why using a pseudonym could be beneficial.
I don't understand how the recruiter potentially finding you unattractive makes it "gendered".
Perhaps it's because you're too attractive and so you're threatening to them.
It's conscious on a lot of people's parts. I've also heard "no women, no sexual harassment suits" enough from people in tech to assume that there are a lot of bigots not dumb enough to admit it out loud.
I could be going too far, though. Maybe the kind of dumb lockerroom overshare bluster amongst the employees and managers of sexually harassing companies and departments lends itself to admitting incriminating things like that to other men with a wink wink nudge nudge.
I think we missed the key point that he implied he was a women with kids.
Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot).
That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an intentional signal that mangers were meant to interpret as such. Since the applicants gender was misread, the signal was read as they wanted flexible hours, not that they were stable. Sure, dad's could ask for flexible hours, but that is on the whole a less frequent occurrence.
This is an even stronger single because asking if I have kids in an interview is in fact not legal in most places in the US, so including it your self is making a huge point.
Oh, there's also the fact that if you did interview them and not hire, the fact that it was in their resume might give the grounds for sueing you for gender discrimination.
> Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career.
In the present times, some set of managers would assume it for ANY woman of childbearing age. And if a woman doesn't have kids, she's assumed to get pregnant and go on maternity leave.
I personally doubt the problem is mainly maternity leave. 3 months time off for a good employee is not that bad (though if you had an equal male candidate, sure on sheer cost reasons you'd hire them). The problem is they are more likely to leave permanently or the perception they are more likely to put up a stink about discrimination if you say they are not pulling their weight.
Imagine what would happen if a guy came in and said "I like this job, but my real passion may be art. There is a %50 chance in the next 5 years I am going to leave my job to peruse that." You'd try to avoid hiring them.
Of course, this has terrible consequences in that it effectively discriminates against women in hiring, but simply trying to get hiring managers "not to be sexist' isn't going to fix the problem. You are asking employers (men and women) to weigh their personal ideals ( gender equality) against financial incentives(retaining employees, not paying to).
What happens is that women usually get to do the reduced time because they have a higher claim to their kids. It is not only the paternity leave, but also for example working part time later on.
Dads don't get the option to do part time instead of their wives a lot. Of course it happens, but it is not the usual thing to expect.
That's quite probably why my wife gets her contract renewed in half-year increments (and she feels like everybody wants to know if she's already pregnant)...
You'd need to narrow it down some - what percentage of women in "industry X" don't have kids. I don't know if the numbers would be significantly different, but they might for some industries.
But what is the solution? Why should companies be responsible to pay for that risk? I think if society doesn't want women to be disadvantaged because of the "risk" of becoming family persons, then society should pay up, not companies.
I'd like to see a study of response rates on resume's that are nearly the same, except for the gender, and race implied by the name. I feel like that would provide a pretty good measure to figure out how discriminatory our jobs system is.
They've done them, the results strongly imply discrimination. There's been some criticism of the methodology though. I believe there was a chapter in Freakonomics criticizing the "black name" resume studies (though I cannot remember the criticism). With some of the gender ones the claim is that the career trajectories were gender atypical when the names were switched and hence looked odd. I.e. that if you took a resume of a women and a man and swapped the names, the male named female resume would get lower responses.
A more salient question is why there is discrimination on gender in hiring. Is it outright sexism or is it discounting for the fact that a women is far more likely to exit her career to have kids or reduce her hours. The answer radically effect how you fix the problem.
Note, the part about criticism was incorrect. The criticism was that if you handed someone a gender inverted resume, it would score lower period. So of course, if you took a "male" looking resume and gave it to someone with a female name on it, they'd find it odd just as they would if they got a female looking resume with a male name on it. The claim was the study failed to account for this.
Women "more likely" to drop out to provide childcare doesn't make it "100% women". But without fixing problems of families with small children (lack of affordable childcare, culture of long hours and such), anti-discrimination laws only create more discrimination and stereotyping... All women would be stereotyped as risky. I've known quite a few men providing childcare and needing flex hours, while their wives are too busy at work. Yet, such men are stereotyped as an exception. Because asking questions and deciding on a case by case basis is illegal, so it's a breeding ground for stereotyping.
There are 'blind audition' studies that clearly show gender bias: "A recent study by two economists finds that chances of women making it past preliminary auditioning rounds increase by 50 percent if they audition ``behind a heavy cloth suspended from the ceiling so judges can't see their gender.''
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-04-28/business/9704250...
> This is an even stronger single because asking if I have
kids in an interview is in fact not legal in most places
in the US, so including it your self is making a huge point.
It's not such a huge point if you read the bio at the top of the article and noticed that the author lives in Australia and not just assume he lives in the US.
Mind you, Australia does have similar anti-discrimination laws.
"If they did read further, the next thing they saw (as politeness declared at the time) was a little personal information, and that declared I was married with kids."
> It's illegal for an employer to even ask about it in an interview.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find such a law. What you will more likely find that it is illegal for an employer to discriminate in hiring based on that information, and an employer asking the question in an interview is quite likely to be used in any lawsuit over alleged discrimination as evidence that they were, in fact, discriminating in hiring based on the information, since asking a question in an hiring interview is pretty compelling evidence of an intent to use the response in making hiring decisions.
Agreed. I worked at a company where my CTO said "Well we couldn't seriously consider hiring a woman for this team" after interviewing a female developer. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and it was a pleasure to leave the company shortly thereafter.
It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.
Thanks. Though ultimately it's not a moral choice or about doing the right thing, it's not the kind of environment I want to work in. And that comment absolutely was not where things began or ended with that guy.
It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.
It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life.
If you find yourself so embattled with the courts, perhaps you should try and understand the behavior of reasonable people. I have to agree with rayiner -- this sounds like typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy one too many times.
How is "typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy" functionally any different for the female job candidate?
"No, he's not sexist, he just doesn't like women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just can't talk to women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just has seizures when he sees the color pink, and women are more likely to wear pink."
Who cares? The woman still doesn't get the job.
The excuses are equivalent to a student saying they deserve an A for trying hard and having extenuating circumstances though they can't actually do what they're graded on.
People take "sexist" and "racist" to describe intent. I don't give a s(*& about your intent. It's the effect that's relevant.
You don't have to be so embattled in courts to be concerned about it. Your comment is equivalent to telling someone concerned about getting raped that getting raped is their fault.
Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court). It sounds like you have a problem trusting women not to take you to court rather than a problem with the court system. Which sounds an awful lot like misogyny.
With the way things are going, it is not an irrational or unreasonable fear that something you (as a man or a woman) do/say is going to offend someone (man or woman) and land you in trouble. This has nothing to do with man vs woman. Badclient said nothing of men or women... just "sexist remark". Nor was there any mention of anything that would fall under any reasonable definition of misogyny. Your response only furthers badclient's concern over vague definitions (and to some degree overuse/misuse of words as a means to an end).
To be fair he wrote one line which in the context of the thread could easily be perceived as defending sexist hiring practices. He may not have said "man or woman" but he responded to a comment I made where I described a manager of mine who was fond of making sexist jokes and refused to take women seriously as job candidates.
In his position if I wanted to make a more general point about the court system I would have burned a few more sentences clarifying my point.
It would be really awesome if when people read/hear stuff that can easily be perceived in more than one way... they went with the better choice than the worst one. Not everyone perceives things the same way.. so why always assume they meant it the bad way you perceived it rather than finding out what they meant first? I think a lot of this trouble would go away.
Also, badclient wrote exactly one sentence: It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life. This is a true concern that does not infer anything about which sex did which sexist thing... only that the definition of "sexist" is dangerously vague. If you think that translates to a "hate of all women", you have projected that upon badclient.
If he wasn't responding to my comment then a general comment about the court system is off topic. I didn't bring up the court system. It would be strange for me to assume he is veering off topic rather than commenting on the situation I described.
The comment appears to be in response to you using the phrase "sexist remark"... and it appears that badclient believes there is a problem with that phrase being too vague. In the context of your comment, it was pretty clear to me that this vagueness is of some concern to badclient because that could land a person in trouble one day for doing something that was not an issue the week before. I think the difference that might be tripping you up is that you were speaking of a specific "man violates rights of woman" situation but badclient was talking of a more general "person violates rights of person" situation. Some people like to pretend that this is only a "man violates woman" topic... when really it goes both ways. Of course it is entirely possible that you don't believe it goes both ways... but then you and I would have a totally different issue... one that I'd opt out of discussing.
EDIT: "both ways" should probably be "all ways" since all parties involved could be the same gender.
> Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court)
Americans seem to like having things escalate. Going to court is the first reaction to everything in stead of asking someone to apologize or talking things out. The incentive for going to court also seems to be very high, you can get large sums of money for small things. Money is the biggest reason people work in the first place.
I don't know why hiring decisions would be based on gender at all, though, so I don't know why badclient seems to argue for it here. Both men and women can be frivolously litigative.
He didn't have to, we all understood that he meant he wasn't comfortable cutting back on certain types of speech.
And I'm not trying to be a PC zealot here. I've told and laughed at many an inappropriate joke. But I also have a lot of respect for the idea that you should not make people feel uncomfortable at work and you shouldn't go out of your way to dismiss candidates of a particular gender (or race or class) because you think you would offend that person and you are incapable of not offending them.
Another notable thing about feeling like you can't hire certain people because they will be offended by things you say in the office is that you are making it clear that you have a narrow range of means to express yourself.
But I also have a lot of respect for the idea that you should not make people feel uncomfortable at work
You can have a lot of respect for something and still have a hard time achieving it. You're suggesting that people that make crude jokes around a sex about that sex don't respect that sex. I find that assumption to be unfair and false.
I would not call it bigotry, but rather stupidity. They are not the first people ever thinking the idea of separating female and men, or suggested that some benefits can be achieved that way.
Schools like to separate girls from boys, and points towards improved and safer environment. Conferences like to create women only sections, in the idea (with some irony) that it would improve gender equality, and like schools, make a better environment for teaching out technology.
I call it stupid because it fail some basic common sense. A mixed classroom, work space, or conference room is better because it increase cooperation, make society better, and switch the focus on the individual skill level rather than their sex. Schools have almost gone through this stage and fully gone over to mixed classrooms. The work space is learning the same lesson, but slower. As to conferences, I can only assume that they are looking at the workplace and fail to connect the dots.
> Schools have almost gone through this stage and fully gone over to mixed classrooms.
To their detriment. As a product of both coed and all boys private schools, there is a stark difference in teaching and disceplin in single sex schools that research shows improves outcomes. Hit http://scholar.google.com/ with "single sex education." There is a huge discrepancy in male performance especially that most teachers admit a preference to teaching girls as they "behave" better.
Bigotry and sexism exists, but the "problem" is an effect of the US obsession with political correctness and an overly sensitive and litigious society. There are cases of systematic discrimination in organizations, but they are not as pervasive as a few decades ago, so there has been progress, especially in corporate environments. An example is a female cousin with a law degree. Being a women of breading age, she was specifically asked if she intended to have children in the next 5 years which was a non-starter. These were small firms that couldn't afford to have a junior partner off for maternity leave. She had no problem with that at a large corporation.
On equality, if you start giving men maternity leave in the same way as women, and effectively change societies views on gender roles in the home, you might start seeing that form of discrimination disappear as in the scandinavian countries.
There is much to be said about differences in men and women's personalities. Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that. So as long as the kid gloves are on...
>if you start giving men maternity leave in the same way as women
I agree.
>Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that.
I definitely disagree with that at work. If you want to discuss your sexuality, comment on people's body parts, or articulate your unified theory on the differences in the natures of men and women, get some friends. People have to work in order to eat - allow women (and men) to get through it without having to constantly bite their tongues or else be seen as the problem. We've made a decision as a society that racial, sexual and religious discrimination are problems at work. Find another subject.
> allow women (and men) to get through it without having to constantly bite their tongues or else be seen as the problem
Right. Bite my tongue and put on the kid gloves. Wouldn't want to discuss last nights episode of Game of Thrones in the break room, less be seen as a sexist jerk. People do have friends at work, and normal human interactions do take place there.
People also have sex with people they know from work. Should they have it at work? If you can't find something to talk about at work other than how hot some naked woman on tv was last night, they're not giving you enough to do.
If your friends at work refuse to meet you away from work for your crucial sex talk, they may be uncomfortable with it too. If your self-righteousness is because you feel put upon by not being able to say what you want when you want, I entirely lack sympathy.
>If your friends at work refuse to meet you away from work for your crucial sex talk, they may be uncomfortable with it too.
If someone is uncomfortable with something they should speak up. If someone says they are uncomfortable with something that should be respected (within reason).
Its not that hard when everyone just behaves as adults instead of spoiled sheltered children who cannot communicate with each other
I only said that because you can't prevent all discomfort to everyone. Its not possible and there's a good chance fixing one persons discomfort will just make someone else uncomfortable, hence within reason.
And even so they should still speak up. Even if someone has some unreasonable discomfort (ie it makes me uncomfortable when you wear red) it may be so minor that it can easily be avoided. You couldn't expect people to not wear red, but if a co-worker said that to me i'd probably just try to not wear red.
Without communicating/talking about it, reasonable or not, there is absolutely no chance of the situation getting better.
If you can't discuss last night's episode of GoT without being seen as a sexist jerk, you might be a sexist jerk. The fact you keep suggesting you have to "put on kid gloves" suggests you might be a sexist jerk.
More of an insensitive libertine than a sexist. I cannot control what other people say, think or do. I can only control how I react to those situations. This makes it crucial to self sensor being offended more than being offensive. I agree with a lot of what this thread is about, but also am aware that overcompensation is also present. Being offended to a point as to intend to change someones behavior is a form of exerting moral authority. It is rare that this is not itself a form of discrimination. "I have zero tolerance for intolerant people."
I agree there is a place and time for everything. However, true friends are rarely made in polite company. I prefer to work with friends.
Well, if the comments are not different for men and women - as in, you're not actually trying to say something not in the words (winkwink) and it's appropriate for the level of relation, and if you respect if someone tells you some comment was not so great, you should be fine with most woman of the technical inclination, I'd say.
It's a subtle thing, really. One person can make remarks about women and shoes and it's funny because we know that's not his real opinion, another does it and it's offensive because he thinks it's true. It really is about what your real opinions and intentions are.
In a world where sexism is still a huge problem, it seems that forcing students into a monosexual environment would only contribute to stunting their social development even more. Compare, for example, the relative incidence of sexism in a heavily male field like programming or philosophy with the amount of sexism in a gender-integrated field like biology.
This idea of separating students by gender to increase performance is really treating them like little test-taking machines: students, by and large, do not choose to take gender-segregated courses unless their parents require it of them. They're human beings. They have a fundamental right to develop in a natural social environment. And, like it or not, schools provide a large proportion of a child's social interaction, which isn't going to change anytime soon.
But most importantly, any improvements are highly controversial and tend to disappear once researchers attempt to correct for confounding.
The most successful school systems in the world, in Northern Europe and East Asia, are all coeducational. There are also a whole lot of interventions that don't require such drastic measures. Cracked of all publications wrote a surprisingly well-researched article on the subject:
The reason I did not link to a specific article is that there are so many on both sides of the debate. However, my experience and the experience of my female friends that underwent similar education are all positive on both sides. Also, I am willing to bet that the top US schools are mostly private and mostly single-sex or segregated. They are in my area.
> Being a women of breading age, she was specifically asked if she intended to have children in the next 5 years which was a non-starter. These were small firms that couldn't afford to have a junior partner off for maternity leave
That's sexism, plain and simple. Who are they to assume she's going to take extended maternity leave and be the primary care giver? They would never ask that of a man (most male law partners are married and have kids), because they would as assume that his wife would take care of the kids. That's sexism.
The company's assumption that the stereotype of how women handle work life balance applies to any specific woman. That's pretty much the definition of sexism. Also, the fact that a company would never ask if a man had any time consumer hobbies or other sorts of things that might prevent them giving 100% to their jobs, because when kids and women aren't involved, companies generally assume that their employees are grownups and can balance their various obligations like grownups.
By that metric, car insurance companies are also sexist - they charge individual men more because stereotypically men are riskier. Of course, that stereotype is based on data, but so is the stereotype that women take more time off when they have children.
Why is it legal to discriminate based on data in some situations but not others? I think the only solution is to remove the logical justification for discrimination: force men and women to take equal parental leave.
I have always wondered if insurance companies had the data to show that people of Asian decent (for example) have more car accidents, could they jack up their insurance premiums?
discrimination based on sex for insurance is now unlawful in the UK, as of last year.
as a result car insurance prices for women increased significantly, while mens remained the same.
additionally annuity rates for men dropped, while those for women remained the same (the provider is no longer allowed to factor in that men on average die several years earlier).
That annuity case is batshit-crazy, IMO. Sad that we've gone so far in the chase for fairness that we demand equality in the name of fairness in cases where it makes no sense.
I'm all for fairness. Equal is not fair in all cases, nor is fair equal in all cases...
If I had any other time-consuming hobby and started phoning it in at work, the company could tell me I may be dismissed if I don't shape up. Only parents get the nuclear option, and thankfully most of them don't abuse the possibility very heavily.
That's because parenthood ensures that companies have future customers, while hobbies don't. Facebook stock isn't worth much if all the 13-25 year olds that buy the crap advertisers peddle on it is a shrinking demographic!
As this Hungarian illustrates, getting the government involved to guarantee these sorts of "anti-discrimination" rules can lead to a very bad outcome: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/01/09/this-is-why-i-dont-g... (Too bad the guy's blog has died, he had some more good rants on it that made me very glad not to live in Hungary.)
I looked up Hungarian laws, and the problem is not the government involvement, but that there is a huge difference between maternity and paternity leave (3 years vs 5 days). This somehow doesn't fit "anti-discrimination", as it's quite the opposite.
Every study I've seen on outcomes either finds no effect or a negative effect for boys' performance in all-male schooling. It is beneficial to girls, but currently in America all students, boys and girls, perform better when there are more girls in the classroom.
I wasn't talking about 'people', I was talking about men. That's important because the benefits to be achieved are not for society, but rather for the men making the decisions, and the outcome isn't just single-sex workplaces, it's single-sex professions.
If we assume that's the reason, it should be easy to fix: if men start complaining about unprofessional and harassing behavior, there'd no longer be any reason not to hire women.
I have saved a really good booklet from my past employer about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is actually gender neutral, and it doesn't have to be about sexual advances. Moreover, a man can be harassed by another man, as much as much as a woman can be harassed by another woman (happens way too often in my experience). The legal definition says harassment should be both severe enough and impose gender inequality (i.e. telling dirty jokes to both men and women doesn't constitute sexual harassment as long as they are not more derogatory to one gender). The problem is that there are too many stereotypes about sexual harassment, some are spread by corporations themselves (because they try to avoid lawsuits, nothing to do with employee fair treatment).
The way to fix it is to start a software company and then hire all the overlooked overqualified women on the job market. When people are being stupid like this, it's a market inefficiency; it means that the market price for a woman will be lower than for an equivalently-qualified man. As an entrepreneur, your job is to exploit that market inefficiency and in the process drive wages up to parity.
That's fine to first approximation, but doesn't hold up in the real world, where women have the deck stacked against them in the tech world at every turn. If men are being preferentially chosen over women, then that damages the ability of women to be competitive at the next level.
The fix for that is to work from the bottom up, not by intentionally ruining a bsiness by hiring less effective people at the time.
Note that "women aren't represented in the executive levels" isn't a significant issue, not for the vast majority of women or men. Very few people are executives, and it's not important to 95% of the population what the gender of the executives is. The majority of women have more in common with the majority of men that are non-executives, than they do with the few women that are executives.
> What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people.
The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change.
I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone interested in the topic of gender discrimination. Jackson writes well, he's a man, and he brings a mans perspective to the issues. There is no demonization or undue blame assigned to men in the book. It's a powerful read.
Female bosses discriminate worse against women than male bosses. The causes to this is debated, through if we want a change, we do indeed need to change people rather than men.
I could not find the source, nor the original news article that I read.
But while looking, I instead found research that slightly contradicted my current understanding of the subject. They[1,2] claimed that there is no difference between female and male management in how they discriminate. They say that both genders are equally bad in creating equality in the work space (deciding hiring or pay rate).
So I still stand by that we need to change people rather than men, but thanks for pushing me to look for sources.
Of course you need men to change their attitudes - the majority of people at the top of the food chain are male, and they’re the ones that make the hiring decisions.
But you are right - it’s not an exclusively male problem, and woman are perfectly capable of discriminating against other women, and do, frequently, and often unconsciously.
In the end society as a whole needs to change how it views women, and how it acts upon those views.
When you got your resume thrown out because you have a female sounding name, it has NOTHING to do with higher ups, whoever threw the resume out was HR, and thus very probably a woman.
A problem might exist, but targeting the wrong target won't fix it, stop blaming the "higher ups" for decisions (conscious or not) taken by the ones that took those decisions.
I very much doubt there is a company where the CEO made a explicit rule for the HR don't hire any women.
Or the resume wasn't thrown out by the HR person. It was passed along to the department hiring manager, which is what actually happens 100% of the times where the resume fits the job description, and it was the department hiring manager who then threw it out.
But I can see your point, let's just assume it was the HR person that threw out the resume. And since we're in assumption land, let's assume the HR person was a woman.
Because men vastly outnumber women in executive and management positions in business, esp. in the highest levels of business/corporate hierarchy.
Of course, combating misogyny and patriarchy doesn't mean only men will have attitudes changed, but let's not pretend about the numbers of the situation.
>men vastly outnumber women in executive and management positions in business
This is the problem, not (only) men's attitudes. The most screwed up part is that this inequality often holds even in female dominated professions, like librarians and teachers. I'm into forcing companies to do things rather than waiting for the attitudes of millions to change, esp. when the effect of that attitude only increases the income and options of the people whose attitudes you are trying to change.
Institute quotas and penalize companies if they don't make them. In the beginning, companies may have to hire women that are less talented than the men that are available to them, but if the positions are there, women in general will up their games to compete with each other for them. It's basic economics.
I have a better idea. Instead of forcing companies to change using an incompeteny bureaucracy, invest in operations that commit to gender-blind hiring practices, and get rich when those companies hire better people and are vastly more successful.
It doesn't address the real gender discrimination issues, but having gender-balanced HR departments could have helped Kim O'Grady. Currently, if you include your photo in your resume, being a beautiful (rather than average-looking) woman seems to lower your chance of getting an interview [1].
Having a culture in which it was normal to post resumes with photographs would also have benefited Kim O Grady...
Either way, HR didn't hate him because he was beautiful, and there are conceivable reasons why even a gender balanced HR department might screen out candidates posting their "beautiful" photos along with an applicatiom that don't involve petty jealously.
If photos are relatively rare in a culture receiving applications or the photos used are glamorous model applications, one could even argue that it's a reasonable alarm about a person's willingness to nakedly milk their looks. Even if that isn't the case, a non-partisan observer might [over]correct a perceived (and often real) tendency for beautiful people to receive more favourable treatment in some environments. Maybe they could apply the same criteria to tall men too...
They nearly always perform the initial sorting of resumes. People in charge of departments or groups (who are usually the ones hiring) are often too busy to sort through 400 resumes.
Even at lower levels. I managed a team of 4 people at Yahoo, and whenever I was replacing someone, we'd send a spec to HR, negotiate a pay grade target to fit the department budget, and wait for the resumes, who'd first been sorted by external recruiters, then been further filtered by internal HR before they landed in my inbox.
This was true even when I managed hiring at a company of 50 people or so. At companies smaller than that, I've usually been the one to have a first look at resumes for my team.
That's an incredibly uninformed opinion you've got there Thomas!
HR tends to be the first line of defence between a job seeker and a hiring manager. The majority also conduct the phone interview and occasionally the first face to face interview.
Finally, who do you think hires other HR staff? So, yes. Human resource people are hiring managers. More so than most.
HR tends to be the first line of defence between a job seeker and a hiring manager
From my experience (longer than tptacek's) there are BFE (big freaking enterprises) that use HR to screen, but in every one of those, if an external applicant could find a hiring manager, HR reduced to a pro-forma deal.
Even at the executive hiring level, if HR is meaningfully involved, it is with a specialist hired to do nothing but that.
As a "first line of defence" they are the opposite of qualified. External candidates and internal hiring managers find ways around them if they are at all involved. Otherwise, the result is not filled with qualified folks.
I stand by my statement. I have nothing but respect for your obvious and substantial success but as you say yourself, you've mostly worked for startups. Whilst you're clearly more informed than most on all things tech & startups, in this one particular area, you're point is clearly ill-informed.
The vast majority of established organisations with 100+ staff have a HR department and in Europe, the HR department usually screens CV's and are regularly involved in phone screening and/or first stage interviews.
What, that women often discriminate against women? That's ironic but also true. Or maybe that men discriminate against HR departments... not sure that's true but at least it's funny :)
You do realize that HR doesn't actually hire people (except for HR roles of course), department managers make the hiring decisions. HR is there to support the process.
Yep, anyone who does not know this generally doesnt get how much the HR idiots can prescreen wonderful candidates because they didnt match the keywords.
"The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done"
Are you suggesting that as a hobby, a career, or?
Who has the time or inclination to do that?
"It can definitely be done"
As a practical matter I would personally worry more about other things than spending time reversing established thought process and bias.
Now of course if someone wants to start a movement or a non-profit toward this cause (and somehow be able to earn a living from that) that's fine. Or if they decide this is a cause they believe in and instead of spending leisure time on something else that's fine as well.
I'm suggesting that it be a focus in life - if it's one of your core values and you care about it, you'll naturally take the time and energy to work against it.
For example, many people on HN care about privacy and government intrusion. They don't need to be convinced as to why it's important to speak up about the NSA and the US treatment of Edward Snowden. People who care feel it's a personal imperative, so they do something about it.
I personally have the time and the inclination. Because it's something I care about. Maybe you don't care about it, that's your personal feeling, so you won't take the time. But I'm sure that there are other things in your life that you care about, and you do invest time in those things.
It's absolutely fine not to care about every social cause out there. I don't think we can expect everyone to care about everything. Just pick those things which matter most to you and work to do something about them.
As for a movement, there are a few out there that I'm aware of - in particular I am a big fan of the work of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP).
"It's absolutely fine not to care about every social cause out there."
I'm impressed with your reply and the way it is phrased. Not typical for HN (and other places) where you can and do get jumped on because people feel differently or feel you have to care about what they care about or what a crowd thinks is important. Very well put.
"But I'm sure that there are other things in your life"
This really is one of my core problems with people judging. They don't know the complete picture and focus on one vary small thing and make their judgement from that.
For example maybe someone doesn't like recyling (and never recycles) but is free with their time and help in another area that has much greater personal and societal benefits.
One of the things which stuck with me from my social psychology class in college was a comparison of gender discrimination in hiring practices comparing male interviewers with female interviewers. The take away was that female interviewers were more likely than male interviewers to end up with sexist hiring results. Their were a number of possible justifications given, such as that the women interviewers felt threatened by having another women take their job (they felt like a "token" member of a team), a sort of stereotype threat where the female interviewer held female interviewers to a higher standard (they didn't want to "confirm" negative stereotypes about women), ect.
However, those biases come in part from our experience. People subconsciously assume that a woman won't make a good engineer (for example), because when they picture the engineers that they've met, the overwhelming majority are male. So to change those attitudes, one of the things you need is to make the numbers more balanced.
A more immediate fix for HR departments might involve a two step process for selecting candidates.
The first step is to get the candidates CV and work history, and then re-enter that information into a generic form. Only crucial information should be entered in this step, leave out the candidates gender, marital status, age, the name of their school(s), the names of previous employers, etc. The second step is to pass this "sanitized" information on to someone else to make the actual decision as to whether or not the candidate should be interviewed.
The two step process is repeated in the interview process. Only objective information is taken down by the interviewer, and again this is passed on to someone else, who can make a value judgement about the candidate without their judgement being colored by the candidates gender, race, looks, height, perfume or whatever else is considered to be extraneous information.
Those seem like caricatures of what an HR person would say, rather than what was actually said.
I work at a company notorious for poor work\life balance, and nobody has ever said to me 'we can work <person> harder' in any context.
They say things like 'We value people who are commited to growing the company. If a candidate shows us he's willing to go the extra mile to finish the project he's working on, that's a definite positive indicator."
I've heard that companies like men with wives and kids, because wives will drive them to work harder. Can't afford to lose your job if you have to support a family either.
There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment. The best HR departments already do that, at least that's the hope.
There was a proposal going around the Lib Dems in the UK at one point[1] to make it illegal to have names on CVs; because they describe gender, and sometimes race, too.
The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination.
I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why.
[1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...
The first 3 digits of a SSN indicate where the child was born. While not as prejudicial an aspect, there are definitely some geographical biases among some groups.
Only for younger people - SSNs have only been assigned at birth since the 1980s. My mother was born in West Virginia but her SSN has a Minnesota prefix, because that's where she lived when she got her first job.
Someone who wasn't born a US citizen would only get assigned an SSN with their green card or work visa, and I'd imagine the prefix would indicate their first place of residence in the US.
So the most you can get from a pre-2011 SSN is that someone lived in some particular state in some particular year, and that information is likely inferable from the resume anyway.
I was born in the early 70's and mine was assigned at birth. In fact, when I was a teenager I ran into someone else born at the same hospital on the same day (at the time we met we were thousands of miles away living in a different city on the other side of the state, so not a high probability event). The first 6 digits of our SSNs were the same.
Children are not automatically assigned a SSN at birth.
Quoting from the Social Security office: "Must my child have a Social Security number? No. Getting a Social Security number for your newborn is voluntary. But, it is a good idea to get a number when your child is born. You can apply for a Social Security number for your baby when you apply for your baby’s birth certificate."
A couple of decades back, the law was changed to require the SSN for any claimed dependents. Most people, of course, want that ~ $4,000 deduction, so hospitals often distribute the birth registration form.
For what it's worth, I was also born in the 1970s, but didn't get my SSN until jr. high, as I recall.
People are remarkably good at picking up on subtle signals that correlate well with their existing biases. Instead of "It seems like a women" they'll subconsciously think "It seems like an even."
In general, it could be enforced as a random identifier generated with each electronic application; this just burdens employers with implementing an electronic applications system, which is too high a regulatory burden (and would make dropping off a CV in person impossible/illegal, which is stupid.)
It could be a hash of the persons name, too, but then the public would have to learn what a hash was...
NI number works well in the UK, because it's convenient (and the original suggestion was specifically for the UK.) A similar system could be used anywhere.
It's not. OP wrote about using SSN-like numbers instead of names, so I wanted to note the fact that those number can, and quite often do, encode additional information.
I guess that would put an end to linking your github account from your resume.
Considering that doing that is an invaluable tool to people lacking "real" work experience, either recently or in general, I think that could end up hurting a lot of people.
There was never any plan to restrict anything else (although if your github URL is your name, like mine, I guess it would defeat the purpose.) The point was that people often put their name (like in the article) in a large font at the top - replacing this with a faceless number just reduces the initial "put the girls and people called 'Singh' in that pile over there" nonsense, at makes people actually read the CVs.
This sounds great. I do wonder though how the batch interviews would go - it is easier to dismiss people for subconscious (or conscious) racism and sexism when they are just a voice or a piece of paper, but I can see a lot of lawsuits coming out of the HR departments in companies with less than angelic hiring practices.
> anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment
Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant.
Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social biases, those biases still are real and business value can be extracted from them).
Also, once a shop commits to a particular gender choice, it might be inclined to stick to it exclusively. For instance, I heard a first-hand story from a local grocery store about why exactly it avoids hiring men (especially attractive ones) for clerks - because it leads to relationships forming between co-workers, which usually end with people left jealous and/or angry at each other. I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one.
I'm not responsible for hiring decisions right now, but if I were then one thing I wouldn't want to be anonymized are names. I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;).
> I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one.
Allow me. It's illegal for an employer to discriminate against applicants based on gender when it doesn't serve a direct business purpose. (Actors, Models, Priests, etc.)
While I can sympathize and understand their reasons, I can not condone their solution.
This is one of the two-way street issues. There is real business value to be extracted from exploiting the existing sexism in society, agreed, but in doing so, it also reinforces that existing sexism. It's a vicious cycle of mutually supporting behavior.
That is a problem. Denying said value is not necessarily the best solution, but some solution is necessary.
"I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;)"
If there was a protocol\industry agreed standard for doing hashing of names on applications, then you could still do this.
It's easy enough to fix for screening for gender, but it's much harder to fix the screening for age, because people like to see a sequence of activities. At the very least, work experience years comes across. When people leave off graduation dates, that throws up a red flag too.
The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start?
For tech companies it shouldn't be a problem to interview candidates blindly. Give some questions as written tests and coding assignments. If talking is necessary, there is software changing voice pitch. Skype has a plugin like that. Just interview a candidate sitting in another room, streaming what they write and use the same voice settings for all candidates. My impression that nobody uses written tests because companies want to keep bias, not to eliminate it.
The problem with that is similar to "online dating". Sure you can learn a lot about a person without ever seeing or hearing them... but you don't really know a person until you have spent a portion of time actually interacting with them. If you are hiring a person to be part of a team, you need that person to gel with the team at least on some level. I don't think you could get an accurate representation of that if you can't hear that person's true voice, see their mannerisms, etc. I've been in situations where our team was down to two candidates that had various strengths/weaknesses but for the most part were equally qualified. Either one of them was just as likely as the other to be able to perform the work we needed someone to do. Is it wrong to go with the person that we felt would fit into the team the best?
It wouldn't be unprecedented. Symphonies regularly use "blind auditions," with the performer behind a screen, to prevent bias (typically against women). Blind auditions significantly improved women's chances of being selected, as related by Malcolm Gladwell in 'Blink'. Here's the original study he references:
That would be excellent wherever it's feasible. The way Gladwell tells it (so take it with a grain of salt), when symphony orchestras started conducting their auditions with a screen in place so they couldn't see the person playing the instrument, the fraction of female musicians in top orchestras shot way up.
However, in cases where the quality of in-person interaction is a major part of what you're trying to assess — like for a team programming environment — it's going to be pretty hard to do anything comparable.
I'd go so far as to say that it might be slightly more important than the ability to write code, depending on the company, the project, etc. Being able to effectively discuss requirements and technical tradeoffs with non-technical stakeholders is extremely valuable.
Obviously some level of programming expertise is required, but once you've crossed that minimum threshold, personal communication becomes a larger and larger share of an employees value.
But what about language pattern, vocabulary and dialects? What about university names or degrees if it makes companies favor those over others that are self taught. One can put this into an absurd chain of arguments...
I tried my own comments from this page. The majority gives me around 70-85% male (I'm a feminine female). But adding one comment which was talking "childcare" and such gave me "only" a weak male (saying it might indicate European). It's so stereotypical. Interesting also how it divides people into males, females and Europeans (the "weak" versions).
I moved to Germany to work from Canada after finishing grad school and was amazed to find applicants put pictures on resumes there.
Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).
Sure, why not? Birthday might not be absolutely relevant, but allows to judge your success at school/uni/education much more easily, nationality is relevant to decide whether they would have to go through trouble to get you employed (if non-European), and the employers/jobs of your parents usually correlate strongly with your own qualifications, at least on a quantitative level.
Whether you like the fact that a surprisingly large number of university student has academics for parents, it is still there, and if you want an intelligent person, it might act as a decent filter to look for intelligent parents, especially is said person does not have much experience otherwise yet.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of HR departments (even the 'best') aren't doing this at all.
My company, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history.
They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profiles. Should the candidate accept, we reveal contact information to both parties and help schedule the interview.
While we're still fairly early stage, we're aiming to expose bias at different points in the hiring process using this approach, and at the very least help employers understand their own biases. Acceptance is the first step to a solution, no?
It would be great to see this more. It could provide some interesting data. I would be interested to hear if anonymized resumes closed the gender gap for getting an interview or not. It could also expose a possible bias if the gender gap closed for getting a first interview but then the gap simply shifted up one level when it came to the second step of the process (ie, disproportionately more men move on to a second interview). Although, it might actually be harder to show a bias at that level since a lot of the interview process has to do with how well the person sells themselves, articulates their answers, presents themselves physically (ie, dressed appropriately), etc. These things also happen to be very subjective so it is kind of difficult to prove there was a bias. Which is also why it is equally difficult to prove there was not a bias. (Did you not get hired because of your gender? Or just because you didn't interview well?) I have no doubt that people get turned down based on unimportant "qualifications" like gender, race, age, etc. And that is wrong. But I also have no doubt that some people who felt they were turned down for one of those reason actually just wasn't qualified or blew the interview and don't think to look internally before they look around them.
I believe Monster.com allows you to do this; there is an option to hide your contact info and only allow recruiters to contact you through the site. This is ostensibly to allow you to apply for new jobs without being discovered by your current job. I would imagine many job sites provide this feature.
There could be conscious discrimination against the resume once the "married with kids" line is added; I wouldn't be so quick to assume that surely nobody is doing it. Honestly (and this is embarrassing to admit), I'd probably think much differently about a female job applicant who had that line on her resume than a male applicant.
In particular, I wouldn't necessarily expect that line to imply anything about a male candidate's commitment to the work/job, but just write it off as a misguided attempt to look "well rounded." So, shit, I'm worse than I thought.
If a man is married with kids - then he's got more commitment to work because he's got the responsibility of a family depending on his income.
If a woman is married with kids - the she's got less commitment to work because she's got the responsibility for the well-being of a family depending on her attention.
It's not just that, but more about why the applicant thinks that "married with kids" is important information on his or her resume. Why does he or she want to broadcast that fact (especially given that, in the US at least, it's illegal to ask a job applicant if he or she is married and has kids because of the possibility of exactly this discrimination)?
But, of course, if the applicant is qualified I should try to figure out why in the job interview, not by projecting some made up story on the resume.
I drop that sometimes as a invitation to discriminate when I don't know alot about the organization.
If you're going to be giving me dirty looks for working less than 50 hours, have an unspoken mandatory happy hour attendance policy, 24x7 oncall, etc, I don't want to waste the time of both parties by interviewing with you.
Want to see this in action? Create near-identical profiles on any job site frequented by recruiters, one profile male and another female. Your male account, fictional or not, will get a measurable amount more attention and see more outreach.
I was part of a research team (class project; never published) that did something like this about a dozen years ago.
We were specifically looking at hiring-related gender bias among different education levels. Our study showed non-statistically significant bias among those without a bachelor's degree, and statistically significant at a moderate correlation level among bachelor's degree holders. The worst were the subjects with graduate degrees; not only was it a strong relationship at a statistically significant level, it was as extreme as our methodology could detect. And it went both ways (e.g., a female identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a mechanic position, but a male identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a nursing position either).
Respondents weren't supposed to put specific information on their responses, but one prominent individual did. Our curiosity got the best of us, so after we input and calculated our metrics, we looked at the identifiable subject's responses. This individual was in charge of EEO and non-discrimination policies at a research 1 institution, and she was the most gender discriminatory individual in the study!!!
The studies I've seen actually demonstrate that women get called for interviews slightly more often than men. (The studies were not in software engineering, so different industries certainly are different).
I've heard more personal experiments (be it by gender or ethnicity) leaning more towards white/male names getting more interviews and jobs than ethnic/female names.
It would be especially interesting to compare by gender the amount of interest, frequency of landing an interview, and rate of success of landing an interview. I'd be very curious to see if biases shift depending on the phase of hiring process.
There are some pretty obvious ways to fix it. A basic step would be people actually owning up to their own biases. At the very least, then people could better detect their unconscious biases and override them with objectivity.
I don't think that would be enough, but we'd be far better off if we could get to that point.
I don't know if this is obvious, or if it applies to all kinds of jobs. Something I do is give all candidates an assignment: here is a problem, solve it, and let's discuss it over Skype/Webex/etc.
The best solution typically wins. There is no way to fake talent when an actual job-related problem needs to be solved and then a solution sold to a team of folks.
There are issues with this approach too: somebody else could help the candidate, the presentation style, etc. Picking the right problem to solve is important, as is deciding ahead of time what is the criteria for selection.
and then there are languages, like Nordics and Slavic, where the last name reveals your gender - Sigmundsdottir (daughter of Sigmund), Politkowskaja (f) vs. Politkowski (m), etc.
Don't be negative, all I am saying is that there are things that can be done to improve the situation, and there are many companies out there that are actively trying.
I wouldn't know that Sigmundsdottir would be revealing the gender, and many other wouldn't either. (I'm not saying that it can't be improved even further)
Edit: I have a slavic last name that doesn't reveal my gender (on the balkans, last names are the same for both male/female)
Women are picking the best man for the job as well.
"The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student."
Yup. I don't dispute that. Quotas would work against that too.
Quotas really are quite a multifaceted fix.
- Directly and immediately drive up numbers.
- Create a demand for women that pulls the supply.
- Create a supply of women leaders with experience and skills.
- And create somewhere for them to go, so they don't get discouraged and quit.
- Change people's mental image of working with/for women from abstract and theoretical to specific and personal. Overwrite their stereotypes with actual experience. This goes for both men and women.
- immediately reduces your competitiveness with people outside your legal jurisdiction. (And software engineering can be done anywhere.)
- reinforces prejudice at an everyday level as the group whoa re being quota-ed down resent losing their jobs to people who can't do them.
- sends a signal that excellence doesn't matter and that what you are is more important than who you are.
In a list of really silly suggestions to reduce prejudice, quotas are the stand-out silliest. We surely want to increase the number of any discriminated-against group because there is a level of untapped excellence in that group; if we get rid of prejudice then we can access that excellence. Quotas go against that idea; you reduce the level of excellence in the field overall, retard development and competitiveness and reinforce the prejudice that you're trying to combat!
This. Nothing would cement widespread sexism more than forcing everyone to work around a highly visible influx of unqualified women. We've already seen outsourcing reinforce racism, as bottom-feeding scammers exploit clients' inability to screen out unqualified contract development shops, and the rank and file here assume there are no smart people from that country simply because they only got to work with the bench warmers hired at random by the lowest bidders.
If you want 50% of qualified candidates to be women, you have to find the nerdy girls in middle school with the aptitude and give them the latitude to develop the obsession the way boys can. Nobody who starts in college because they're chasing dollar signs is going to be very good.
1) The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, esp. on the grounds of race, age, or sex.
2) Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.
Hmmmm.... nothing in there about power.
sex·ism /ˈsekˌsizəm/
Noun:
1) Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
Sure... it says typically against women. But if sexism against men can not exist then that definition would have to say always... not typically. So you might not want to accept it... but your statements are wrong... plain and simple... wrong. You can't just make your own definitions for words and then project them onto everyone.
Quotas discriminate. Period. If the rule says you must have 50% women and 50% men, when it comes time to hire a new person, you absolutely will have to take the gender of that person into account in order to make sure you stay within the quota. I have absolutely no idea how reasonable people can think quotas are anything but discrimination.
I'm not part of the MRA. But go ahead and lump me into the MRA group if that is what you need to do so you can laugh at me. I really don't care. Because that would just be one more thing you are doing to water down the real issues. You do your cause no good to be like that. Overuse of words that used to mean something is becoming the butt of jokes! You are making them a joke. Go laugh at that. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Eventually no one will listen anymore.
Dictionaries are not politically neutral. They record the popular, not the best, understanding of a thing, and they privilege the "mainstream" from the perspective of very white, very male, middle class academia. In practical terms, dictionaries are good at telling you what a subset of the population thinks. It's more or less argumentum ad populum, indirectly.
With dramatically higher demand for women programmers, would it be permissible to pay women far more than men? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace?
Assuming that currently 20% of programmers are women, would 60% of the current programmer population (or 75% of current male programmers) have to go unemployed until more women had entered the workforce? Following from my first question: if we think paying men and women differently is a-okay, what would this 25/75 split do to the salary of male programmers? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace?
Would these same quotas apply to universities as well? How would the market react to universities making cuts in graduation rates to accommodate occasional fluctuations in the woman student population?
What kind of grace periods and permitted lag would be allowed? If I fired a woman, would I have to fire a man to make up for it that same day? That same week? That same month? Would I just have to refill that position with another woman? What if I decided to eliminate that role entirely?
I am not convinced that you have put thought into your proposal. It makes for a good sound bite and I don't doubt that your intentions are noble, but it is not a good idea.
The fact that this post is getting so much attention is baffling me. There is literally nothing in this story to indicate that the name made any difference.
It's blatant confirmation bias. Nothing more.
Allow me to state, once again, there is absolutely no denying that sexism exists and that it's an issue that needs to (and eventually will) change however this article adds absolutely nothing new to the debate.
He didn't provide empirical evidence because there are already resources for that. This is a personal anecdote and is being shared because personal anecdotes are effective in making people think in ways that many won't be moved to by statistics.
It's not news and it's not providing any objective data, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value.
When it comes to sexual bias, hacker news readers/commenters generally discard the "evidence" bit. And of course, nobody mentions the author's obvious anti-male and age bias ("but when I viewed it through the skewed view of middle-aged men who thought I was a woman").
One stereotype used as a rhetorical device doesn't imply he actually thinks worse of "middle-aged men" than any other group. That was just the relevant stereotype for the situation.
I'm a male and I'm tired of hearing "there is absolutely no denying that sexism exists" because it's not "sexism", it's normalization of gendered oppression on a cultural level. Girls and young women are taught to be domestic, to not aspire to men's work, and they are taught half-consciously, culturally, through the media and activities they are made to take part in. Boys are taught that their competence is natural and are segregated socially and often physically from living, playing, and interacting with girls, and the culture of "girl-things"[1]. "The Gender Trap" by NYU sociologist Emily Kane documents this, and contains an excellent bibilography for more research on this. It is established academically, but people don't want to hear it -- it's radical feminist nonsense, man-hating (or "self-hating" if you're a male), so we don't have to look at the research.
But men are affected as well. Older men take longer to report symptoms of serious disease to doctors because they are taught that they should be able to handle it. Men are deprived of emotional outlet and expected to live up to impossible standards, foregoing friendships with women in the process. You see all these young men with unrequited love ("friend-zoned") who can't accept friendship with female people and thus must invent strategy to solve the woman-puzzle-box or justification for harassment.
Questioning gender itself is the best solution, logically.
[1] Rough examples for "girl-things" as a phenomenon: A girl can wear blue or pink, but a boy wearing pink is doing a "girl-thing" (I've read that the color scheme was reversed a under a century ago). A young woman can watch an action movie or a romantic comedy, but when a young man watches a chick-flick what is he, gay?
As a father, when I had my first kid, & read a few "Parents" magazines, I was so disheartened to see 99% of the references in articles referring to the parent as the "mom" or "She/her". I said, "WTF! Are fathers not parents!?"
Then, it hit me. As a male engineer, manager, etc... I just got a very small taste of the less than subtle gender biases that exist all around us. That made me appreciate my wife more (who is also an engineer), and all the others who put up with that crap even in this modern day.
This is the only forum I've complained about "Parent's Magazine"'s female gender bias. And, I only do so within a context that shows it's just a lesson in empathy for a much more severe bias in the other direction.
Interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking article.
To me, another interesting experiment would be changing the first name of the resume to something that's nearly unambiguously male, say instead of Kim O'Grady to just Robert O'Grady, and seeing if that has the same effect.
Another interesting experiment would be adding "Mrs." in front of the name Kim and seeing if that has the same effect.
Personally speaking, I believe that technical people are sick and tired of the sausage fests at most technical companies and all other things being equal would go out of their way to hire more women.
> True. I would assume women would have a better chance since most men are tired of being surrounded by other men all the time at work, like you said.
This may sound reasonable, but this is actually the opposite of what happens. In terms of hiring, people tend to leverage existing social networks and look for people that are similar to themselves. This generally puts a bias in favor of candidates who are not women, esp. when hiring for positions that are higher up in a company or business, as men generally outnumber women in higher level positions.
> What is the motivation for someone to be biased against women, seems counterintuitive.
Bias against women can take many forms and it may not be overt. Attitudes and basic opinions on women often form the basis for a actions that are micro aggressions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression
To that end, some people (men or women) may see women as not fit to do a task, not fit with a particular culture or set of workers, not able to interact with other depts. or businesses as a representative of a company, etc. Of course, there may be overt sexist discrimination as well.
Men can get away with making sexist jokes (or even not-jokes) around other men. You don't have to think so hard about how what you say might be perceived. Taking the overhead of that mental filter out of the loop lets men feel more at ease around each other.
I'm not making a moral judgment, just describing what I've seen over the years as to one explanation of how men can have a subconscious bias that prefers hiring men.
Cultural norms among men create pressure not to call out other men for misogynist and homophobic "humor." A man might be able to "get away with" making such remarks around other men, but it is very incorrect to infer that a lack of complaints means everyone around you is actually at ease.
> Men can get away with making sexist jokes (or even not-jokes) around other men.
That's an important observation and plays a huge role in perpetuating sexism and gender discrimination. It continues to exist because guys let other guys get away with it. If you speak up and indicate that you're not okay with it, behaviors and attitudes may change.
It's not easy and it requires courage. But it's necessary to really make a dent in the historical patterns.
Maybe it isn't a problem that needs fixing? Maybe making work another place of constant judgement and time under the PC microscope would not be a net positive?
Remember there's a difference between bare-faced misogyny and garden variety politically incorrectness.
Nice observation.
One of my colleague got a stern warning for using the word dick ( 'dont be a dick' kind of way) around female colleagues, because two women sitting behind him complained to management about it.
I am sure he is not discriminatory, biased or misogynistic.
I guess it wise to think about what you are saying and not say stuff like 'fuck off', 'stop bitching' which may be construed as inappropriate.
You don't have to be a woman to be offended by profanity. So it is hard to say (based on your few sentences) that this had anything to do with man vs woman. Perhaps the two people sitting behind the person were just offended by the language in a general "I don't think we should be cursing at work" sort of way. Not everything has something to do with the gender of the people involved. Wait... that can't be true... can it? ;)
If a man that is not a member of a protected minority complains about profanity, the powers that be tell him to suck it up. If a protected minority complains, the user of profanity may be fired (see: Adria Richards)
This is an issue with jerks in any situation that entitles them to some automatic due process or protection. That might be gender/race/disability or union affiliation or nepotism.
People who are skilled in manipulating the environment use whatever tools are available to get their way. When you decide that an entire class of people, say women, are unwelcome because you're worried about dealing with chickenshit complaints, you are discriminating illegally.
I can't claim it is my own observation. I got it from a feminist talking about how maybe the reason men are resisting women's ingress into male-dominated professions is because when women find the traditionally male workplace environment unsatisfactory, they expect the environment to change to suit them.
As a man in a pretty male-dominated profession, (Military) I can say that this is the case. It's exacerbated by blatant sexism, but the biggest rational fear is that women expect the environment to change when they arrive and that this change will be detrimental. The current culture and environment has been tried and proven to work, and they're fearful of a change in that culture impacting success.
Having worked with women, I'm of the opinion that it really depends on leadership and the maturity of everyone in the shop. If you have scumbags around that are allowed to act unchecked, then a woman can destroy a shop in a matter of weeks. If you have good leadership that clearly outlines proper and improper behavior, then things usually come out ok.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. It's especially valuable since you are working in a historically male institution. It'd be interesting if you wrote about more of your experiences and observations on this topic (like a blog post). I would be excited to read it.
Women in the military is a really, really complicated topic. It'll take a long post to do it justice; you could easily write several books on the subject.
First, as you have said, the military has always been a male-dominated institution. The first time that we actually started putting large amounts of women into uniform was during World War 2. We took women for clerical jobs so that more men were able to fight on the front lines. The recruiting slogan was "Free an Man to Fight."
The military has always been seen as a catalyst for social change. It's arguable that the integration of black and white soldiers was the first step in the civil rights movement, and the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is probably going to be seen as the first step of the federal government ending de jure discrimination of gay people. With this in mind, a lot of feminist lobby groups are trying to do the same thing with women with the exact same goals.
The problem is that men and women are much further apart than these other integration challenges. Black men and white men are culturally different, and there were a lot of problems with integration. I'd say that there still are problems; if you look at a battalion, you'll notice that all the black guys hang out with each other, all the Hispanic guys hang out with each other, and so on. However, everyone is still able to function as a unit. The same is true for gays. I'd say that it's mostly because most gay men stay in the closet for their terms, (lesbians are almost universally accepted) but the repeal of DADT didn't really have much of an effect on anything because a gay man is still basically the same as a straight man when it comes to doing work.
This is not so with women.
Similar to firefighting work, the military is a very physical job. Everything ends up being physical in some shape or form, and it really doesn't matter which MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) you pick, you're going to end up doing something physical as a matter of your daily duty. There are particularly egregious cases where they stick women into Ordnance, but even a job like avionics technician involves doing hard labor (Ha, you thought you'd use a soldering iron all day? Guess your recruiter didn't tell you that you have to take off all the hydraulic lines before you can take the control box out. Have fun).
There's a very clear double standard that is communicated, and it's insidious for several reasons. When a man "falls out" (can't keep up with the rest of the unit) of a run, his life sucks. In my shop, falling out means you just volunteered to run with the master sergeant at 2:00 in the afternoon. It's summer in Arizona, and it's usually around 115 degrees. Not a good time. We have a guy who isn't very good at running; as a result, he gets to run every day at 2:00. He is pretty miserable. He's definitely getting better, though.
When we had a female sergeant, she also fell out every time. The response was indifference because, "well, she's a woman and it's just par for the course that women can't keep up with men." It's also implicit that said sergeant could make the case that the master sergeant is only making her run at 2:00 because she's a woman. The case would go, "Your standard is too high, and you know that I can't keep up. You're being a big meaniehead and you're only making this standard because you're sexist." The master sergeant's career would be fried before you can say "Equal Opportunity." An EO case is a career-ender.
Because this issue can't be dealt with in the open, (it's verboten to say that women are simply not as physically capable as men) you have a lot of people who pay lip service to the "We're all equal" party line but snicker at women in leadership positions. And, sadly, it's justified in many cases. This aforementioned double standard also get applied to promotion along with daily life, and it's a kick in the teeth when you're a lance corporal obeying a corporal who is, by all objective measures, a worse Marine than you. That applies to either gender, but it just so happens that due to affirmative action, there are a lot of women in leadership positions who have no business being there. Couple that with the fact that women make just over 6% of the Marine Corps, (small sample size) and you get sexism.
I don't really feel like going into the sexual harassment / assault part and the fraternization, as that's just shitty behavior that can be remedied by court-martialing people and setting a clear standard. In any case, the real problem is the double standard. If you apply a double standard, then you get sexism. If you hold everyone accountable, then you get genuine respect. Doing so, however, would drastically decrease the number of women in the military. I personally think that's a good thing if it means that the remainder are respected and valued.
Is the male military really "proven to work"? Perhaps a more feminine influence would have better outcome, with less dead and destroyed on all sides of international conflict. Who nows?
> they expect the environment to change to suit them.
It may not be your intention, but I get the sense that you feel this is unreasonable?
As a thought experiment, consider what you'd say if we were having this discussion around racism. Do you consider it unfair for black people (or any non-white racial group) to expect society to change due the discrimination they've experienced?
Imagine we have an office staffed exclusively by white people. Then imagine a black person joins. After a while, they hear a racist comment, not overtly racist, but insensitive and potentially hurtful. If the black person complains about this comment, would we feel it okay to say "oh come on, you're just overly sensitive"?
I'm certainly not advocating that work should be a place of constant judgment. And I'm not fan of being under a constant behavioral microscope.
I do find it important that work be a place where I feel respected and safe. Eliminating sexism and gender discrimination in the workplace is part of that effort.
Maybe it would be better if the women stayed home and did whatever it is that they do there?
Unfortunately, the economy over the last 40 years has demonstrated that that option is sub-optimal.
Or did you mean by "time under the PC microscope" and "garden variety politically incorrectness" that you are ok if other people are uncomfortable, as long as you aren't?
My favorite explanation comes from the Economist[1]:
"The increase in female employment has also accounted for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity. Carve up the world's economic growth a different way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has."
It's not a conscious motivation. But if you go through life working with nothing but men, it becomes harder to visualize a woman doing your job, or doing it well. (Because otherwise where are they? Thus the term "status quo".)
I was very surprised to see the admission of his giving family information. Employers are prohibited from asking such questions here in the US, and I've always thought it improper to put it on a resume. It either invites unfavorable discrimination or comes across as a ploy for sympathy or favoritism.
It may have been a lesser factor in this case, but I would guess hardly anyone does this today, and I had thought it was no longer considered OK even before the 90s.
"Employers are prohibited from asking such questions here in the US"
Regardless of what you can ask you can always ping people and find out answers.
You can discuss your own situation and see a reaction on the part of the person you are speaking with. Takes a bit of creativity.
I know of someone who wanted to hire only puerto ricans for his bricks and mortar store (forgetting the reason). So you can't advertise for "puerto ricans" but you can say "knowledge of spanish a plus".
Not to negate the point, but I witnessed some MALE gender discrimination when applying to a local IBM office for a college co-op.
Ratio of females to males is low in computer programming courses, but 100% of females were interviewed for an IBM position, and 0% of males were interviewed (approx. 6 females and 16 males). This happened twice in back-to-back years.
It seems the whole gender discrimination has taken a swing in the opposite direction for this small office - work hard to find female workers over male workers. But I haven't figured if they are doing this because they care about female workers, or they want to boost their public image? Are they giving females a chance to prove themselves to work for IBM, or are they just filling the most menial jobs with females to balance out their gender ratio?
This doesn't seem like the "give the job to the person best fit for it" mentality, but maybe to them the "first glance" isn't enough to make that decision. Plus, this was just a co-op, almost anyone in the class could perform the position. I decided to view IBM's actions as a form of tactic to develop female presence in IT industry rather than gender discrimination.
Interesting article. I wouldn't necessarily say you can understand gender discrimination just because you were affected by it as a side affect. It is true the author became aware or more aware of gender discrimination because of his name, but he still doesn't have the experience of living in a society where gender discrimination is a daily occurrence.
That said, gender bias a real thing in hiring and faculty practices in the US.
>It is true the author became aware or more aware of gender discrimination because of his name, but he still doesn't have the experience of living in a society where gender discrimination is a daily occurrence.
All genders face gender discrimination. For example, the country I live in is a Nordic country often hailed for equality, but the state forces all men to do slave-labour for the government. Men and women face about the same amount of gender discrimination in Western nations. Men's problems include more severe jail sentences, forced labour, lack of father's rights and so on. Interesting fact: majority of rape victims in USA are male.[1]
This is true, but it should be noted that gender discrimination is fundamentally related to patriarchy and misogyny.
> For example, the country I live in is a Nordic country often hailed for equality, but the state forces all men to do slave-labour for the government.
I don't know anything about this so I can't really comment.
> Men and women face about the same amount of gender discrimination in Western nations.
I'm from the US, so I can't speak for every place, but that is most certainly not true here. Women and trans* folks are far more likely to experience sexual assault and violence compared to men and generally women face systemic issues revolving around family and work that men do not.
> Men's problems include more severe jail sentences, forced labour, lack of father's rights and so on.
In the US, its not just men that are more likely to receive jail time, but esp. black and hispanic men. There are systemic issues with racism that perpetuate this problem and this is intersectional with systemic issues with gender. All prisoners suffer from work programs that are essentially indentured servitude and forced work (not sure if that is what you were getting at).
In the US lack of "father's rights" is a red herring. Men have a high success rate in getting custody in family court when they pursue custody, however men do not pursue custody nearly as often. Also, any kind of bias or discrimination in favor of women in family court is rooted in misogyny in the first place.
> Interesting fact: majority of rape victims in USA are male.
This because the rates of rape for men overwhelmingly come from prisons and being incarcerated. Further more, this isn't really that useful of a thing to say anyway outside of the context of prisoners rights and prison abolition, as women do face high rates of sexual assault and rape and most perpetrators of rape are never convicted.
>This is true, but it should be noted that gender discrimination is fundamentally related to patriarchy and misogyny.
I don't agree with your definition.
>I'm from the US, so I can't speak for every place, but that is most certainly not true here. Women and trans* folks are far more likely to experience sexual assault and violence compared to men and generally women face systemic issues revolving around family and work that men do not.
I disagree, even with US. Men face more violence than women, for example.
>In the US lack of "father's rights" is a red herring. Men have a high success rate in getting custody in family court when they pursue custody, however men do not pursue custody nearly as often. Also, any kind of bias or discrimination in favor of women in family court is rooted in misogyny in the first place.
Ah, so discrimination against men is actually discrimination against women? I disagree with your invented definition.
On the "slave labor" point, he is probably talking about compulsory military service in the defense force. If I'm correctly informed, this still happens in Finland and Norway. Those who opt-out to the military service for ideological reasons still have to do a year of "community service".
Although Norway's government decided this year to make military service mandatory for both genders. So I'm assuming that parent is from Finland, Sweden or Denmark.
>This is true, but it should be noted that gender discrimination is fundamentally related to patriarchy and misogyny.
Making faith based statements like that and acting as though they are evidence based is not productive. There is no evidence to support feminist mythology surrounding their redefinition of patriarchy.
>In the US lack of "father's rights" is a red herring.
No it is not. A system that was equal would begin with shared custody as the default, and a case would need to be made to remove either parent's custody based on their being unfit. A system where men are required to spend considerable time and money fighting to get less custody than women get by default is not equal. The reason men have high success in getting custody when they pursue it is because they almost exclusively pursue it in cases where there is substantial evidence that the mother is grossly unfit. Have a man talk to a custody lawyer while you listen in. They will universally tell you not to bother pursuing custody unless you have proof the mother is an addict or has allowed another man to assault the children frequently. Using selection bias to dismiss valid concerns makes it appear as though you have a vested interest in maintaining inequality.
>This because the rates of rape for men overwhelmingly come from prisons and being incarcerated.
> Making faith based statements like that and acting as though they are evidence based is not productive.
Cool; how about some evidence for your custody assertions?
> There is no evidence to support feminist mythology surrounding their redefinition of patriarchy.
Systemic sexism is widely documented. This ranges from pay gaps [1] to harsher views on overweight women vs men [2] to sexual assault [3]. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you objecting to appropriation of the word 'patriarchy'?
I accidentally deleted a line when I was typing; I meant to write "Male rape is predominately a result of the way the United States does incarceration and needs to be discussed in that context; the parent isn't saying that male rape victims 'don't count' "
Also, you clearly didn't bother to glance over any of the data I provided. You probably should, especially about the extremely well documented gendered pay gap. Denying that such a gap exists when there are mountains of evidence to the contrary only makes you sound ignorant and chauvinistic.
I'd still like citations on the male custody and on this 'forced envelopment' business.
Yes, I did see your "data". Comparing the average income of all men to the average income of all women does not establish a pay gap. The average of all women works fewer hours than the average of all men, work less demanding jobs, and has less experience. Comparisons of men and women with the same amount of experience, working the same hours, in the same job show there is no difference in pay.
Interesting fact: majority of rape victims in USA are male.
This has been addressed a couple of times. Note that 1) the 216,000 number is for victims of "sexual abuse" which doesn't necessarily mean "rape" and 2) not all inmates of penitentiaries are male.
Also, isn't 216,000 a pretty small number (ignoring the, uh, horror of it)? I usually hear numbers like "1 in 6 women" or "1 in 4 Native American women".
If your company is discriminating, it's not getting the best applicant for the job, it's getting the best young male for the job. That is missing out on at least 60% of applicants. That should be all the reason any intelligent person needs to be concerned about these factors. It is hard to hire good people. Also the pool of individuals discriminated against by other employers is perhaps more likely to contain qualified people who have not been hired.
Why should I be concerned? I like working with talented people, but my experience has been that those employers that employ gender-balanced workforce employ a lower proportion of highly talented people than those that do not. And if we're speaking solely about self-interest then as a male such discrimination works in my favour.
So no, that's not "all the reason any intelligent person needs", you have to give an actual reason.
If you need someone with qualification X, and n%, n != 50, of students attending university to earn qualification X are of gender A, yet you try to employ genders A and B equally, you will get fewer good people with qualification X than if you employed n% people of gender A and (100-n)% people of gender B.
Since there are very, very few subjects attended equally by both genders, employing equally will get you worse people.
Note that the above actually assumes that people from both genders are in general equally capable/intelligent. If you add, for example, a higher standard deviation of the IQ for gender C, you will get even more skewed results.
I am graduating in a few month and also applied for some jobs in the USA (I'm from germany). I found it somewhat intresting that every employer I sent my resume to was asking what gender and race(!) I was before I could submit. You could also choose the option not to give an answer, but I have never seen that in germany.
On the other hand some people on HN find it odd to have a picture of you on your CV - which is the norm here.
They don't use that information for interviewing/hiring decisions. If they have any contracts with the federal government, they are legally required to collect that information about applicants specifically for compliance with equal opportunity employment.
In other words, no one was looking at that information when looking at your resume. Someone in HR was looking at aggregate data at the end of the year to say "Hey, we're hiring group X at above/below average" or in the event of a lawsuit to prove they don't discriminate.
We've been interviewing for our first 2 roles recently and I have to say that male or female doesn't bother me either way - we've interviewed in equal quantities and, while we're yet to fill the positions, I genuinely am not bothered if the successful person is male or female.
Reasons for this could be:
1. I'm 25 so I wonder if I haven't experienced enough to bias me one way or another (what that experience would be I've no idea)? (don't claim I'm being ageist, I'm not it's just one possibility)
2. My fiancé is an excellent engineer so I might have had the male dominated field bias squashed by that.
Unfortunately, their software is broken. It goes through the test, and then the post test questions (I strongly prefer X, etc) just keep repeating over and over. You can't actually complete a test.
Agreed, but thinking over the CVs we've rejected and the people we've interviewed it's been pretty balanced in the number of male vs female. Obviously its not a perfect 50:50, and nor should it be as that would indicate some sort of bias.
Maybe the solution to this problem is to have recruiters and HR departments redact the name of someone and replace with a number.
In the UK it's not a requirement to ask for someones age on their CV so maybe internal processes could be implemented to further reduce the likelihood of subconscious, or conscious, bias.
Sorry, poorly phrased sentence. What I meant was, where some of my friends see engineering as a male only field (ie. women can't do the job type opinion) I don't, this could be in part because my female fiancé is an excellent engineer who is head and shoulder above some of her male and female counter parts in knowledge and skills.
I've never heard that before. And the searches I just did for it seem to reference "fiancée" as just a side note. It seems to me that "fiancé" is most commonly used to mean either. I for one was not confused one bit by the original statement.
Well now you know. It's a French noun, and most French nouns that refer to people add an extra "e" in the feminine form. It even works for a lot of names (Jean vs. Jeanne).
Yes. The footnote I saw referred to that spelling as "the French spelling"... so (since I'm not French or in France) I think I'll continue to use the other one like every other time I've seen it.
Interestingly, it's not just a case of gender: Rather the uncertainty and its associated cognitive dissonance, leaves a negative feeling in the mind of a reader.
There are many other kinds of uncertainty present in a resume; and its always a risky factor because folks like to understand context.
Have an ethnic name? Assume people might think you're an immigrant. If you don't want them to assume that: emphasize where you're from, etc. This is good personal branding. Is it unfortunate that you might feel a liability here? yes
For example, in my office when someone doesn't show their picture in our email system: I feel negative about them. When they don't show a picture and have a name that makes it difficult to know how to refer to them, I'm doubly-frustrated.
Much of this frustration is subconscious but people need to be congnicent of how they come across to others in many contexts.
here I choose to be 100% identity neutral, because I can be. But in work this is a big mistake, because formal expectations are applied in correspondence and you need to feel you're meeting those expectations with a job applicant.
If you're in this position, you've done yourself a disservice: "Dear Sir or Madam, We are sorry to inform you that we cannot offer you a position"
There is much better data out there concerning the effect of gender (and race) on CVs. That would be much more useful than this guy's anecdotal experience.
The first third of the story leads with all this talk about how he had all the qualifications and shouldn't have any trouble finding a job. Then a couple paragraphs about how hard it was to find, and how this was so surprising. Then a couple of paragraphs on how "Kim" could be assumed female. And then a complete turn around when he added "Mr".
This was supposed to be data, in the sense that it was supposed to provide you with the sense that, empirically, gender has a huge effect.
If you subtract this from the story, what do you have left? A personal account of how having difficulty finding a job shakes your confidence, forming maybe 3 or 4 sentences? Were you unaware that getting rejections is hard?
The article gives you a mental tool that you can apply as you like to various situations that you encounter. It's like learning a type of logical fallacy. You wouldn't disregard an article that described what a "false dilemma" is as "having no data".
First, what is the tool? (This is an honest question.)
Second, my complaint wasn't that it had no data, my complaint was that it was essentially just data, and that this data was much noisier than some good, widely available data. Wrapping crappy data in an engaging story that stick in the mind of the reader, when better data exists, is doing the reader a disservice.
Not to argue that gender bias doesn't exist. But this is not a good study case as he tainted his resume pretty badly from the start. Not being currently employed is a red flag to a lot of employers and gets you immediately discarded. And putting personal information, even if seemingly innocent, triggers the lawsuit avoidance mechanism at a lot of places and immediately gets you discarded.
I'm not sure you really read it closely. The ONLY thing that changed about his resume is the clarifying "Mr.". Whatever faults his resume might have were present before and after, yet the differences in its reception were dramatic.
I really want to read this, but the site goes completely bonkers on iOS. I can see some content but it's wedged behind this top banner. They don't really expect people to read through a tiny gap in their images, do they?
Maybe it had to do with the resume appearing more formal. Try another version with "Ms." and another with "Mrs." to really make this something we can draw conclusions from.
When you use the "anecdote-not-data" contentless dismissal, you're not supposed to follow it up with a suggestion to add a control to the single data point.
This is so sad...wow! I cannot imagine what goes through people's heads when they see a very qualifies individual and then they decide it's a woman and skip even considering her.
They never see the qualified individual. They trained their brain to do pattern-recognition on the resume for quick filtering, and women just don't fit the pattern. They probably don't even realize they've trained themselves to ignore women like you don't pay attention to the weight of the shirt on your back. It doesn't rise to the level of consciousness.
I kind of doubt that this is true. Wouldn't the managers see that she was a female in the interview, and ask why she misrepresented herself or take that opportunity to not hire her?
Since this is entirely devoid of any discernible facts, it's a little disturbing that this has made it to the front page of HN. When did random assertions become unquestioned truth?
This feels a lot like a sensationalized modern day witch hunt, "Burn the misoginists! Burn the sexists!"
Also, for whatever it's worth, never have I heard "Kim" considered anything but a woman's name.
This is scary. I go out of my way to remove gender hints from my CV. In particular I use a shortened version of my first name which is slightly more commonly associated with women. And I have had problems finding work recently. Now, do I change things because I need work? I could even pretend it was a bit of research to give a second data point to this story.
Oh my god. I'd seriously write fuck you letters in 72pt bold comic sans ms to all other companies, explaining what dicks they were. Seriously, 4 months of nothing (must have been lots of applications), and then the word "Mr" changes it all? Incredible.
I would love to read this article, but quartz.com is horribly broken in Opera Mobile on my phone...
I'll just wait and read it on my laptop, but this does look like a sign of Webkit bringing back the days of sites "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6".
Not at all. Thoughtful and open discussion on gender discrimination is hard to come by, even on Hacker News. I think a hard first step to take is admitting that the problem really is quite serious and that it is something that affects all of us.
some of previous cases was just making fuss out of nothing, however this is a real problem here. As HN is usually better at criticising, I don't think there is much to add...
This was the late 90s. A lot has changed since then. Yeah, there's still problems with male-dominated industries but it's gotten a lot better. Nowadays it's more about getting women even interested in the fields.
You would hope, but sadly not much as changed. There have been numerous experiments lately where someone created identical mid-career LinkedIn profiles one posing as a man and another as a woman.
The male profile always gets far more views and recruiter messages.
The finance industry has a terrible reputation for blatant sexism for example however it's been proven categorically by the world largest finance recruitment firm that over the last 70 years the number of females in executive positions in finance is steadily and blatantly improving.
Their studies also prove that there is still a gender issue in finance but claiming that not much has changed is categorically wrong.
Sadly it's not just the gender thing that's going on here as well, I'm thinking of some study they did where they attached photos with the resumes - the "attractive" people (both men and women) were rated as better skilled than the "normal" and "ugly" people that had the same resume. Although, I think that if I took some fancy photos of myself and primped myself up, I don't think it would do me any favors and I'd get some unwanted attention!
My name isn't even gender neutral, very feminine...I think I once was on some board online using my real name and people were still assuming I was a guy. When I asked how they could possibly think it was a male name, they replied, "I dunno, I was thinking it was like one of those fancy Italian names, like Fabio or whatever..Fabia..yeah, same thing...they always sound like girls names."
I've now started picking the most ridiculously cutsie usernames possible, like this one, to keep people guessing. Sometimes it backfires still and people just get homophobic, but I generally stick with it anyway for fun :)