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Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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What do you mean by equal footing? Equality in Outcomes, or Equality in Opportunities?
Having a job conference open to all genders sounds more equal then a conference excluding a gender identity.
I personally would love to get to the point where names, photos, genders, and social networks - are removed from all employment material and people are just judged on their ability to do a job.
Something like putting someone into the interview queue based on their resume and projects, then having the interview feedback re-written by a third party to remove all discriminatory indicators, then a double blind hiring committee making decisions based on the interview feedback, and neutral resumes. It's a pipe dream, but it would get us closer to a true meritocracy
Women face a huge amount of bias in the tech industry. There's nothing wrong with giving the disadvantages an advantage.
Us men are basically crying because women are getting what we've had the whole time.
Obviously what you describe would be ideal but even that doesn't even the playing field. Once hired women still face that same bias. They are less likely to be taken seriously as professionals (particularly by the higher ups who tend towards old white men) and more likely to be passed over for promotions.
I've seen it happen multiple times, especially in more corporate jobs.
I try to very specifically mention who came up with ideas even if it's my work for this reason.
Another common one is not wanting to ask simple questions in meetings as it makes them look less intelegent. While I ask every stupid question I can think of to be sure and look like I'm invested.
My advice is talk to your manager about things like that instead of helping. I know it feels like a dick move but it's not your job to help someone else with basic stuff.
Something along the lines of "I think John may require more training as I'm having to help him a lot with simple things. I'm happy to do it but my deadlines will need adjusting"
Females have a hard time in tech, not women. anyone can be a women. but historically only females were the ones disadvantaged. Transgender women are actually over represented in tech as a proportion of population.
No I don't mean that because I'm not an incel.
That's great.
people use the word incel pretty liberally these days. can you think of something a bit more original?
Spoken like a true incel
So your advocating for Equality in Outcomes?
Disadvantages groups need help to gain equal footing first. Before we can even talk about equality.
What does equal footing look like / mean to you?
The easiest is incentives to hire minorities (gender, sexual, race, disabled, etc.) to level the playing field first.
This takes away a large part of the privilege that is at play in the tech industry.
As more of these minorities get higher in the industry the implicit biases will begin to disappear.
Many of the people who currently experience the privilege will be pissed off and view it as unfair. But in reality they're getting a taste of what other minorities already experience.
And in my experience (roughly 20 years) the more diverse a team the better the solutions and diversity in thinking you get.
There are two competing lenses we can view this kind of thing through, and both are valid. First, there's the macro lens in which groups like women are significantly underrepresented, and most reasonable people believe that to be a problem we've created that we need to solve. It's not that women are bad at this job. It's that women have been pushed not to participate for reasons we think are bad. Through that lens, an obvious solution is to bias things in favor of women for some period of time to get to a steady state where the system won't automatically fall back into gender-bias as soon as we take our thumb off the scale. That's a reasonable theory, and pursuing it does a lot of good.
But there's a second lens in which individual people with names are trying to participate in the labor market. The fact that men have had a built-in advantage does not imply that any man looking for a job would only be able to get one by leveraging an unfair advantage. If we think talent and hard work are equally distributed through the population, then temporarily biasing things away from men is, to the man currently trying to find a job, exactly as discriminatory as anything that prior generations have faced. The fact that there's a societal good being pursued doesn't make that harm go away either. It is unfair, and we should recognize that. We may decide we have to do it anyway, but I'm not a fan of the idea that "let's mistreat them like other people were mistreated" is inherently a good thing.
That second lens is called egocentrism.
It's just Maslow's Hierarchy. The person who doesn't have a job should be egocentric, at least in this narrow area of focus. If your position is that people should prioritize abstract societal benefits over their own security and well-being, I'm not sure what to tell you other than to prepare for a life of people disappointing you.
That sounds good. But what does equal footing look like in hiring process?
You've described a steady end state, and I agree that's a good end state.
So one form of discrimination was wrong, but this version is ok? No. We should learn from past mistakes, not essentially replicate them with the only difference being we flipped the men/women position.
Also, article states women make up a third of tech jobs. A third. That's a really good chunk. I think the battle for women in tech jobs is over.
You're only looking at things at a surface level. If you don’t correct the wrong, the “level playing field” is only an illusion. companies can’t easily correct why less women choose careers in tech, but they can make moves to correct the problem at their level. Extend and push for parental leave policies where the non-child barring spouse also takes time off for example. Women often see career growth plateau vs non-child barring co-workers due to this missed time. Traditionally this has meant women fall behind men.
Otherwise if you tomorrow just remove gender from Resumes, Men will still have an advantage, because they had the advantage in the past. It would take an entire generation to sort itself out assuming every inherent bias disappears and they absolutely won’t.
Maybe if you live in a world with no depth and only have a shallow understanding of anything.
The kind of discrimination that is problematic is the kind that is unjust or unfairly prejudicial. The kind where we respect people's differences and historical lack of representation is not problematic.
Inequality of outcome is proof of inequality of opportunities 99.9% of the time. IME people playing up the distinction are simply looking for any excuse to pretend inequality isn't a problem.
I'm trying to understand the requirements of the parent comment.
I'm not trying to be disingenuous.
Equality means a lot of things to a lot of people. Equality of outcome, and equality of opportunities are very distinct, and nuanced, and well-defined things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_outcome
Vs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity
Trying to understand what equal footing means, is helpful for me to understand the parent posters position. I don't want to be stuck in ambiguity, when I'm genuinely trying to understand people.
And what happens once people are hired? How to you deal with unequal promotion rates or raises?