3 ms·
> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a spec
by vertex-four 10y ago
> You will (probably) never see such thing in Latin American because no one cares why color your skin is or what gender you identify with in order to get a specific job.
So the issue is: most companies are somewhat discriminatory by default. Left to their own devices, they'll hire people who are similar to the existing group. If you have a company made up of white men, you're going to wind up hiring more white men.
And the worst bit - when they do eventually hire someone different, they're going to keep all the little bits of culture which, while they worked as long as you all had much the same background, are harmful and distressing to people coming from other backgrounds.[0] After all, if it's one person complaining, and everyone else is OK with it, it must be that one person's fault, right?
The result of this is that once a member of a minority sees that a company is made up primarily of white men, well, it's probably not for them.
Now, at some point between anti-discrimination laws being written and now, some people decided this is not a particularly good state to be in, and a whole bunch of people spent a whole lot of effort trying to persuade society that this isn't a good thing. And hence, eventually we get to a situation where HR paper pushers and high-level managers are explicitly thinking about people's race, gender, and so on and so forth while hiring - although the law says that you have to avoid doing so.
The issue is that this really isn't what we want people to be doing, but as long as nobody's caught doing it, the law and society incentivises it. It's a better position than the one we were in - you can actually get employed in the sort of company I described above if you don't come from the same background, and you can complain if people misbehave in an egregious manner - but it's still not good enough.
What we want is for companies to signal that they're open to changing their culture to fit the needs of their employees - which of course is flipping the power dynamic on its head, but there you have it. We need companies to signal that when their employees raise an issue with how the company works on a social level, they'll actually be listened to. And then we need companies to actually follow through with that.
Until then, we'll have discrimination in hiring and in the workplace.
[0] I've worked for a company which regularly had the majority of its employees take clients out to strip clubs, and had a porn-sharing Friday, and this was a normal and expected part of business. And that's the really blatantly obvious things. We had one female employee who was not an office manager - and my boss specifically mentioned to me that she was tough as nails to be in our industry.