6 ms·

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

leaveyou 10y ago
I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.
- geofft 10y ago
  Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    No you don't get it. When men get their jobs its because of their hard work and abilities. When women get jobs its because of mass discrimination against males! /s
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before. Either way, you need more numbers to judge. Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.
    - geofft 10y ago
      > If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job. If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline. So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people. If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        >> If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. Why not? Statistically, at least, this should be true, provided that the candidates have been treated equally before they came to you. If they have disadvantaged in that treatment, it will skew the outcome even more against the discriminated minority - e.g. if women tend to get shittier education in certain field because their teachers don't believe them as capable as men, then of those 200 female candidates, the proportion of ones that are less qualified is likely to be lower. If you somehow end up with the numbers that are reversed, it's not at all unreasonable to ask why - there ought to be a cause, and for a difference that big, it should be prominent. It may well be a reasonable cause - maybe you just got a bunch of really bright women in that batch, and that will be reflected in their career records etc. But it may also be sexism or other form of discrimination not related to performance. We do investigations of discrimination against minorities based on statistics like these all the time. For example, one of the underpinnings of the ongoing push for police reform in US is the disproportionate number of black people when it comes to police interactions, arrests (esp. for often substance-less crimes like "resisting arrest" or "disorderly conduct"), and convictions. Generally speaking, this is not considered proof of discrimination by itself, but when there's corroborating evidence (e.g. you find out that some PD had a racist internal culture, based on the SMS the officers send to each other etc), it can certainly strengthen the case to the point where discrimination becomes the default assumption, and another explanation would require substantial proof. In this lawsuit, the guy does cite several specific examples that, at face value, do indicate discriminatory approach, so dismissing such a large disparity and such a quick rate of change as "it just happens, wasn't on purpose" out of hand is not feasible - it requires evidence to rebut.
- paulcole 10y ago
  You had no problem with them being 80% male?
  - leaveyou 10y ago
    I had no problem with it, why would I have ? Some workplaces have 99% men, others 99% women but very few workplaces fire out 60% of their employees just because their gender is not trendy anymore.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    Is there any evidence that that is due to sexism?
hueving 10y ago
You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s
- geofft 10y ago
  1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 10y ago
    > This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT? I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.
romanovcode 10y ago
"When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female" Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?
- mcguire 10y ago
  Also from the article: "Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."
jbmorgado 10y ago
When you have an hard fact like: In one year the administration when from 20% female to 80% female. You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.
- paulcole 10y ago
  So weren't they guilty when it was 80% male, too?
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?
    - ska 10y ago
      I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company. If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that. Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times. To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.

leaveyou 10y ago

I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.

geofft 10y ago
Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
- yolesaber 10y ago
  No you don't get it. When men get their jobs its because of their hard work and abilities. When women get jobs its because of mass discrimination against males! /s
- int_19h 10y ago
  Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before. Either way, you need more numbers to judge. Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.
  - geofft 10y ago
    > If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job. If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline. So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people. If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      >> If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. Why not? Statistically, at least, this should be true, provided that the candidates have been treated equally before they came to you. If they have disadvantaged in that treatment, it will skew the outcome even more against the discriminated minority - e.g. if women tend to get shittier education in certain field because their teachers don't believe them as capable as men, then of those 200 female candidates, the proportion of ones that are less qualified is likely to be lower. If you somehow end up with the numbers that are reversed, it's not at all unreasonable to ask why - there ought to be a cause, and for a difference that big, it should be prominent. It may well be a reasonable cause - maybe you just got a bunch of really bright women in that batch, and that will be reflected in their career records etc. But it may also be sexism or other form of discrimination not related to performance. We do investigations of discrimination against minorities based on statistics like these all the time. For example, one of the underpinnings of the ongoing push for police reform in US is the disproportionate number of black people when it comes to police interactions, arrests (esp. for often substance-less crimes like "resisting arrest" or "disorderly conduct"), and convictions. Generally speaking, this is not considered proof of discrimination by itself, but when there's corroborating evidence (e.g. you find out that some PD had a racist internal culture, based on the SMS the officers send to each other etc), it can certainly strengthen the case to the point where discrimination becomes the default assumption, and another explanation would require substantial proof. In this lawsuit, the guy does cite several specific examples that, at face value, do indicate discriminatory approach, so dismissing such a large disparity and such a quick rate of change as "it just happens, wasn't on purpose" out of hand is not feasible - it requires evidence to rebut.
paulcole 10y ago
You had no problem with them being 80% male?
- leaveyou 10y ago
  I had no problem with it, why would I have ? Some workplaces have 99% men, others 99% women but very few workplaces fire out 60% of their employees just because their gender is not trendy anymore.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Is there any evidence that that is due to sexism?

hueving 10y ago

You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s

geofft 10y ago
1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 10y ago
  > This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT? I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.

romanovcode 10y ago

"When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female" Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?

mcguire 10y ago
Also from the article: "Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."

jbmorgado 10y ago

When you have an hard fact like: In one year the administration when from 20% female to 80% female. You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.

paulcole 10y ago
So weren't they guilty when it was 80% male, too?
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?
  - ska 10y ago
    I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company. If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that. Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times. To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.