5 ms·

Oh, you’re with them? (2016)

61 points by minikites 10y ago

renlo 10y ago
Why does everything have to be a big deal these days? Forgive, forget, move on.
- sdflkd 10y ago
  Because women should not have to "forgive, forget, move on" when it comes to being disrespected and having their career held back.
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    we have no idea what happened. it's possible the 3 men were sitting together talking while the woman boss was sitting farther away. it seems that whenever a mistake happens it must be because of your sex or race and nothing else.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Yes, I agree. This must be an elaborate attempt by Raymond Chen to trick us into believing in gender bias.
      - aaron-lebo 10y ago
        There's no reason to discount this post, but you're talking about a secondhand story. We have one account from someone a step removed from the story. The post is about bias, and people are guilty of their own biases in perspective.
  - fjert 10y ago
    But this sounds like a real mistake someone can make... how do you know which groups of people are together? If they're spaced apart enough it's not hard mistake them as separate groups. Not to mention you don't know what the assistant's tone was or whether or not the author was misinterpreting the situation. Honestly, that blog post feels like bait for a forced debate based on an anecdote with little to no information/evidence of anything.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      I find it illuminating that there are comments alternately explaining that his happened because she wasn't standing close enough to the group or that it's just simple Bayesian probability that black women aren't important. I'd really like to see a debate between these two groups. Like both agree that nothing wrong happened, but who has the best explanation why it's all ok?
  - darawk 10y ago
    But this woman's career was not held back. She was the head of the department. So, if this story is evidence of anything at all, it's that this sort of bias doesn't matter. That being said, I don't think this story is evidence of much of anything.
- thereare5lights 10y ago
  Why does everyone have to complain about other people's complaints these days? Forgive, forget, move on.
- moonka 10y ago
  To forgive implies that someone is sorry for what happened. Non-apologies as mentioned in the post tends to mean that they aren't actually sorry, and just don't want to deal with the discomfort of being called out.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Once isn't a big deal. If it happens all of the time (and this type of thing seems to) then that makes it a big deal.
- essayist 10y ago
  If nothing else, because people who screw up should have better manners. You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off, and you immediately do and say "sorry" -> I forgive, forget, move on. You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off and you delay, express surprise, finally do, and then explain, at length, that you didn't notice, aren't that heavy, meant nothing by it, but you're sorry if I'm offended (and it's the third time it's happened this year) -> kind of a big deal, because I'm getting very tired of this cp.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    How do you extrapolate that from the post?
- danbolt 10y ago
  I don't really agree with your sentiment at all, but I think that the discussion that can come from it is really valuable, so I hope your comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion.
- alexdumitru 10y ago
  I agree. If it was for a man instead of her, it would've been nothing. And I'm sure this happens often for men too, they just don't think about it.
charles-salvia 10y ago
If you trained a neural network to recognize "high powered tech executives", it will likely start picking up on features associated with 30 to 40 year old (mostly white) males wearing sweaters or "business casual" attire. It probably would report a low value if you showed it a minority female. (Google "tech executive" on Google images to test this out.) Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future. There are only two solutions: (1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect it. (2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases. Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.
- noobermin 10y ago
  While micro-aggressions suck, I agree with your sentiment. This is the problem with PC, it is treating the symptoms without addressing the fundamental causes.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  The people who run tech companies are mostly similar demographics. They make a lot of short-sighted decisions. Make your leadership pool more diverse in gender, race, and (more importantly) life experience and things will change. An artificial solution is only going to be top down, engineered by the very execs who have limited experience. The bigger problem is the self-perpetuating vortex that is Silicon Valley. Mix it up.
- darawk 10y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The solution isn't to make this assistant apologize profusely. It's a reasonable mistake to make. Women of color are extraordinarily unusual in this position. This isn't an instance of bias. It's a mistake based on simple base rate prevalence. No harm was done here and no harm was meant. Now, that doesn't mean that all forms of what people have taken to calling 'microaggressions' are harmless - some of them are harmful. This is just pretty clearly not one of them.
nl 10y ago
I think about this a lot. I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We had person Y from that course and they were bad". It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on the color characteristic and project from sparse examples. I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone could come up with a solution.
- foobazzy 10y ago
  I believe there's nothing wrong with coming up with biases based on evaluating a person's technical abilities for a job role. (Isn't that the whole point?) You know the part where the requirements mention a skill set you should possess. If a person with a particular skill set/course wasn't able to perform as expected, then maybe that is not what you want. However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really solve this. Or so I believe. And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill set to perform the job properly.
Archio 10y ago
This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the administrative assistant was towards the department head. Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well: >Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return. There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)? Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background. What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men? [0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-gender/?dataView=1&currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduate...
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Well, read any HN thread on the topic. "There's no problem in the tech industry. Women just don't like computers."
  - Archio 10y ago
n00b101 10y ago
I don't think this kind of thing is isolated to the tech industry. Edith Cooper at Goldman Sachs shared this recently: "I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter. I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs. I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn). I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on-talking-about-race-at-work-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on...
synicalx 10y ago
Sorry, but why are we immediately assuming this wasn't an accident/unintentional? Did I miss the part where the admin assistant took off their KKK costume and stick-on Adolf Hitler moustache before shaking everyone's hand? Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive? I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand, apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her much.

61 points by minikites 10y ago

renlo 10y ago

Why does everything have to be a big deal these days? Forgive, forget, move on.

sdflkd 10y ago
Because women should not have to "forgive, forget, move on" when it comes to being disrespected and having their career held back.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  we have no idea what happened. it's possible the 3 men were sitting together talking while the woman boss was sitting farther away. it seems that whenever a mistake happens it must be because of your sex or race and nothing else.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Yes, I agree. This must be an elaborate attempt by Raymond Chen to trick us into believing in gender bias.
    - aaron-lebo 10y ago
      There's no reason to discount this post, but you're talking about a secondhand story. We have one account from someone a step removed from the story. The post is about bias, and people are guilty of their own biases in perspective.
- fjert 10y ago
  But this sounds like a real mistake someone can make... how do you know which groups of people are together? If they're spaced apart enough it's not hard mistake them as separate groups. Not to mention you don't know what the assistant's tone was or whether or not the author was misinterpreting the situation. Honestly, that blog post feels like bait for a forced debate based on an anecdote with little to no information/evidence of anything.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    I find it illuminating that there are comments alternately explaining that his happened because she wasn't standing close enough to the group or that it's just simple Bayesian probability that black women aren't important. I'd really like to see a debate between these two groups. Like both agree that nothing wrong happened, but who has the best explanation why it's all ok?
- darawk 10y ago
  But this woman's career was not held back. She was the head of the department. So, if this story is evidence of anything at all, it's that this sort of bias doesn't matter. That being said, I don't think this story is evidence of much of anything.
thereare5lights 10y ago
Why does everyone have to complain about other people's complaints these days? Forgive, forget, move on.
moonka 10y ago
To forgive implies that someone is sorry for what happened. Non-apologies as mentioned in the post tends to mean that they aren't actually sorry, and just don't want to deal with the discomfort of being called out.
jlarocco 10y ago
Once isn't a big deal. If it happens all of the time (and this type of thing seems to) then that makes it a big deal.
essayist 10y ago
If nothing else, because people who screw up should have better manners. You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off, and you immediately do and say "sorry" -> I forgive, forget, move on. You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off and you delay, express surprise, finally do, and then explain, at length, that you didn't notice, aren't that heavy, meant nothing by it, but you're sorry if I'm offended (and it's the third time it's happened this year) -> kind of a big deal, because I'm getting very tired of this cp.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  How do you extrapolate that from the post?
danbolt 10y ago
I don't really agree with your sentiment at all, but I think that the discussion that can come from it is really valuable, so I hope your comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion.
alexdumitru 10y ago
I agree. If it was for a man instead of her, it would've been nothing. And I'm sure this happens often for men too, they just don't think about it.

charles-salvia 10y ago

If you trained a neural network to recognize "high powered tech executives", it will likely start picking up on features associated with 30 to 40 year old (mostly white) males wearing sweaters or "business casual" attire. It probably would report a low value if you showed it a minority female. (Google "tech executive" on Google images to test this out.) Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future. There are only two solutions: (1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect it. (2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases. Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.

noobermin 10y ago
While micro-aggressions suck, I agree with your sentiment. This is the problem with PC, it is treating the symptoms without addressing the fundamental causes.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
The people who run tech companies are mostly similar demographics. They make a lot of short-sighted decisions. Make your leadership pool more diverse in gender, race, and (more importantly) life experience and things will change. An artificial solution is only going to be top down, engineered by the very execs who have limited experience. The bigger problem is the self-perpetuating vortex that is Silicon Valley. Mix it up.
darawk 10y ago
Couldn't agree more. The solution isn't to make this assistant apologize profusely. It's a reasonable mistake to make. Women of color are extraordinarily unusual in this position. This isn't an instance of bias. It's a mistake based on simple base rate prevalence. No harm was done here and no harm was meant. Now, that doesn't mean that all forms of what people have taken to calling 'microaggressions' are harmless - some of them are harmful. This is just pretty clearly not one of them.

nl 10y ago

I think about this a lot. I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We had person Y from that course and they were bad". It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on the color characteristic and project from sparse examples. I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone could come up with a solution.

foobazzy 10y ago
I believe there's nothing wrong with coming up with biases based on evaluating a person's technical abilities for a job role. (Isn't that the whole point?) You know the part where the requirements mention a skill set you should possess. If a person with a particular skill set/course wasn't able to perform as expected, then maybe that is not what you want. However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really solve this. Or so I believe. And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill set to perform the job properly.

Archio 10y ago

This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the administrative assistant was towards the department head. Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well: >Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return. There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)? Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background. What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men? [0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduates-by-gender/?dataView=1&currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduate...

tedunangst 10y ago
Well, read any HN thread on the topic. "There's no problem in the tech industry. Women just don't like computers."
- Archio 10y ago

n00b101 10y ago

I don't think this kind of thing is isolated to the tech industry. Edith Cooper at Goldman Sachs shared this recently: "I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter. I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs. I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn). I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on-talking-about-race-at-work-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on...

synicalx 10y ago

Sorry, but why are we immediately assuming this wasn't an accident/unintentional? Did I miss the part where the admin assistant took off their KKK costume and stick-on Adolf Hitler moustache before shaking everyone's hand? Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive? I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand, apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her much.