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I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit

by hunta2097 9y ago

I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit for the role. Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes. I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy. I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.

rayiner 9y ago
Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.
- chronic193 9y ago
  > We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. This should be treated at the harassment/legal level. Not at the interview level. We should not lower the bar for females or "diversity" hires. I'm sorry, but with all this diversity encouragement bullshit, every black or female engineer I see, I automatically assume they aren't as smart as their male counterparts and were offered a job simply because of their gender or ethnicity. A large portion of silicon valley makes this same assumption.
- beingrealistic 9y ago
  you missed the biggest factor in explaining the balanced gender distribution - more women are qualified for and apply for corporate law jobs. the vast majority of software engineering jobs have pleasant working environments than a typical corporate law job - "unwanted attention and hurdles" doesn't work as an explanation.
- decorator 9y ago
  You can be sure of a counterfactual? Really.
  - decorator 9y ago
    It seems counterfactuals can be known (according to the downvotes). It must be clear how truth-values can be obtained. I must have missed the news about A/B testing reality. Silly me.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - decorator 9y ago
      You can't reason with ideologues. That's what makes them dangerous. With an inability to entertain an opposing view there can be no course correction.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.
      - decorator 9y ago
        > But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. Is that not a counterfactual? > Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was: Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'. Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together. I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really? Does that not convey surprise? I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question. I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mrep 9y ago
  How do you guys recruit and how has that influenced the number of law school graduates by gender assuming you are not a professor? I see that woman now are the majority of law graduates [0] which I find doubtful that it is attributable to corporate recruiting tactics. [0]: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/women-majority-of-us-law-students-first-time.html?referer=https://www.google.com/ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/wome...
  - rayiner 9y ago
    At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in. As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary. And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio. Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.
    - beingrealistic 9y ago
      why do you think the push to hire more women is the reason for the current gender balance in law hiring rather than a simple increase in the number of women choosing to pursue legal qualifications? there is a huge push to hire more women in tech yet it has done little so far to change the balance. there is certainly no hard barrier on women pursuing a tech career as there was for women pursuing a career in corporate law before the 80s.
raducu 9y ago
I've witnessed this at least twice in my career. Both cases by "women", the "diversity-promoting" manager actually meant "mid twenties attractive female". It makes me sick that people need to tip-toe on these issues and add the obligatory "not-sexist" appology to an obviously not-sexist text.
- triplesec 9y ago
  This is indeed a hidden problem in most of these conversations: you see in several fields an overabundance of good looking women, who have been hired by men for equality but over their probably (statistically on average) more qualified but less attractive sistren.
  - RandomCSGeek 9y ago
    In our campus placement, one of my female classmate was asked a single question in a "technical" interview. Which was, "Are you willing to relocate to city x". I won't make any conclusion as that would get me tons of downvotes.
richmarr 9y ago
> I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy. This view is contradicted by the weight of evidence for unconscious bias in hiring. [Edit] Although obviously I don't know exactly what their policy was... maybe they were hiring badly, but the evidence suggests that people (of both sexes) discount the abilities of people in gender-incongruous roles. > I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability. I agree with this (disclaimer: this is what my startup does) but my reasoning is that quotas and other active methods (a) generate resentment, even though they have been shown to raise the bar not lower it, and (b) require a lot of study to determine the 'correct' targets... and even then it's a gamble... so are clumsy and expensive to get right. It's a complicated topic though, not well suited to sweeping statements.
- novembermike 9y ago
  A lot of the unconscious bias studies are failing to replicate.
  - richmarr 9y ago
    Care to support that a little? Not aware that there have been many attempts at direct replication
regularfry 9y ago
People have tried fully anonymised hiring processes. The problem is that in tech women and minorities don't even apply, so it's attacking the problem too late in the process. When they do apply, there's stereotype threat to take account of as well, so even if the employer doesn't know anything about the candidate, that's not enough to correct the bias.

rayiner 9y ago

Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.

chronic193 9y ago
> We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. This should be treated at the harassment/legal level. Not at the interview level. We should not lower the bar for females or "diversity" hires. I'm sorry, but with all this diversity encouragement bullshit, every black or female engineer I see, I automatically assume they aren't as smart as their male counterparts and were offered a job simply because of their gender or ethnicity. A large portion of silicon valley makes this same assumption.
beingrealistic 9y ago
you missed the biggest factor in explaining the balanced gender distribution - more women are qualified for and apply for corporate law jobs. the vast majority of software engineering jobs have pleasant working environments than a typical corporate law job - "unwanted attention and hurdles" doesn't work as an explanation.
decorator 9y ago
You can be sure of a counterfactual? Really.
- decorator 9y ago
  It seems counterfactuals can be known (according to the downvotes). It must be clear how truth-values can be obtained. I must have missed the news about A/B testing reality. Silly me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - decorator 9y ago
    You can't reason with ideologues. That's what makes them dangerous. With an inability to entertain an opposing view there can be no course correction.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.
    - decorator 9y ago
      > But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. Is that not a counterfactual? > Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was: Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'. Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together. I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really? Does that not convey surprise? I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question. I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mrep 9y ago
How do you guys recruit and how has that influenced the number of law school graduates by gender assuming you are not a professor? I see that woman now are the majority of law graduates [0] which I find doubtful that it is attributable to corporate recruiting tactics. [0]: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/women-majority-of-us-law-students-first-time.html?referer=https://www.google.com/ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/wome...
- rayiner 9y ago
  At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in. As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary. And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio. Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.
  - beingrealistic 9y ago
    why do you think the push to hire more women is the reason for the current gender balance in law hiring rather than a simple increase in the number of women choosing to pursue legal qualifications? there is a huge push to hire more women in tech yet it has done little so far to change the balance. there is certainly no hard barrier on women pursuing a tech career as there was for women pursuing a career in corporate law before the 80s.

raducu 9y ago

I've witnessed this at least twice in my career. Both cases by "women", the "diversity-promoting" manager actually meant "mid twenties attractive female". It makes me sick that people need to tip-toe on these issues and add the obligatory "not-sexist" appology to an obviously not-sexist text.

triplesec 9y ago
This is indeed a hidden problem in most of these conversations: you see in several fields an overabundance of good looking women, who have been hired by men for equality but over their probably (statistically on average) more qualified but less attractive sistren.
- RandomCSGeek 9y ago
  In our campus placement, one of my female classmate was asked a single question in a "technical" interview. Which was, "Are you willing to relocate to city x". I won't make any conclusion as that would get me tons of downvotes.

richmarr 9y ago

> I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy. This view is contradicted by the weight of evidence for unconscious bias in hiring. [Edit] Although obviously I don't know exactly what their policy was... maybe they were hiring badly, but the evidence suggests that people (of both sexes) discount the abilities of people in gender-incongruous roles. > I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability. I agree with this (disclaimer: this is what my startup does) but my reasoning is that quotas and other active methods (a) generate resentment, even though they have been shown to raise the bar not lower it, and (b) require a lot of study to determine the 'correct' targets... and even then it's a gamble... so are clumsy and expensive to get right. It's a complicated topic though, not well suited to sweeping statements.

novembermike 9y ago
A lot of the unconscious bias studies are failing to replicate.
- richmarr 9y ago
  Care to support that a little? Not aware that there have been many attempts at direct replication

regularfry 9y ago

People have tried fully anonymised hiring processes. The problem is that in tech women and minorities don't even apply, so it's attacking the problem too late in the process. When they do apply, there's stereotype threat to take account of as well, so even if the employer doesn't know anything about the candidate, that's not enough to correct the bias.