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California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system
- KindOne 6y agoDiscussion 10 days ago (600+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 "California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste"
- IMAYousaf 6y agoThank you for this. I must have missed it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pankajdoharey 6y agoYeah well sounds about right, entirely possible.
- duxup 6y agoIt's an interesting situation. Discrimination based on something not common in one country can still have negative impacts.... but perhaps it hasn't been sorted out legally in our country yet? We live in a strange global world.
- danans 6y agoThis will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law. There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes, including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of them. Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK has its own historical hereditary caste like system.
- dsr_ 6y agoIt's the equivalent of hiring white supremacists and letting them make employment decisions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 6y agoIt does seem a lot like that. And I did find an article which suggests that caste and skin color are associated:[0] > Our understanding of the genetics of skin pigmentation has been largely skewed towards populations of European ancestry, imparting less attention to South Asian populations, who behold huge pigmentation diversity. Here, we investigate skin pigmentation variation in a cohort of 1,167 individuals in the Middle Gangetic Plain of the Indian subcontinent. Our data confirm the association of rs1426654 with skin pigmentation among South Asians, consistent with previous studies, and also show association for rs2470102 single nucleotide polymorphism. Our haplotype analyses further help us delineate the haplotype distribution across social categories and skin color. Taken together, our findings suggest that the social structure defined by the caste system in India has a profound influence on the skin pigmentation patterns of the subcontinent. In particular, social category and associated single nucleotide polymorphisms explain about 32% and 6.4%, respectively, of the total phenotypic variance. Phylogeography of the associated single nucleotide polymorphisms studied across 52 diverse populations of the Indian subcontinent shows wide presence of the derived alleles, although their frequencies vary across populations. Our results show that both polymorphisms (rs1426654 and rs2470102) play an important role in the skin pigmentation diversity of South Asians. 0) Mishra et al. (2017) Genotype-Phenotype Study of the Middle Gangetic Plain in India Shows Association of rs2470102 with Skin Pigmentation. Journal of Investigative Dermatology: 137, 670-677. doi:10.1016/j.jid.2016.10.043 https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(16)32648-3/pdf https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(16)32648-3/pdf
- olivermarks 6y ago@dsr_ I'd argue it is more of a clique/cluster thing - very common in the bay area. A couple of people get hired and bring 'their' people in, whether from Indiana or Iran. They have the all important inside track on information and hiring criteria and help bolster the first in's career. It's a huge HR problem (and HR are typically oblivious, more interested in hiring and firing to order)
- binaryzeitgeist 6y agoThis is rich coming from a state that introduced a bill like ACA-5.
- ramraj07 6y agoInteresting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude other Asians. I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these "consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job (most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half-pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays, but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.
- IMAYousaf 6y agoI've sadly heard stories about forced deference, though not seemingly as overt as in Cisco, at other tech companies. The most shocking experience is actually a personal anecdote. Someone from India from a client once asked my father, who also works in tech in a senior position, why people listen to him given his background. Kind of jarring given that the discrimination in the US tends to be much more structural and sinisterly subtle as opposed to some Indian or South African style outright "one drop rule" thing.
- mahaganapati 6y agoAs a Hindu I'd like to take the opportunity to share that the implementation of the caste system is not based on what it really means to be Hindu. The Vedas state that one's caste is fluid (not based on lineage) and can change in one's lifetime, and that further a person of the worker class is not lesser than someone of the priest caste, they both perform dharma necessary for the community.
- dis-sys 6y agoare you defending the caste system?
- __init 6y agoIt sounds like he's defending _a_ caste system, but probably not the one you're thinking of.
- Bang2Bay 6y agocaste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem. Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other. otherwise there would be no fights.
- ignoramous 6y ago> Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other. Except one thing isn't like another. If you think otherwise, I'd appreciate examples. > caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem. That's like saying, apartheid isn't the problem, the ensuing discrimination is?
- mahaganapati 6y agoNo, the other reply has it right - I'm just pointing out that what we see of as the caste system is not what is originally intended. It should not be about inequality
- tesseracted 6y ago
- dis-sys 6y agoshocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or "low caste" people?
- whatshisface 6y agoCaste is highly correlated to skin pigmentation, so in practice... this would be almost indistinguishable from regular old racism.
- cjsaltlake 6y agoIt's not at all highly correlated, and skin color certainly wouldn't trump real caste affiliation.
- cjsaltlake 6y agoAdditionally, there's north/south discrimination, with greater antipathy from southern Indians against northern Indians.
- mirimir 6y agoPlease see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512 for a recent paper which reports that it is.
- pokeman12345 6y agoThis guy is a Principal Engineer at Cisco. This is nearly as high as you can go on the engineering track. The fact that he's complaining about being discriminated against while some how making it to the 95th percentile paygrade is a bit revealing. Not saying it's impossible, but I dont buy it.
- IMAYousaf 6y agoI looked at Cisco's salaries here: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Cisco/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Cisco/salaries/Software-Engin... For Cisco's Principal Engineer position, which seems super high up relative to other titles at other tech firms, the pay is actually quite low for what that position's requirements seem to be. I wonder how this dynamic played out. Disgusting anyway you look at it but the nuance of corporate structure here is worth thinking about.
- saltedonion 6y agoWill this be a precedent setting case?
- charliebrownau 6y agoConstant double standards from Comifornia This is the same place that uses state force to force business's to hire X wamans or non whites as management/ceo roles instead of hiring on MERIT and letting companys choose who they staff
- tesseracted 6y ago"The suit alleges that Iyer told other workers the employee was Dalit and had gained entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology through affirmative action." Indian law explicitly requires a much lower standard of admission for the lower castes. Is it illegal to take consideration of this fact?
- mirimir 6y agoI suspect so. Affirmative action laws would be meaningless, otherwise.
- toast0 6y agoI couldn't read the article because of the paywall. I'm going to assume the person in question graduated from IIT as well as gained entry. If so, I don't see how it matters if he got in through a door with a lower bar, if he graduated, he graduated. Unless graduating from IIT is a rubber stamp for showing up? Also, just because the bar is lower for admissions doesn't mean that people who cleared the bar couldn't have cleared the bar otherwise. I don't see how IIT entrance exam scores are relevant for employment at Cisco anyway.
- MattGaiser 6y agoIt depends on what theory you believe about why a university degree is valuable. If you see it as a competitive signal of how many people a candidate was better than, then the signal is contaminated.
- mirimir 6y agoOne might feel the same about an African American graduate of MIT, but it'd be illegal to discriminate based on it.
- tesseracted 6y agoIvy League degrees are worthless to most employers except for what they say about how you score (or who your parents are) and this signal is unavailable to those who benefit from lowered admission standards. Does anyone actually think that you learn anything of substance better at the University of Pennsylvania than at the University of Iowa?
- newshorts 6y agoSorry to say it, but I believe there will always be groups of people who unjustifiably feel they are superior to another group of people.
- mirimir 6y agoPeople in the US can feel however they want, but they don't get to discriminate on the basis of protected group status.
- hardsoftnfloppy 6y agoLaughs in Californian