15 ms·
Ad men sacked to improve gender pay gap win sex discrimination claim
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- da_big_ghey 5y ago> Two white male creative directors at a top London advertising agency have won a sex discrimination claim after a female director vowed to “obliterate” its Mad Men reputation of being full of straight, white men. director kept Mad Men reputation of shitty management... pay gap is a reflection of shitty management that is causing bad hiring practice.
- jackjeff 5y agoYou can’t fight racism and sexism by using “reparative” racism and sexism. Going after straight white men because of their identity is as abhorrent as any other form of racism/sexism.
- anamexis 5y agoWouldn't "reparative" here have been hiring a more diverse cohort, and paying them more?
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoThat would be a way to address the underlying complaint. But it wouldn't be "reparative". The perversion here is the assumption that the next minority you hire is a complete stand-in for the implicitly-assumed minority who missed out before, leading to the existing imbalance.
- raxxorrax 5y agoThere is no person more diverse than another one. You cannot discriminate that by skin color without being racist.
- tpoacher 5y agomathematically speaking, sexism is an idempotent operation.
- seph-reed 5y agoPersonally, I'm onboard with being equal-and-opposite to whatever race/gender caste systems are being used. But if there's not a correct counter-balance, all you end up with is an inverted race/gender caste system. It's like fighting fire with flood rains, and not recognizing the difference between a forest-fire and camp-fire.
- Grakel 5y agoYep. There's been a recent surge of changing the term "people of color" to "the global majority." I hope the global minority is going to have some rights left when this is over.
- Spivak 5y agoYou’re confusing fixing the underlying cause with fixing the resultant effects. Your statement is about the former while HR is trying to do the latter. You can’t fix sexism with just a hiring policy but you can absolutely fix the effect of your company having no diversity with one.
- travisgriggs 5y agoYou can if all of the reasons for whatever aspect of diversity is out of whack is under your control. But often the reasons for lack of diversity are not isolated to a single knob that the company itself is privy to dial to an ideal output.
- variantloki 5y agoI agree with what you wrote. I’ve heard people argue that such action provides a spark for further change. Like brings a new perspective to a group that cascades into more positive effects. It comes to mind the idea of “black children needing black superhero role models” or similarly for girls or other groups. I wonder to what extent this merely reinforces a racist ideology. Why can’t the role model be of any colour? How deep is it, truly, that the tribal behaviour based on group similarities, are ingrained in humans. Interestingly, amongst the well educated, or the wealthy, a different selection criteria is established.
- Spivak 5y ago> Why can’t the role model be of any colour? Because that's just not how it works. You're assuming that the important thing is the role model's race, gender, sexuality. It's about having a character that is like you. How they look is just one small part of it. If you have a movie script where the main character is a white suburbanite man and once it's fully written make his skin color black it doesn't suddenly become good representation.
- raxxorrax 5y agoI don't think that is a requirement for a role model and there is empirical evidence to the contrary. So I don't buy "this is not how it works".
- travisgriggs 5y agoThis is the realization I had the other day. It's an abstraction of the "their are no winners in war" paradox. Racism does bad things. So then we try and fix the negative effects of racism. We practice a new form of "good racism." But it's still racism. And all it does is create more racism, despite our good intentions to roll back the negative effects of racism. We do the same with sexism. And agism. And any other form of differentiationism. And those that benefit not from one state or the other, but rather the flux of transitioning from one state to the other, flock to, and encourage the correctionism.
- tolbish 5y agoI'm trying to understand how you can just come to that realization when that point get repeated ad nauseam all the time on HN.
- stickyricky 5y agoPeople aren't convinced by comments on message-boards. They have to come to the conclusion on their own.
- iammisc 5y agoCareful, according to the activists on my street in Portland you're literally a Nazi. We must eradicate this misuse of terms to silence people. You are right. We cannot fight racism and sexism with more racism and sexism.
- swiley 5y agoIt's also creating some nasty backlash.
- ktm5j 5y agoYour argument doesn't consider the fact that straight white men have received benefits from racism and sexism their entire lives. I'm not saying that you're wrong, but it's just not that simple. They may not have gotten that job in the first place in a world with true equality. As a trans woman I think I have a unique perspective here, having literally seen both sides of this issue. I would have agreed with you at one point in my life, but I see things differently now.
- ryathal 5y agoIt doesn't matter that someone had X for a time. You don't get justice by taking two eyes for an eye just because someone had three once.
- ktm5j 5y agoI never said that it was okay for them to do this.. just that the person I replied to was rather small minded about their view of this issue. You too. It kind of bothers me to see straight cis white men get all worked up about things like this. You think this is unfair? You have absolutely no concept of what it's like to be a marginalized minority. They've had so much handed to them their whole lives, yet the second they have to deal with the kind of thing that minorities have to deal with they make a big fuss. The world is unfair, deal with. We all have to every damn day and no one listens to us when we cry about it.
- matchbok 5y agoApplying the general benefits of a whole group of people to individuals applying to jobs is wrong. And doesn't work. Every person has a unique experience. Also, grouping "cis" in with all that is nonsense. Esp trans women, who seem to think they don't have all the benefits of being male. (Because biology is, in fact, real)
- drevil-v2 5y agoI can sympathise with the men in this story. I have sat in on meetings where HR was telling Engineering that tech skills and experience did not matter; only the sex and race of the hired candidate. How did HR get so much power? Most of them are barely out of University and at least at my org are a homogenous group of white women.
- KittenInABox 5y agoHomogenous groups of white cishet women at HR departments are also a travesty IMO. I highly doubt there isn't something going on internally that make it unfriendly to diverse perspectives (whether from a person of color, an lgbtqia+ person, or a man) that is an HR nightmare waiting to happen.
- tillinghast 5y agoPlease, do tell, how many intersectionality points do we need to win this game?
- KittenInABox 5y agoI don't think its a point system. I just think if an entire department of any company beyond "small" is homogenously one demographic then there's likely a sign that something is going wonky with how that department is hiring/retaining staff. I'd be suspicious of an entire engineering department (of a company of any significant size) that all came from one school, if I was applying to that company and I wasn't from that school. It's simple group psychology that an extremely uniform group is likely heavily biasing itself for more of that extremely uniform demographic. If that extremely uniform group is of one specific race, gender, or sexuality, that might be a yellow (or red) flag.
- fxtentacle 5y agoPretty simple, if you oppose them then you're an easy target to be branded enemy of women. So most people who need their job will just nod and not risk opposing HR.
- 5y ago
- KittenInABox 5y agoI feel that these gender pay gap focuses are really thinking too small. The general argument of a pay gap is that there is a systemic problem. Firing individual men just because they're men is pants-on-head even trying to follow the logic that there are systemic hurdles for women in some space.
- lumost 5y agoPay averages are dominated by outliers. These outliers tend to either be due to negotiation power, seniority, or performance incentive. Odds are good that the outliers will cluster in your most over represented group, this group will then have a pay discrepancy with other groups. A company can correct this by banning the practices that lead to outliers, ensuring outliers are evenly represented across groups, and by eliminating those with outlier compensation. In firms that lock in compensation for long periods such as through partnerships or equity comp ensuring equal distribution of outlier compensation can be complex and difficult.
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoFirst of many such cases, if the allegations I've heard are at all representative. It's a tough ask for businesses - they either replace their existing, presumably qualified staff due to their inherent characteristics being unfashionable, or they create new positions and fill those with people with other characteristics for purely statistical purposes. Doing the latter exacerbates the "fifth column" situation that in turn increases the chance of situations like that in the OP. Seems like a poisoned chalice from the first sip, but I may be biased due to my inherent characteristics.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago"they either [...]" Those are not the only options. For example, here's another thing they could do: increase pay for positions in which women are over-represented. I'm not advocating for or against that. But let's not pretend that all solutions require changing the structure or composition of the team.
- ngcazz 5y agoKinda hilarious that anyone would consider this a reasonable way of closing the gap and not, say, raising the pay of the employees earning less, which was the whole point.
- triactual 5y agoMaybe I missed some details but it appears that the people responsible for the pay gap did not close it. They created legal risk for their company and lost two presumably high performing employees. There is a strong case that some employees at the company are overpaid based on that performance.
- Fjolsvith 5y agoIf women were paid less than men, why aren't there women-only staffed businesses dominating markets due to less cost for production/services?
- Spivak 5y agoBecause that’s a very very very naive understanding of the gender pay gap. The statement is that “women make x¢ on the dollar that men make. You can “explain away” much of the gender gap by accounting for all sorts of things like career choices, aggressiveness of switching jobs and seeking promotions, experience levels, etc.. But that doesn’t make the problem go away or those things not issues unto themselves.
- elzbardico 5y agoIf you can explain it away, and the explanation is credible you don’t have the problem. Period.
- Spivak 5y agoI put it in scare quotes for a reason because that's the phrasing people use when talking about but saying "we know many of the factors that contribute to the wage gap and when you control for them it mostly disappears" misses the point. One of the factors you control for is job title. When you only compare people with the same title the wage gap shrinks a bit. For some reason people interpret this as "Great! Not a problem. Moving on." when it completely ignores that as a group women holding lower paying job titles is itself indicative of a problem -- career paths that are dominated by women are seen as less valuable and girls are socially pressured away from more lucrative careers (you know like software engineering where every woman in our field including myself can tell you stories of being the only girl in her class) by parents, academic advisors, the school and workplace culture the fields cultivate and pushed into "softer", "more nurturing", "more creative" career paths compared to boys. Which it itself a problem for boys because boys who want to go into things like art, music, design, writing, fashion, social work, are mercilessly pressured away from it where girls are more likely to be encouraged. The patriarchy hurts everyone folks.
- moomin 5y agoAn extremely able HR friend of mine has been following this case and at pretty much every step, the company compounded their errors. In my friend’s opinion this is going to be a very easy case of wrongful dismissal and the firm will probably end up settling out of court for a substantial amount.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomas_nort 5y agoWould it be the most optimal way to solve the salary gap by offering a performance improvement plan for underperforming women?
- throwawaymale 5y agoThis story is newer, has more comments and more upvotes than so many of the other stories on the front page, and yet has disappeared under the fold. Interesting that this comment is immediately [dead], I guess from posting via Tor?
- evv555 5y agoAnyone facing issues like this consider contacting https://www.fairforall.org https://www.fairforall.org . Also please consider supporting this organization.
- jjk166 5y agoWe think women being paid less is a terrible problem, just not so terrible a problem that we'd consider paying them more.
- i_am_new_here 5y agoThey need to do the tough man's job to earn more. Women that are already "Women in Tech" (e.g. HR in a TechCompany) need to make other women "also" do a tough (real) IT-job! Fake women (in tech) are pushing other women to the real (coding) fronts... why is that? Are guys doing the same?
- zthrowaway 5y agoCosmic justice applied with the hand of communist tendencies. Forced outcome at the expense of others livelihood.
- airhead969 5y agoAll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. It's not sexism if it happens to a man. It's not racism if it happens to a white person, or sometimes, an Asian person. There are no double-standards, no hate, no hypocrisy going-on at all. /s
- gverrilla 5y agofunny thing is white men still own most of these companies, and that's exactly why they are trying to hardcode diversity into them as shielding. our current economic system is exclusionary and ending gender or race gap won't do a single thing to fix it. even if advertisement is 100% women, lgbt and non-white people, it will continue to be 100% "white" and will do nothing for Africa and other miserable places or for the homeless people that flock all rich nations.
- mejutoco 5y agoI am curious what would you suggest instead. Cooperatives? Easier processes to start businesses?
- gverrilla 5y agoIt's not easy, of course, but new cooperative models will most probably emerge within the next few decades, and the ones that exist already will grow and more people will use them. There's nothing as disruptive as cooperation. Which is also related of course to the "killer app" to be on crypto, imo :) What do you think about all this?
- simonh 5y agoFixing diversity at the highest levels in companies is a really hard problem. The kind of people that get those jobs often have to make massive sacrifices to get there. Insane working hours, prioritising work over all other responsibilities, sometimes willingness to relocate globally as needed. There are some women willing to compete on the same terms, but comparatively few. It's great to see them get there when they do, but realistically ethnic diversity is probably going to be a more realistic expectation.
- RickJWagner 5y agoI'm all for equality. It's a thorny problem. Whither the NBA? How about modeling agencies? Hollywood is overwhelmingly white. There are a lot of troublesome parts. But the sooner we start, the sooner we get to better equality.