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I recently interviewed for a job because my friend asked me to and put in the recommendation. They refused to interview me and just said they weren't intereste

I recently interviewed for a job because my friend asked me to and put in the recommendation. They refused to interview me and just said they weren't interested. My friend got back to me and said "I'm pretty sure it's because you're a white male." It's speculation, but it probably happens more often than you think. I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances. This is not some "white men have it hard" diatribe. Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. But at least in tech they seem to have swung so far the other way that there is some discrimination against white males. I'm not mad, we all have to play the hands we're dealt and honestly being born a white male is about as good as it gets with regards to demographics. Just sharing my anecdotes.

golemiprague 5y ago
If you experienced "incredible privilege" it is not because you are white male, it is because you were privileged in one way or another. There are many white males who are born into dire situations and got no incredible privilege overall. Each person in this world got their own situation in life.
- JediWing 5y ago
  This right here is a demonstration that language around "white privilege" is too opaque, loaded, academic and at times outright hostile. It's failing at it's job of helping people to understand the problem. Privilege is a word loaded with connotations about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. White privilege isn't about being upper class because you're white. It's about the advantages a white person has over non-white people of the same station. A white person in a poor neighborhood is on the whole more likely to be able to pull "themselves" out of poverty, because, the systems and power structures in place have white people in power, or have systems that are fair on their face, but still lead to higher white hire rates or social mobility. Nobody is disputing that some white people have it bad, they're simply pointing out that all else about your social status being equal, being white provides tremendous advantage over being non-white.
  - username90 5y ago
    You are talking about white privilege and not male privilege here. White privilege is pretty straight forward, male privilege isn't. The discussion in question is about white women pushing out white men from sectors where white women dominate, that doesn't sound like a privilege for those men. Also, it is extremely frustrating that people quickly start to include race when the discussion is about gender. As I said racial inequality is an entirely different thing from gender inequality. Police shoots black people more, white people get paid more. There, white privilege! But, Police shoots men more, men get paid more. Who is privileged? See the difference? Most of the problems black people face are also problems men face more than women, so you can't talk about those two as if they were the same.
    - JediWing 5y ago
      Fair enough I guess, but parent was still to my eye misunderstanding what `x privelege` means. s/white/male/g and the point largely still stands with mildly adjusted examples. I'd argue overall it is on the whole easier to be a man in society than a woman for similar reasons (i.e. men have been in charge of power structures for longer and entrenched assumptions abound). I hadn't thought about the perspective that men are more often killed by police than by women, and probably for similar reasons (i.e. subconsciously viewing men as more dangerous than women), but by and large as a man I don't fear getting shot by police on a traffic stop. It could definitely be harder to break into a traditionally female field, as an example, though for sure. Overall I feel the "male privilege" would be more pronounced than any "female privilege", though. This is actually what intersectionality describes: we each have our own unique sets of advantages and disadvantages through the lenses of our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. In the vast majority of cases a straight white male is going to have the fewest disadvantages and most advantages in western society, because it's been designed for centuries around the straight white male as the power-wielder.
  - golemiprague 5y ago
    Apart from this being a very American perspective I am not even sure it is correct for America. Who said a white person has an advantage one on one if all else is equal? How something like that can be measured considering all the other parameters you need to control for? individuals are so complex that I don't think anybody can make any replicable scientific research to come to such a conclusion. To me it sounds more like a religious believe and in general, since we don't know each person situation in life, to judge a person according to this dogma is in itself very problematic.
swader999 5y ago
The ripple on affect of this is going to break society. You want to fly, drive or be treated with systems, people or processes that weren't hired, designed and built using merit? Of course you don't. Skill matters, who cares about color?
- jjeaff 5y ago
  If you think the old system was based on merit, you haven't been paying attention. Successful products that will work for diverse people need diverse engineers to build them. Hiring only "the best" leads to hiring mostly only people from the largest majority group, because that's how statistics work. And that leads to ridiculous product fails like facial recognition that doesn't recognize non-white faces.
  - swader999 5y ago
    Oh of course it wasn't perfect but this is turning the knob up to 11 in the wrong direction.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jacob2484 5y ago
It'd be good if such companies were identified and called out for it.
- BigBubbleButt 5y ago
  The company I worked at pushing the "diversity" agenda is Cruise. It seems unfair to name and shame the other company as I can't actually confirm that was why they declined to interview me.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Just remember that these sorts of companies will miss out on hiring some excellent talent, who will go on to be hired by their competition. "Go work, go broke" stands true.
native_samples 5y ago
If you're being denied jobs because of your race and gender, how is that "incredible privilege"? If you insist on feeling guilty for the circumstances of your birth, surely it is being born in a rich, stable country that yields the privilege, not race? The white women who would have argued for those policies, were not born less privileged than you.
- simonh 5y ago
  I think age plays a role here, I'm a white male in my 50s and certainly women of my generation faced enormous hurdles that men didn't. That's because the majority of people in power while I was growing up were white men who grew up in the 1940s and 50s, and had moral compasses and gender expectations baked into them at that time. Time and again I witnessed girls in my school classes in the 70s and 80s treated disrespectfully and condescendingly by teachers so boys of my age were exposed to these attitudes and I'm sure some were influenced by them. I have two daughters and when they were about 9 and 10 my brother bought them a model combustion engine. When we told one of my uncles he snorted and said "Hasn't he noticed they're Girls!". That was about 8 years ago, and that uncle of mine has 3 daughters. Of course my kids loved the model and wouldn't let anyone else touch it, they spent hours working on it. I'm pretty confident the current climate is much, much more open to women choosing their own path but it's still not perfect. There are still a lot of men in positions of power or influence with attitudes they learned many decades ago. Actually a fair few women too, many older ladies have regrettably regressive attitudes. They're there in families and work places influencing expectations, promoting biased thinking and giving boy's toys to boys and girl's toys to girls.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    You are basically a NIMBY on gender and other men should not get penalties because you have daughters and are protective of them. Women tend not to reach university in tech, so the blame would be on parents anyway. > but it's still not perfect What would "perfect" look like? I do think time will solve this if there are indeed that many women interested in tech. There is still a possibility that those women are exceptions though. And this "positive" discrimination sets everyone back. Don't penalize other men because you are unsure about educating your daughters. It is natural to be defensive here, but that is for you to deconstruct.
etripe 5y ago
> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. Only if you limit privilege to negative reward (suffer less discrimination and exclusion) instead of positive reward (getting actual benefits) and as you say, the tide is turning. Positive reward is still mainly tied to class and generational wealth. > I'm not mad Do you think it makes sense for a for-profit enterprise to have hiring policies based on the political sensibilities of the staff, let alone mainly those of SJW middle class white women?
raxxorrax 5y ago
> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. I would recommend to scrap that noble suffering story because it just isn't really true. No company will give you anything. You aren't privileged, you are discriminated against.
908B64B197 5y ago
> I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances. Fast forward a few years, and when looking at internal transfers you'll hear "don't worry, he's a white/asian male, so you know he's here on merit". First time I heard that I was shocked. > Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. Go tell that to the trailer trash white kid who last saw his mother with a needle in her arm when he was a teenager, never met his father and managed to somehow make it in tech thanks to Community College and scholarships.

golemiprague 5y ago

If you experienced "incredible privilege" it is not because you are white male, it is because you were privileged in one way or another. There are many white males who are born into dire situations and got no incredible privilege overall. Each person in this world got their own situation in life.

JediWing 5y ago
This right here is a demonstration that language around "white privilege" is too opaque, loaded, academic and at times outright hostile. It's failing at it's job of helping people to understand the problem. Privilege is a word loaded with connotations about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. White privilege isn't about being upper class because you're white. It's about the advantages a white person has over non-white people of the same station. A white person in a poor neighborhood is on the whole more likely to be able to pull "themselves" out of poverty, because, the systems and power structures in place have white people in power, or have systems that are fair on their face, but still lead to higher white hire rates or social mobility. Nobody is disputing that some white people have it bad, they're simply pointing out that all else about your social status being equal, being white provides tremendous advantage over being non-white.
- username90 5y ago
  You are talking about white privilege and not male privilege here. White privilege is pretty straight forward, male privilege isn't. The discussion in question is about white women pushing out white men from sectors where white women dominate, that doesn't sound like a privilege for those men. Also, it is extremely frustrating that people quickly start to include race when the discussion is about gender. As I said racial inequality is an entirely different thing from gender inequality. Police shoots black people more, white people get paid more. There, white privilege! But, Police shoots men more, men get paid more. Who is privileged? See the difference? Most of the problems black people face are also problems men face more than women, so you can't talk about those two as if they were the same.
  - JediWing 5y ago
    Fair enough I guess, but parent was still to my eye misunderstanding what `x privelege` means. s/white/male/g and the point largely still stands with mildly adjusted examples. I'd argue overall it is on the whole easier to be a man in society than a woman for similar reasons (i.e. men have been in charge of power structures for longer and entrenched assumptions abound). I hadn't thought about the perspective that men are more often killed by police than by women, and probably for similar reasons (i.e. subconsciously viewing men as more dangerous than women), but by and large as a man I don't fear getting shot by police on a traffic stop. It could definitely be harder to break into a traditionally female field, as an example, though for sure. Overall I feel the "male privilege" would be more pronounced than any "female privilege", though. This is actually what intersectionality describes: we each have our own unique sets of advantages and disadvantages through the lenses of our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. In the vast majority of cases a straight white male is going to have the fewest disadvantages and most advantages in western society, because it's been designed for centuries around the straight white male as the power-wielder.
- golemiprague 5y ago
  Apart from this being a very American perspective I am not even sure it is correct for America. Who said a white person has an advantage one on one if all else is equal? How something like that can be measured considering all the other parameters you need to control for? individuals are so complex that I don't think anybody can make any replicable scientific research to come to such a conclusion. To me it sounds more like a religious believe and in general, since we don't know each person situation in life, to judge a person according to this dogma is in itself very problematic.

swader999 5y ago

The ripple on affect of this is going to break society. You want to fly, drive or be treated with systems, people or processes that weren't hired, designed and built using merit? Of course you don't. Skill matters, who cares about color?

jjeaff 5y ago
If you think the old system was based on merit, you haven't been paying attention. Successful products that will work for diverse people need diverse engineers to build them. Hiring only "the best" leads to hiring mostly only people from the largest majority group, because that's how statistics work. And that leads to ridiculous product fails like facial recognition that doesn't recognize non-white faces.
- swader999 5y ago
  Oh of course it wasn't perfect but this is turning the knob up to 11 in the wrong direction.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jacob2484 5y ago

It'd be good if such companies were identified and called out for it.

BigBubbleButt 5y ago
The company I worked at pushing the "diversity" agenda is Cruise. It seems unfair to name and shame the other company as I can't actually confirm that was why they declined to interview me.

CodeGlitch 5y ago

Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Just remember that these sorts of companies will miss out on hiring some excellent talent, who will go on to be hired by their competition. "Go work, go broke" stands true.

native_samples 5y ago

If you're being denied jobs because of your race and gender, how is that "incredible privilege"? If you insist on feeling guilty for the circumstances of your birth, surely it is being born in a rich, stable country that yields the privilege, not race? The white women who would have argued for those policies, were not born less privileged than you.

simonh 5y ago
I think age plays a role here, I'm a white male in my 50s and certainly women of my generation faced enormous hurdles that men didn't. That's because the majority of people in power while I was growing up were white men who grew up in the 1940s and 50s, and had moral compasses and gender expectations baked into them at that time. Time and again I witnessed girls in my school classes in the 70s and 80s treated disrespectfully and condescendingly by teachers so boys of my age were exposed to these attitudes and I'm sure some were influenced by them. I have two daughters and when they were about 9 and 10 my brother bought them a model combustion engine. When we told one of my uncles he snorted and said "Hasn't he noticed they're Girls!". That was about 8 years ago, and that uncle of mine has 3 daughters. Of course my kids loved the model and wouldn't let anyone else touch it, they spent hours working on it. I'm pretty confident the current climate is much, much more open to women choosing their own path but it's still not perfect. There are still a lot of men in positions of power or influence with attitudes they learned many decades ago. Actually a fair few women too, many older ladies have regrettably regressive attitudes. They're there in families and work places influencing expectations, promoting biased thinking and giving boy's toys to boys and girl's toys to girls.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  You are basically a NIMBY on gender and other men should not get penalties because you have daughters and are protective of them. Women tend not to reach university in tech, so the blame would be on parents anyway. > but it's still not perfect What would "perfect" look like? I do think time will solve this if there are indeed that many women interested in tech. There is still a possibility that those women are exceptions though. And this "positive" discrimination sets everyone back. Don't penalize other men because you are unsure about educating your daughters. It is natural to be defensive here, but that is for you to deconstruct.

etripe 5y ago

> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. Only if you limit privilege to negative reward (suffer less discrimination and exclusion) instead of positive reward (getting actual benefits) and as you say, the tide is turning. Positive reward is still mainly tied to class and generational wealth. > I'm not mad Do you think it makes sense for a for-profit enterprise to have hiring policies based on the political sensibilities of the staff, let alone mainly those of SJW middle class white women?

raxxorrax 5y ago

> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. I would recommend to scrap that noble suffering story because it just isn't really true. No company will give you anything. You aren't privileged, you are discriminated against.

908B64B197 5y ago

> I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances. Fast forward a few years, and when looking at internal transfers you'll hear "don't worry, he's a white/asian male, so you know he's here on merit". First time I heard that I was shocked. > Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. Go tell that to the trailer trash white kid who last saw his mother with a needle in her arm when he was a teenager, never met his father and managed to somehow make it in tech thanks to Community College and scholarships.