6 ms·

I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering

I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background. My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence. A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position. The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.

unixhero 4y ago
I was test manager (never again) on a large enterprise system (never again) and half of our QA team offshore in India were all females; I didn't reflect on that at the time.
- harperlee 4y ago
  If you mean 50% of the india-based team was female, rather than all of the 50% of the team that were based in india, that shouldn’t be surprising?
  - unixhero 4y ago
    I realize my sentence was unclear. My onshore team were all males, all offshore (all India, Bang8, Bang7) QA team members were female.
    - ummonk 4y ago
      It's an open secret that multinational companies preferentially hire women in India to pad their global engineering diversity statistics without having to conduct affirmative action in America where it would generate negative press. An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
walkhour 4y ago
> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done? Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  This ignores the possibility of an unbalanced applicant pool.
  - walkhour 4y ago
    True, although this is similar to what I described, I guess the distinction is purposely imbalanced and accidentally imbalanced. However I think the latter is less likely, the post I replied to originally mentioned doing this consistently across teams. Maybe the pool in QA is imbalanced? In that case we should compare to other QA teams to see if avensec is indeed an outlier. avensec made it seem like they was an outlier, and everybody in these comments is acting like this is the case. So I lean on the side of the pool being balanced. I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
    - bena 4y ago
      Ever noticed how among professional bowlers, there are fewer conventionally fit guys? Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic. Or. Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else. Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you. So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions. And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.
vijaybritto 4y ago
Good team mates. This is non existent in India. A woman in a management position has much harder steps to reach there and will be impossible if she is from a lower caste.
thwjerjl23432 4y ago
- Layke1123 4y ago
  Is this a veiled criticism of Hinduism?
  - charia 4y ago
    I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems. That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific. The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.
wolverine876 4y ago
I know nothing about the parent or their experience [edit: and thanks to the parent for posting this]. I do know that commonly, people in positions of power (managers or people in the majority) believe the following but it's often not true; that is, the signal is always same, but not the reality. That is, the signal is meaningless as an indicator of the underlying situation, but when I find myself thinking it, it is potentially a signal that I'm missing something. > "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example] > "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position." > "I asked for feedback from ..." A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know. A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything. We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly? Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea. It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.
- 4y ago
guru4consulting 4y ago
cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days. Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days. Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
  - guru4consulting 4y ago
    Women are generally under represented in IT. And usually there is a high level of hesitation, fear-of-unknown-foreign-land among young women when they travel alone from home country to any other country. Things are changing fast though.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    Very few H1B women are willing to marry someone from back home and bring him over as a dependent, so you don't see many male H4s.

unixhero 4y ago

I was test manager (never again) on a large enterprise system (never again) and half of our QA team offshore in India were all females; I didn't reflect on that at the time.

harperlee 4y ago
If you mean 50% of the india-based team was female, rather than all of the 50% of the team that were based in india, that shouldn’t be surprising?
- unixhero 4y ago
  I realize my sentence was unclear. My onshore team were all males, all offshore (all India, Bang8, Bang7) QA team members were female.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    It's an open secret that multinational companies preferentially hire women in India to pad their global engineering diversity statistics without having to conduct affirmative action in America where it would generate negative press. An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.

walkhour 4y ago

> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done? Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
This ignores the possibility of an unbalanced applicant pool.
- walkhour 4y ago
  True, although this is similar to what I described, I guess the distinction is purposely imbalanced and accidentally imbalanced. However I think the latter is less likely, the post I replied to originally mentioned doing this consistently across teams. Maybe the pool in QA is imbalanced? In that case we should compare to other QA teams to see if avensec is indeed an outlier. avensec made it seem like they was an outlier, and everybody in these comments is acting like this is the case. So I lean on the side of the pool being balanced. I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
  - bena 4y ago
    Ever noticed how among professional bowlers, there are fewer conventionally fit guys? Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic. Or. Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else. Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you. So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions. And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.

vijaybritto 4y ago

Good team mates. This is non existent in India. A woman in a management position has much harder steps to reach there and will be impossible if she is from a lower caste.

thwjerjl23432 4y ago

Layke1123 4y ago
Is this a veiled criticism of Hinduism?
- charia 4y ago
  I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems. That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific. The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.

wolverine876 4y ago

I know nothing about the parent or their experience [edit: and thanks to the parent for posting this]. I do know that commonly, people in positions of power (managers or people in the majority) believe the following but it's often not true; that is, the signal is always same, but not the reality. That is, the signal is meaningless as an indicator of the underlying situation, but when I find myself thinking it, it is potentially a signal that I'm missing something. > "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example] > "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position." > "I asked for feedback from ..." A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know. A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything. We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly? Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea. It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.

4y ago

guru4consulting 4y ago

cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days. Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.

mr_toad 4y ago
> cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days. Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
- guru4consulting 4y ago
  Women are generally under represented in IT. And usually there is a high level of hesitation, fear-of-unknown-foreign-land among young women when they travel alone from home country to any other country. Things are changing fast though.
- ummonk 4y ago
  Very few H1B women are willing to marry someone from back home and bring him over as a dependent, so you don't see many male H4s.