I remember a lively discussion last year (not sure which one) where several Indian developers living in the SF area said they experienced discrimination, but al

I remember a lively discussion last year (not sure which one) where several Indian developers living in the SF area said they experienced discrimination, but also many reporting they did not. I have no idea who is "right" here; I'm neither Indian nor living in the US. But I will add a general comment: experiencing discrimination is not the same thing as being discriminated. For example, let's say I – as a man – have a disagreement with a female coworker, and maybe I'm a bit of an asshole about it. She might genuinely feel discriminated, belittled, man-splained, or whatever you want to call it. It might be I'm doing this because she's a woman and that she's right, or I might just be having a bad day, or I might be an asshole to everyone I disagree with, or I might just have accidentally phrased things in a bad way. This is a big problem; there have been a few cases where this actually happened and people accused me of being racist or sexist, usually online. Sometimes I could have phrased things a little bit better maybe, but I sure didn't do it because of someone's identity. People will say it's due to "subconscious bias", but I find that's what the kids nowadays call "gaslighting". Maybe subconscious bias exists and influences people's behaviour in significant ways (not so sure it does, but that's a different discussion), but all but one of the times it happened I wasn't even aware who I was talking to until they "outed" themselves when accusing me of discrimination. To be clear: no doubt discrimination happens in various ways for various people, but in many instances it can be really hard to say if a specific incident is an instance of it, of if it's due to other reasons. This is problematic because 1) it makes it very hard to actually do something about (systemic) discrimination because you can't punish/fine people easily, but also 2) people will still genuinely feel discriminated against even if there is no actual (or very little) discrimination happening (or is no longer happening). To be clear: I'm not "accusing" those people of "making things up" or anything like that, I really believe that almost all people report genuine feelings and experiences. As one of those white male types I have it easy: if someone is an asshole to me I can fairly safely assume that person is an asshole to me on account of just being an asshole, but for some other groups this can be a lot harder, either due to current or historical discrimination. My point is that experiences aren't everything when it comes to these kind of topics, no matter how honest and genuine. They're also not worthless, and some experiences do describe clear-cut cases, but in general I'm careful.