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My eyes rolled so hard at this, it woke up my wife in the next room. Then we both had a laugh at me being described as 'enlightened' - in my neck of the woods,

My eyes rolled so hard at this, it woke up my wife in the next room. Then we both had a laugh at me being described as 'enlightened' - in my neck of the woods, most people think I'm a troglodyte. Look, sometimes people do real, obvious, correctable things that result in inequality. There's nothing 'alleged' about these things, and correcting them isn't an 'unendable initiative' - usually, all you've got to do is be a little more self-aware. A case in point - a startup I co-founded a few years back was all-male for a while, and without getting into the details, we didn't always maintain a sophisticated level of conversation around the office. We didn't change our habits after we hired a couple of female college students part-time. Later, I found out our part-time employees were uncomfortable with our office banter. Not cool, since this was their first exposure to startups and the type of people that work for them. When I found out about this, my unendable initiative to fix the problem was a quick email, which took care of it. (Still irritated that I didn't pick up on this earlier.) That's it - no systematic bias in the other direction, no big bureaucratic programs by government authorities, just being aware enough of your surroundings to not be an asshole. You can do it too.

DuncanIdaho 15y ago
That is exactly the right thing to do. But completely honestly, why did you even develop this kind of culture in the first place? Don't you think you should have prevented the whole situation in the first place?
- gyardley 15y ago
  Heh, that's easy to answer - it's because I was an idiot! Of course I should've prevented the whole situation in the first place, but I wasn't on the ball enough to realize it was a problem. I wasn't consciously trying to shape company culture at all, which is why it developed on its own in a suboptimal way.
  - nknight 15y ago
    It happens all the time, and it can be essentially invisible to management at larger companies. People get close. Cliques with their own sub-cultures will develop, HR-unfriendly and perhaps legally-actionable things will go on behind closed doors when everybody in the room is friends with everybody else. Nobody will really notice or care until someone with a different worldview starts having to work closely with them and stuff starts bleeding through. When it goes on for too long, people may get angry and resentful when trouble starts, and then you have a much quieter but more insidious mess... What? No, I've never seen this happening from the inside! Of course not! I'm a perfect angel!

DuncanIdaho 15y ago

That is exactly the right thing to do. But completely honestly, why did you even develop this kind of culture in the first place? Don't you think you should have prevented the whole situation in the first place?

gyardley 15y ago
Heh, that's easy to answer - it's because I was an idiot! Of course I should've prevented the whole situation in the first place, but I wasn't on the ball enough to realize it was a problem. I wasn't consciously trying to shape company culture at all, which is why it developed on its own in a suboptimal way.
- nknight 15y ago
  It happens all the time, and it can be essentially invisible to management at larger companies. People get close. Cliques with their own sub-cultures will develop, HR-unfriendly and perhaps legally-actionable things will go on behind closed doors when everybody in the room is friends with everybody else. Nobody will really notice or care until someone with a different worldview starts having to work closely with them and stuff starts bleeding through. When it goes on for too long, people may get angry and resentful when trouble starts, and then you have a much quieter but more insidious mess... What? No, I've never seen this happening from the inside! Of course not! I'm a perfect angel!