5 ms·

I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated. Nobody rai

I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated. Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company. This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements. That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
WWLink 2y ago
Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up. Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/why-women-led-companies-are-better-for-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...
- coffeeaddict1 2y ago
  Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?
  - WWLink 2y ago
    About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.
    - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
      Except no one made that claim. Parent comment was sharing a personal anectode they witnessed. You on the other hand weren't.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  No, this happens because you score brownie points if you have a female workforce or a diverse (read non-white) workforce. In many countries (UK in my case) "positive discrimination" (an oxymoron, if you ask me) is enshrined in law and actually allow to discriminate candidates based on gender. At least 3 of my clients work with recruiters that bring candidates who are only female or non white. (I'm not white myself but I found the clients outside of recruitments, I hope I'm not a diversity hire!). Beside, whenever you start applying non meritocratic filters, the pool of talent shrink and you are forced to pick among a smaller pool, which inevitably will have less of the most talented folks.
- pydry 2y ago
  The fact she was proud of it and that at that time this form of discrimination was considered laudable is a signal that it was more likely just simple discrimination.
- Spivak 2y ago
  It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a job I'm fighting for them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.
  - scarab92 2y ago
    You're mistaking prevalence for bias. There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why). However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women. As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment. I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.
    - Volundr 2y ago
      > As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment. As a man in this field, I can pretty concretely say I have never experienced the problems getting hired or getting promoted she just described.
      - scarab92 2y ago
        That’s a great anecdote for you, however it doesn’t change the fact that for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man. The only reason people think differently is because they see more men than women, and mistake that prevalence for bias.
t-writescode 2y ago
Having spoken with some truly incredible women engineers who battled through the tiers and tiers and tiers of strife and struggles and bullshit women in the engineering world have to deal with to make any sort of progression for themselves, that 5:1 in favor of women is a VERY good thing. How many 1:5 man teams have you seen? How many 0:5 man teams? Getting more women and getting more women-majority teams is a net good not only to the hilarious gender disparity in tech but also for the individual engineers, especially women, who don’t have strong, similar-to-themselves mentors and people to look up to.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  [flagged]
- busterarm 2y ago
  When my brother was starting his career in university IT in the very early 90s, CS was still part of the math department and most places were anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 women. Many people at the time considered operating a computer to be equivalent to secretarial work. Such a gender disparity in tech is relatively recent and pretty much since the iPhone and the flood of zero-interest money into the industry. And yet all of the big FAANGs hire lots of women. And as someone who has done lots of hiring across the industry, generally women don't even apply to jobs that aren't big recognized brands anymore.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    > pretty much since the iPhone I would say it's since the dot-com crash, I went to university in 2003 and it was like 100:1 men in the CS courses back then.
    - busterarm 2y ago
      And nobody was complaining about that then either because there were no job prospects and the high salaries from pre-crash were long gone.
- 2y ago
xyst 2y ago
Great - you provide an anecdotal case of a mid tier manager showing off some metric. What I want to know: is the performance of this team/org worse, better or the same as others? > Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately quite common in that company. You have to ask yourself: why does nobody speak up? This is because of the loss of worker power. Corporate MBA flunkies don’t give a fuck about pay equity. If they can under pay (man|woman|non-binary) folk, they will do it and use politics/fake economics as cover to do so. Tech workers not unionizing has fucked not only people of today. But people of tomorrow (your children and grand children). But sure, yea let’s keep that fantasy alive of “yea we should unionize but I want to be a billionaire too and exploit others so let’s not do that. Also I get paid 6 figs to not care about others”
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  All the unionised sectors I know people in complains about unions extracting money for them and not doing anything That's not the problem and not the solution. Nobody speaks up because if you do you are canceled and branded as racist / mysoginist. Society is too polarised and freedom of speech is just a memory. That said, I noticed (for the first time) people complaining and leaving 0 stars reviews at the last DEI training so maybe the times are changing.
  - JohnnyLarue 2y ago
    Let's hope not.
- scarab92 2y ago
  Unions would be terrible for tech workers, because of the high variance in output between individuals. Your best workers would be underpaid and leave, your worst overpaid and stay.
  - JohnnyLarue 2y ago
    LOLOLOL and the union dues too, right? Guy is fresh out of Praeger U.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

WWLink 2y ago

Maybe they were hiring all the unrecognized talent the other companies were passing up on because the talent happened to be women. Perhaps they offered better benefits or had better outreach? I agree that 5:1 sounds extreme, but you're also giving us a pretty vague description of a company and not naming them, so there's no evidence to back your claim up. Also random things: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/why-women-led-companies-are-better-for-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/03/24/w...

coffeeaddict1 2y ago
Why would you guess that? Is there any evidence that companies are not hiring women despite them being equally/more talented than their male counterparts?
- WWLink 2y ago
  About as much evidence as there are companies hiring women over men 5:1 lmao.
  - coffeeaddict1 2y ago
    Except no one made that claim. Parent comment was sharing a personal anectode they witnessed. You on the other hand weren't.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
No, this happens because you score brownie points if you have a female workforce or a diverse (read non-white) workforce. In many countries (UK in my case) "positive discrimination" (an oxymoron, if you ask me) is enshrined in law and actually allow to discriminate candidates based on gender. At least 3 of my clients work with recruiters that bring candidates who are only female or non white. (I'm not white myself but I found the clients outside of recruitments, I hope I'm not a diversity hire!). Beside, whenever you start applying non meritocratic filters, the pool of talent shrink and you are forced to pick among a smaller pool, which inevitably will have less of the most talented folks.
pydry 2y ago
The fact she was proud of it and that at that time this form of discrimination was considered laudable is a signal that it was more likely just simple discrimination.
Spivak 2y ago
It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a job I'm fighting for them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.
- scarab92 2y ago
  You're mistaking prevalence for bias. There's always going to be more men interested in this field than women, which means you'll see more men in class and more men in industry (read Damore's essay for why). However, that doesn't mean that at an individual level there is bias against women. In practice, in most tech companies, there is significant bias towards hiring and promoting women. As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment. I think you don't realise this because men are more prevalent. The majority of promotions may go to men, but that's simply because there are more men in this field, not because at an individual level they are each receiving preferential treatment over you.
  - Volundr 2y ago
    > As difficult as it may have been to achieve the career outcomes you desire, it is significantly more difficult for a individual man with the same skillset to achieve the same outcomes without that preferential treatment. As a man in this field, I can pretty concretely say I have never experienced the problems getting hired or getting promoted she just described.
    - scarab92 2y ago
      That’s a great anecdote for you, however it doesn’t change the fact that for an average 20 year old, it will be substantially easier in this industry to be hired and promoted as a woman than as a man. The only reason people think differently is because they see more men than women, and mistake that prevalence for bias.

t-writescode 2y ago

Having spoken with some truly incredible women engineers who battled through the tiers and tiers and tiers of strife and struggles and bullshit women in the engineering world have to deal with to make any sort of progression for themselves, that 5:1 in favor of women is a VERY good thing. How many 1:5 man teams have you seen? How many 0:5 man teams? Getting more women and getting more women-majority teams is a net good not only to the hilarious gender disparity in tech but also for the individual engineers, especially women, who don’t have strong, similar-to-themselves mentors and people to look up to.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
[flagged]
busterarm 2y ago
When my brother was starting his career in university IT in the very early 90s, CS was still part of the math department and most places were anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 women. Many people at the time considered operating a computer to be equivalent to secretarial work. Such a gender disparity in tech is relatively recent and pretty much since the iPhone and the flood of zero-interest money into the industry. And yet all of the big FAANGs hire lots of women. And as someone who has done lots of hiring across the industry, generally women don't even apply to jobs that aren't big recognized brands anymore.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  > pretty much since the iPhone I would say it's since the dot-com crash, I went to university in 2003 and it was like 100:1 men in the CS courses back then.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    And nobody was complaining about that then either because there were no job prospects and the high salaries from pre-crash were long gone.
2y ago

xyst 2y ago

Great - you provide an anecdotal case of a mid tier manager showing off some metric. What I want to know: is the performance of this team/org worse, better or the same as others? > Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately quite common in that company. You have to ask yourself: why does nobody speak up? This is because of the loss of worker power. Corporate MBA flunkies don’t give a fuck about pay equity. If they can under pay (man|woman|non-binary) folk, they will do it and use politics/fake economics as cover to do so. Tech workers not unionizing has fucked not only people of today. But people of tomorrow (your children and grand children). But sure, yea let’s keep that fantasy alive of “yea we should unionize but I want to be a billionaire too and exploit others so let’s not do that. Also I get paid 6 figs to not care about others”

jokethrowaway 2y ago
All the unionised sectors I know people in complains about unions extracting money for them and not doing anything That's not the problem and not the solution. Nobody speaks up because if you do you are canceled and branded as racist / mysoginist. Society is too polarised and freedom of speech is just a memory. That said, I noticed (for the first time) people complaining and leaving 0 stars reviews at the last DEI training so maybe the times are changing.
- JohnnyLarue 2y ago
  Let's hope not.
scarab92 2y ago
Unions would be terrible for tech workers, because of the high variance in output between individuals. Your best workers would be underpaid and leave, your worst overpaid and stay.
- JohnnyLarue 2y ago
  LOLOLOL and the union dues too, right? Guy is fresh out of Praeger U.