oh wow! Isn't this just blatant sexism and racism ?
> It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.
"“Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.”"
I actually listened to a great podcast recently that expresses why this might be, and the trick is not to demand more interaction but to give everyone an opportunity to write thoughts down first. Then the differences sharply decrease.
What this shows me is an unfortunate lack of education in recent sociological research, but also a lack of curiosity to pursue. Weird for Google.
I don't know about the "Now you Asians" line but the diversity exercise is so bloody obvious in what it's aiming to achieve that it blows my mind any other HN commenters aren't able to figure it out.
It is a "see how it feels to be discriminated against" exercise. You can argue the outcomes, but you certainly can't argue the intentions. It's clearly aimed at trying to make people understand what it's like to be discriminated against.
About the best you can do for a well-intentioned person doing a thing like that is tell them it's not helping.
> It was no different in the workplace culture. Senior colleagues bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks. At an all-hands meeting, my boss said, “Now you Asians come to the microphone too. I know you don’t like to ask questions.” At a different all-hands meeting, the entire policy team was separated into various rooms and told to participate in a “diversity exercise” that placed me in a group labeled “homos” while participants shouted out stereotypes such as “effeminate” and “promiscuous.” Colleagues of color were forced to join groups called “Asians” and “Brown people” in other rooms nearby.