Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in need of a leg-up, just to fulfill some backwards skin-color quota. It's obscene, and insulting to all parties involved.
I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
> I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.
Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
As a hiring manager I have substantial pressure to hire incompetent people to meet quotas. I confronted my recruiter in front of witnesses and was partially shunned.
I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to.
It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas.
There is resentment all around.
I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work.
You should think about legal recourse here. If this isn't stomped out it can result in real racism pretty quickly. It has to, because people aren't treated fairly and it creates adversary between people of different skin color.
I was just interviewed at Microsoft last week and at the end of a very good interview the interviewer said welp we are looking to diversify our team more. Best of luck to you.
Define "real". It's definitely measurable in the lab, but the effect sizes aren't very impressive, and the link to real-world outcomes remains quite controversial.
Likely not. Saying "we will only hire women for this position" would be illegal, but saying it implicitly would not be. True quotas are unlawful, but there are many loopholes there.
>I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse.
I'm really sorry that things have become like this.
What do you mean by "things have become like this"?
I obviously don’t know your age but the software industry (and other fields) has been extremely sexist since decades (at least the 80s).
The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live).
My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)
There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun:
- that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism
- that being casual about sex is automatically sexist
- that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist
- that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out"
I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment.
What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no.
Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance.
If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men.
Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.
You made a lot of arguments in your post, and it's going to take a lot of work to unpack them all.
But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?
I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:
> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment
Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!
Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.
> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,
I have a different experience and believe that tech fields are extremely egalitarian. This might not apply to the specific regions like SV where tech and status often intermingles, don't know much about the situation there. There is probably also a difference between countries.
There are some very opinionated engineers, but they are an exception and quite rare. They might bark a little from time to time but it doesn't have any real repercussions.
Sure, if you are one of the few women in tech, you might face some difficulties getting into established groups, but that isn't due to sexism for the most part. Far more often it is some misplaced courtesy or something else in my experience.
Compared to medicine for example, tech is pretty harmless. Medicine has a lot of women, but that doesn't mean much. Surgeons for example are know to have their elitist clubs and it often is exclusively men. I have yet to hear similar "locker room talk" or what you call it in any tech circle. Probably exists but it has to be quite rare.
To my knowledge the diagnosis for tech was pretty much that there are far more men here. But that isn't indicative of sexism. So I don't understand what you mean by "extremely sexist" at all.
Not questioning what you're saying, just adding that I think "prejudice" is a better word for this than bigotry? (to be clear: we're discussing here the results of identity-based hiring practices, as opposed to are there sex differences in programming ability)
Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible!
Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some!
In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.
Of late I have been seeing people going viral for posting some incredible career trajectories. Usually involving someone in another career who made the switch to tech by doing a bootcamp, and within a year they were in FAANG. Now that I think about it, they were all people who fit into diversity quotas and were probably diversity hires
Brown Indian immigrant here. I am part of a multi racial family and have nephews and nieces who are white and mixed race. I have family who is white and black while I am brown.
This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.
Some of starting to rearrange the letters to be DIE. Companies are going to die as they become paralyzed trying to placate differing views and opinions... or parts of their workforce are going to protest or cause internal strife/trouble...
Putting identity over class is the main sin of the modern "woke" movement, in my opinion. Seeing how much that identitarian, exclusionary, and sectarian thinking is promoted by mainstream media, I cannot help but think it is intentional, as a distraction.
USA has a long documented history of being deeply racist inside class consciousness, which is why poor non-whites compromise on "help rich and poor PoC" instead of only "help poor but only white people"
wow .... when was a rich brahmin hired instead of an inner city American kid .... are you really sure ... that the Indians working in the US tech industry have gotten those positions thru affirmative action?
I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota.
I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways
1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping
2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.
I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).
What's a rich Brahmin? Where this assumption coming from ? I think you are about to make highly biased and uninformed opinion on Hinduism based on some article you read , so go on...
I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.