I saw many of these same initiatives beginning as I was moving through high school and college. Being young and generally feeling like I treated people fairly, I assumed that most of the world treated others the same. Sexism seemed antiquated.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the women in my life still get second-guessed, mansplained, faced lowered expectations, and/or past over for promotions.
Some of it is blatant sexism. Some of it is sexism-light, where not being part of the boys’ club leaves them excluded from the power-clique. They still have a markedly different professional experience than I do, because they are women.
Is there a better way to handle this than what you described? Maybe. But I don’t think the need for such support mechanisms has expired yet.
My wife works for a non-profit. Her supervisor (a woman) was up for a promotion. She has worked at the place for 5 years. A guy who was newly hired 2 years back was also up for the promotion but he had more experience for the role (he had worked at a bigger firm and had done work at higher levels before, it's a legal nonprofit).
These were the only two up for the role. It's between work experience and time with the organization. Whichever you value more will probably determine who you choose. The big boss (a woman) ended up choosing the man over the woman for the job.
The woman was qualified. No doubt. For my wife and her supervisor, this was another example of sexism, women getting passed over for promotions again. But for the big boss (a woman) or for someone else on the outside, it's not so clear. Her leg up was her experience in the org. His leg up was his experience from other orgs.
When looking at a situation like this, how can you prove this is sexism? For someone it will be proof positive of sexism. For another it won't be.
Explicit, institutional sexism towards males is easy to spot out. Towards women, it takes this form, where you can't honestly say you 100% know it's sexism.
So what do you do then?
if the superboss has done this consistently in the past, then your wife's supervisor has grounds[1]. However with a sample size of 1 , it could be hundred factors and it is unfair to accuse anyone .
[1] Even when is there larger sample it is nuanced and tricky to really say, unless the superboss explicitly favours women there are inherent biases in the system against them, for example amount of mandatory maternity leave u.s. offers is pitiful, there are lesser women in STEM etc, the super boss selection criteria may be biased because of underlying biases not necessarily her own. Doesn't mean she should get a free pass, It should be investigated/reviewed before jumping to the conclusion of labelling someone sexist.
It also artificially limits the demand for men (lowering the salary costs) and normalizes dual-income families where 2 people have to work full-time to afford the same quality of life that the previous generation could get from a single salary.
The culture war is just a distraction, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the wealthy elites (who are isolated enough in their personal lives to be able to avoid all this noise) playing the masses to hate each other instead of hating and attacking the elites.
The best strategy is not to play, blend in and try to reach elite level yourself.
The very next moment the social justice kicks in. Your kids are labelled privileged. They will be demoralized at school and told to hate themselves. They will be penalized when trying to apply to top academic institutions, denied promotions at work, and constantly guilt-tripped.
Instead these positions will be split between those who get them via connections, and the "disadvantaged" people who will pose a much lower political threat to the "connected" group.
So unless you are a part of the hereditary elites, whatever wealth you have created, gets erased in the next generation.
It's just that these advantages are normalized in the system, so they aren't as apparent as the corrective measures. It's really easy to miss them, just like, for example if you play a shooter on an easy mode first, you don't necessarily know how it would be harder.
That said, you want to talk to your director or learn about your career? Email them and ask them about it.
Girls aren't obviously disadvantaged in school. Girls outperform boys in every subject, science and math included, and have for decades[1]. Women are admitted more to colleges and graduate more[2]. Then there are structural programs at major companies to advantage women in hiring and career growth, as I mentioned.
It is true that women face the subtle kinds of discrimination referenced elsewhere. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that instituting programs which relatively disadvantage my career and opportunities due to my gender strikes me as unfair. I don't get a benefit because the executive leadership team is mostly men. They don't share the money and power with me because we are all men - so why am I disadvantaged because other men have achieved success?
1 - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades
2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...
For example, here's a study where candidates with the same cv differ only by name.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/06/07/new-study-fin...
I gotta run, so I don't have time to cite it, but women, controlling for job qualifications and profession, earn 98% for every dollar a man earns. That may not seem like much, but the effect is enhanced by hiring and promotion differences and other effects of bias.
As to your question of not getting the benefit, how do you know that gender bias didn't help you get hired or affect your pay? Are you so sure that if you were a woman, you would have been hired, paid, and promoted just like you were now?
Regardless, policies are based on affecting the most good for the most people, not on helping you.
The kind of sexism that women encounter is not an organized system of oppression (e.g. being directed to hire fewer women) but rather it is the latent sexism of individuals not acting in an organized fashion. Individuals not taking a woman seriously, or being harassing, or not wanting to hire women etc. "Systemic" does not seem like an apt word for this kind of sexism.
Regarding your question over how I know I don't benefit from gender bias - clearly I can't know. Just like my female colleagues can't know if they benefit from gender bias. Maybe if I were a woman I would've got better grades in school, gone to a better college, retained my interest in programming, and been preferentially hired in an even better role. It's impossible to know.
1. Women couldn't vote until the 1920s in the U.S. The 1940's in France.
2. In the U.S., the Equal Rights constitutional amendment, guaranteeing legal equality between men and women, still hasn't been fully ratified/passed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment
That's the tip of the legal iceberg.
If those aren't examples of a system, i.e., the U.S. government, granting less legal rights to women than to men, i.e., systemic sexism, then what is?
2. From your wikipedia link, one of the key arguments against the amendment was that it would imply women could be drafted - "Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA".
If you want to show a persuasive (to me) example of systemic sexism, I think you should provide an example that is current and that systemically disadvantages women. If the lack of an ERA does disadvantage women, please explain how.
If you are unwilling to understand the significance of it taking until 1920 for women to receive the right to vote, and the variety of reasons for resistance to the ERA, then, I don't know what to say.
If you haven't, talk with the women in your life you are friends with about sexism and discrimination in the work place.
As far as talking with women about the sexism they've experienced - I've never denied women experience sexism. I've explicitly acknowledged that multiple times. My point is that the sexism they experience is not an organized system of oppression (i.e. it is not "systemic"). There are multiple, explicit, and codified systems that disadvantage men and I have pointed to several of them.
In fact we have a word for that and that word is “culture”. No one explicitly organizes it.
You use knowledge and reason, not to seek truth, but to occlude it for your own ends, driven by your own insecurities and fear.
The argument for affirmative action goes that any special treatment only counters the biases and limitations you don't face and they do.
The argument against affirmative action is that it is very hard to remove preferential treatment once it is in place even if it no longer required. The other argument is that such affirmative action does not efficiently target the truly deserving or the underlying cause.
Dependent probability is never factored in, while it is true the number of women who get into STEM or programing is low, the biases in companies is considerably less once they are in. Over extending benefits in the workplace is not perhapa as important as getting education fixed in schools and colleges.
There are no easy answers
Once you educate yourself with fact-based historical information to understand how unfair the system has been, this actually is an argument in favor of affirmative action.
Point being that until very recently the biases has been extreme, so that despite positive changes in both culture and law, equality will not happen over night (as you said, things persist), and thus affirmative action is important even after the most pernicious source of discrimination has been removed.
Affirmative action is complex, no question, but your particular point is more of an argument for it than one against it.
To elaborate on the why not:
The problem is rarely the intent of affirmative action .it is in the execution, same problems with big / small government , and the idea behind UBI or give cash instead of subsidy is sometimes bettee.
I grew up in a country where affirmative action is codified in the law and about 50 % of job openings, promotions university seats are reserved and has been for the last 70 years. Was it and still is there need for it ? Yes absolutely,
however the efficiency of allocation is a challenge , some groups who needed it 70 years back don't really need it anymore , however it is political suicide to even propose a reduction or a reallocation to reflect today's problems.
It doesn't mean we should not do anything, however to ignore the misalignment of incentives inefficiency of allocation and stickyness of any action is not good either.
Girls and boys mathematical abilities are equivalent.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/myth-busted-girls-cant-do-math...
Blind hiring increases diversity in hiring
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-...
Just as in our society individuals may have an incentive to do nefarious deeds like robbery or murder, but society as a whole has an incentive to stop it, so it is with science.
And having checked your link, A) the person's theory was overhyped and B) a meta analysis brought it back to earth. Which is evidence that the process of scientific inquiry works.
That's why we know that climate change exists, despite deniers, and that vaccines don't cause autism, despite anti vaxxers having been inspired by a now retracted paper that said it did.
Furthermore, if you want to come to valid statistical conclusions about whether a discrepancy is due to a particular cause (and can't just do a RCT), it's not enough to just ignore plausible confounders until they are "provable". You need to systematically control for all possible confounders.
This one says it doesn't: https://www.pmc.gov.au/news-centre/domestic-policy/beta-repo...
> What we found is that de-identifying applications at the shortlisting stage does not appear to assist in promoting diversity within the Australian Public Service (APS) in hiring. Overall, APS officers discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates. The practical impact is that, if implemented, de-identification may frustrate diversity efforts.
What's interesting, I suppose, is not that the selected speakers were all men (which could have happened by random chance), but the reaction by the conference organisers to that fact.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/6f8u2s/githubs_...
I have to laugh my ass off. In reality, boys get 800 on the math SAT at over twice the rate that girls do. That article addressing this by stating "the SAT is hardly a random sample of all students" is complete nonsense.
The idea that smart males and females are produced at the same rate is ludicrous on its face, because female brains are made with the information from two X chromosomes and males with just the one.
IMHO what is actually being claimed, and which there is academic consensus based on facts around, is that sexism has been such a pervasive cultural force, to such a degree that it's difficult to parse nature versus nurture.
Plus science is still working on nature vs nature - it's complex.
So. Simpler to start with the known, empirically verified problem in front of our eyes.
These two sentences contradict each other.
You also say "I am not all men", but, sadly, the issue with systemic biases (racism, sexism, etc), is that it's not about individuals.
You seem smart enough to be able to theorize about ways in which, as a man, you may have unknowningly benefited from systemic biases over the course of your education / career.
For one thing you don't have to worry about being sexually harassed or raped by a friend/coworker - the numbers are pretty bad.
We're supposed to be rational, work with numbers, etc - so even if we can't prove the effect of a systemic bias on an individual, our knowledge of the data and basic statistics should lead us to be able to make reasonable inferences about general cases, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is, be the bigger man, in both ways in which that phrase can be read. It's not all about you.
I could be the "bigger man" by ignoring structural disadvantages against me and people like me, and in real life, of course I do ignore these disadvantages. The reason I ignore them is not because I think it makes me a bigger man, but because if I spoke out against them I would be fired and ostracized. People would hate me for raising or sharing these opinions.
For your point about sexual harassment and rape - this is not something specific to the tech industry and not something that is fixed by deciding to prefer women over men in hiring decisions. Is the idea that, because women are more likely to be sexually harassed or raped, outside of prison, they should get the compensatory prize of these career benefits I've described? That just seems like a non-sequitur to me.
That's not what I am arguing. What I am saying is, if people were currently being treated equally then we would not have to have this conversation. The truth is that they are not.
I mean come on, have you ever heard of the Bedchel test?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
"It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added."
You have to exercise a lot of mental energy to not see all the ways in which there is systemic sexism in our society and workplace.
You also have to decide that all these women must be, making this shit up?
You also have to be pretty ignorant, either deliberately or through circumstance having placed you in an unhealthy media environment. These days there are a lot of fact-based, data-supported history books, studies, etc, talking about systemic sexism both past and present.
To sum up, however good your tech knowledge may be, your knowledge - current, best-practices knowledge, so to speak, of history is weak. Or, you don't want to acknowledge the truth.
Those are facts.
This doesn't seem to be what you're advocating though. You're defending policies that explicitly favor people based on their immutable characteristics. I understand you think it balances historical inequality, but I disagree with that.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on job occupation and demographics of the workers[1]. You can see that many occupations are at approximate gender parity (i.e. ~50% women) and some occupations are majority women while other occupations are majority men.
Let's consider four occupations from this list written as Occupation title, percent women. Computer programmers, 20. Insurance underwriters, 51. Human resource managers, 75. Pre-school teachers, 98.7. Why are women only 20% of computer programmers? Is it because 100 years ago women weren't allowed to vote and because today women have relatively few lines of dialogue with one another in popular films? Well, why do those factors uniquely affect female computer programmers and not other career disciplines? I don't think I would have expected that prior to looking at the data.
If relatively few women are computer programmers because of systemic sexism, is there less systemic sexism among insurance underwriters? And how would you know that apart from looking at these percentages? As male as the profession of computer programming is, human resources managers are even more female - is that because of a prejudice against men? And that's not to mention the apparently staggering bias against male preschool teachers.
In other words, if the only way you can tell that computer programmers are systemically sexist and insurance underwriters are not is because of the portion of women in those respective fields, it seems like that same logic would also lead to there being massive system sexism against male human resources managers and teachers.
An alternate hypothesis, which I do believe in, is that men and women tend to have different interests. Women, for reasons that are an ineffable mystery, like to be around children as an example. That's why they are over represented among teachers, especially teachers of younger and younger children. I think it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that women, in aggregate, are less likely to be interested in computer programming, and this lack of interest is what leads there to be relatively few female programmers, not the Bechdel test or the history of women's suffrage.
And yet, it feels like sexism to me. Women get an explicit benefit that men don't. Women are also explicitly privileged in the hiring process and higher ups are rewarded based on the number of women they employ, hire, and promote. This isn't a conspiracy theory but an explicitly articulated and documented process. Even before that, in college, we had events for women who code, women in STEM, career opportunities for women, etc.
I get that these things are all because women are underrepresented in tech and surely there are challenges for women and sexism against women. However, the examples above still feel like sexism to me. I am not all men, so the fact that men have better representation in upper levels is meaningless to me as an individual. The fact that my female peers have a monthly meeting with higher-ups to discuss how they get promoted and I don't get that isn't as meaningless.
On top of all that, I also know that if I were to ever suggest this was sexism or wrong in any way using my real name or at work, I'd fully expect to be fired and reviled by my coworkers as a deplorable sexist.
My point in writing all this is just to say that I would much prefer my company stay dispassionate and neutral and try to treat everyone fairly. I don't really support the company taking up political, social, or ideological agendas and using them to make decisions about what happens at work.