I never realized it, but on my team we have several Indian male engineers, no female engineers, and 4 Indian female QA

See my comment above about "women in QA". Also, "no female engineers" is laughable because that is 1 anecdote. There are plenty of Indian female engineers. You know that right ?

"on my team" does mean anecdote. That's not laughable.

This is an American problem too. I've worked with a lot of women in QA who have CS degrees, and lots of male programmers who were shocked to discover that the testers they were working with had exactly the same qualifications they did.

In America companies, women who struggle to find software engineering roles due to discrimination are often able to get lower-paid roles in QA where they are less likely to be pre-judged for not looking like what people think engineers look like. The result is that 38.8% of American QA testers are women, compared to 14% of software engineers.

That’s interesting and holds true for me experience. In hindsight I think I’ve worked with more female qa engineers than female engineers

> less likely to be pre-judged

I wonder how much that has to do with the hiring managers also being women. (For the places where that’s the case.)

It is likely to have more to do with gender stereotyping, and attitudes towards the work itself. Women and men alike perpetuate gender discrimination: https://escholarship.org/content/qt8s94154n/qt8s94154n.pdf

Fields that hold fixed-mindset beliefs, where success in the field is attributed to innate talent, "being smart" or other unchanging characteristics, have significantly more discrimination against women and traditionally-marginalized racial groups than do fields that believe success relies on hard work and practice: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1261375

Or another possibility is men and women are wired differently, and the things that make a good dev (such as coming up with a novel solution to a problem) is different from the things that make a good QA (testing every possible edge case to make sure the thing does what the thing is supposed to do).

Hint: It is not casteism. It is cultural. Women in India want to get into IT (best way to make decent money) and QA has lower barrier to entry with less pressure. Nothing to do with casteism. This is why GP's comment is extremely reckless and dangerous.

I read your post, then I we back to again read the original post.

To quote:

    The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.

No where in that sentence does it say anything about casteism. (Yes, I know the original post was discussing both casteism and sex discrimination.)

Also, you wrote:

    Nothing to do with casteism.

Yes, in this particular case. Casteism results in lower human development for low caste people. As a result, they are likely to perform worse in the workplace due to multiple reasons, including education, confidence, etc.

    It is not casteism. It is cultural.

Why do you think that they are separate? Any university-level sociology professor would tell you that they are clearly intertwined. Sexism is also cultural.

About "extremely reckless and dangerous": On HN, each time casteism is the topic, it evokes strong, emotionally defensive responses from Indian-descent people (both nationals and the diaspora). Something that I often see repeated: "Oh, you just don't understand." "Oh, you cannot understand this ${thing} in our ancient culture." It's hard to understand if you don't ask. Yes, you may perceive their asking as a slight, but in many cases they are making an effort to learn more about this complex social issue. I see similar reactions during discussions about transgender rights and Black Lives Matter _in the United States_. There seems to be a small, vocal minority that wants to deny these are real, very serious, and important social issues that need our attention.

When a non-Indian descent person sees what they perceive as casteism or sex discrimination towards Indian descent people, how would you like them to raise the issue with you?

> GP's comment is extremely reckless and dangerous

Unless sitkack thumbed their comment into an iPhone while simultaneously driving drunk and having unprotected sex with a prostitute, "extremely reckless and dangerous" is an awfully weird commentary on their post.