I could be going too far, though. Maybe the kind of dumb lockerroom overshare bluster amongst the employees and managers of sexually harassing companies and departments lends itself to admitting incriminating things like that to other men with a wink wink nudge nudge.
Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot).
That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an intentional signal that mangers were meant to interpret as such. Since the applicants gender was misread, the signal was read as they wanted flexible hours, not that they were stable. Sure, dad's could ask for flexible hours, but that is on the whole a less frequent occurrence.
This is an even stronger single because asking if I have kids in an interview is in fact not legal in most places in the US, so including it your self is making a huge point.
Oh, there's also the fact that if you did interview them and not hire, the fact that it was in their resume might give the grounds for sueing you for gender discrimination.
In the present times, some set of managers would assume it for ANY woman of childbearing age. And if a woman doesn't have kids, she's assumed to get pregnant and go on maternity leave.
Imagine what would happen if a guy came in and said "I like this job, but my real passion may be art. There is a %50 chance in the next 5 years I am going to leave my job to peruse that." You'd try to avoid hiring them.
Of course, this has terrible consequences in that it effectively discriminates against women in hiring, but simply trying to get hiring managers "not to be sexist' isn't going to fix the problem. You are asking employers (men and women) to weigh their personal ideals ( gender equality) against financial incentives(retaining employees, not paying to).
The point is that not hiring women because they have kids, is stupid, as the same can happen to men as well. Except for the pregnancy time, of course.
Many European countries, have shared leaves between parents.
Sweden does it :)
Would you say that assumptions is completely unfounded? What percentage of women don't have kids?
A more salient question is why there is discrimination on gender in hiring. Is it outright sexism or is it discounting for the fact that a women is far more likely to exit her career to have kids or reduce her hours. The answer radically effect how you fix the problem.
The study in question: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf
It's not such a huge point if you read the bio at the top of the article and noticed that the author lives in Australia and not just assume he lives in the US.
Mind you, Australia does have similar anti-discrimination laws.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find such a law. What you will more likely find that it is illegal for an employer to discriminate in hiring based on that information, and an employer asking the question in an interview is quite likely to be used in any lawsuit over alleged discrimination as evidence that they were, in fact, discriminating in hiring based on the information, since asking a question in an hiring interview is pretty compelling evidence of an intent to use the response in making hiring decisions.
It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.
I'm sad that you were forced to make that choice, I'm proud of the choice that you made.
It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life.
If you find yourself so embattled with the courts, perhaps you should try and understand the behavior of reasonable people. I have to agree with rayiner -- this sounds like typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy one too many times.
"No, he's not sexist, he just doesn't like women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just can't talk to women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just has seizures when he sees the color pink, and women are more likely to wear pink."
Who cares? The woman still doesn't get the job.
The excuses are equivalent to a student saying they deserve an A for trying hard and having extenuating circumstances though they can't actually do what they're graded on.
People take "sexist" and "racist" to describe intent. I don't give a s(*& about your intent. It's the effect that's relevant.
In his position if I wanted to make a more general point about the court system I would have burned a few more sentences clarifying my point.
Also, badclient wrote exactly one sentence: It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life. This is a true concern that does not infer anything about which sex did which sexist thing... only that the definition of "sexist" is dangerously vague. If you think that translates to a "hate of all women", you have projected that upon badclient.
EDIT: "both ways" should probably be "all ways" since all parties involved could be the same gender.
Americans seem to like having things escalate. Going to court is the first reaction to everything in stead of asking someone to apologize or talking things out. The incentive for going to court also seems to be very high, you can get large sums of money for small things. Money is the biggest reason people work in the first place.
I don't know why hiring decisions would be based on gender at all, though, so I don't know why badclient seems to argue for it here. Both men and women can be frivolously litigative.
And I'm not trying to be a PC zealot here. I've told and laughed at many an inappropriate joke. But I also have a lot of respect for the idea that you should not make people feel uncomfortable at work and you shouldn't go out of your way to dismiss candidates of a particular gender (or race or class) because you think you would offend that person and you are incapable of not offending them.
Another notable thing about feeling like you can't hire certain people because they will be offended by things you say in the office is that you are making it clear that you have a narrow range of means to express yourself.
You can have a lot of respect for something and still have a hard time achieving it. You're suggesting that people that make crude jokes around a sex about that sex don't respect that sex. I find that assumption to be unfair and false.
Schools like to separate girls from boys, and points towards improved and safer environment. Conferences like to create women only sections, in the idea (with some irony) that it would improve gender equality, and like schools, make a better environment for teaching out technology.
I call it stupid because it fail some basic common sense. A mixed classroom, work space, or conference room is better because it increase cooperation, make society better, and switch the focus on the individual skill level rather than their sex. Schools have almost gone through this stage and fully gone over to mixed classrooms. The work space is learning the same lesson, but slower. As to conferences, I can only assume that they are looking at the workplace and fail to connect the dots.
To their detriment. As a product of both coed and all boys private schools, there is a stark difference in teaching and disceplin in single sex schools that research shows improves outcomes. Hit http://scholar.google.com/ with "single sex education." There is a huge discrepancy in male performance especially that most teachers admit a preference to teaching girls as they "behave" better.
Bigotry and sexism exists, but the "problem" is an effect of the US obsession with political correctness and an overly sensitive and litigious society. There are cases of systematic discrimination in organizations, but they are not as pervasive as a few decades ago, so there has been progress, especially in corporate environments. An example is a female cousin with a law degree. Being a women of breading age, she was specifically asked if she intended to have children in the next 5 years which was a non-starter. These were small firms that couldn't afford to have a junior partner off for maternity leave. She had no problem with that at a large corporation.
On equality, if you start giving men maternity leave in the same way as women, and effectively change societies views on gender roles in the home, you might start seeing that form of discrimination disappear as in the scandinavian countries.
There is much to be said about differences in men and women's personalities. Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that. So as long as the kid gloves are on...
I agree.
>Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that.
I definitely disagree with that at work. If you want to discuss your sexuality, comment on people's body parts, or articulate your unified theory on the differences in the natures of men and women, get some friends. People have to work in order to eat - allow women (and men) to get through it without having to constantly bite their tongues or else be seen as the problem. We've made a decision as a society that racial, sexual and religious discrimination are problems at work. Find another subject.
Right. Bite my tongue and put on the kid gloves. Wouldn't want to discuss last nights episode of Game of Thrones in the break room, less be seen as a sexist jerk. People do have friends at work, and normal human interactions do take place there.
If your friends at work refuse to meet you away from work for your crucial sex talk, they may be uncomfortable with it too. If your self-righteousness is because you feel put upon by not being able to say what you want when you want, I entirely lack sympathy.
If someone is uncomfortable with something they should speak up. If someone says they are uncomfortable with something that should be respected (within reason).
Its not that hard when everyone just behaves as adults instead of spoiled sheltered children who cannot communicate with each other
And even so they should still speak up. Even if someone has some unreasonable discomfort (ie it makes me uncomfortable when you wear red) it may be so minor that it can easily be avoided. You couldn't expect people to not wear red, but if a co-worker said that to me i'd probably just try to not wear red.
Without communicating/talking about it, reasonable or not, there is absolutely no chance of the situation getting better.
I agree there is a place and time for everything. However, true friends are rarely made in polite company. I prefer to work with friends.
It's a subtle thing, really. One person can make remarks about women and shoes and it's funny because we know that's not his real opinion, another does it and it's offensive because he thinks it's true. It really is about what your real opinions and intentions are.
Perhaps step one should be "find out their real opinion and intention". But too often people just go straight to "thermo-nuclear melt down".
In a world where sexism is still a huge problem, it seems that forcing students into a monosexual environment would only contribute to stunting their social development even more. Compare, for example, the relative incidence of sexism in a heavily male field like programming or philosophy with the amount of sexism in a gender-integrated field like biology.
This idea of separating students by gender to increase performance is really treating them like little test-taking machines: students, by and large, do not choose to take gender-segregated courses unless their parents require it of them. They're human beings. They have a fundamental right to develop in a natural social environment. And, like it or not, schools provide a large proportion of a child's social interaction, which isn't going to change anytime soon.
But most importantly, any improvements are highly controversial and tend to disappear once researchers attempt to correct for confounding.
"The Pseudoscience of Single-sex Schooling", Halpern et al, Science 2011: http://womenstudies.wisc.edu/documents/ScienceSingle-sex09-2...
The most successful school systems in the world, in Northern Europe and East Asia, are all coeducational. There are also a whole lot of interventions that don't require such drastic measures. Cracked of all publications wrote a surprisingly well-researched article on the subject:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19254_5-surprisingly-easy-way...
Using a microphone and turning on the lights is a far less severe encroachment on students' freedom than, well, segregation. Seriously.
That's sexism, plain and simple. Who are they to assume she's going to take extended maternity leave and be the primary care giver? They would never ask that of a man (most male law partners are married and have kids), because they would as assume that his wife would take care of the kids. That's sexism.
Why is it legal to discriminate based on data in some situations but not others? I think the only solution is to remove the logical justification for discrimination: force men and women to take equal parental leave.
as a result car insurance prices for women increased significantly, while mens remained the same.
additionally annuity rates for men dropped, while those for women remained the same (the provider is no longer allowed to factor in that men on average die several years earlier).
I'm all for fairness. Equal is not fair in all cases, nor is fair equal in all cases...
No reason it can't be both. It is stupid, but it's also the dictionary definition of sexism.
Why is it bigot to think that? Seems like a valid concern, can't really blame companies for worrying about that?
It's of course a problem, but what is the proper solution?
Note that "women aren't represented in the executive levels" isn't a significant issue, not for the vast majority of women or men. Very few people are executives, and it's not important to 95% of the population what the gender of the executives is. The majority of women have more in common with the majority of men that are non-executives, than they do with the few women that are executives.
There is no easy way to fix it, but there is a way to fix it. I won't go so far as to say that it's obvious to many people.
The way to do it? Work to change men's attitudes and biases towards women. It can definitely be done, but it takes hard work and cultural change.
I would recommend the book "The Macho Paradox" by Jackson Katz for anyone interested in the topic of gender discrimination. Jackson writes well, he's a man, and he brings a mans perspective to the issues. There is no demonization or undue blame assigned to men in the book. It's a powerful read.
Most HR departments are staffed by women for example, they would be the ones that saw a "Mr." in the resume.
But while looking, I instead found research that slightly contradicted my current understanding of the subject. They[1,2] claimed that there is no difference between female and male management in how they discriminate. They say that both genders are equally bad in creating equality in the work space (deciding hiring or pay rate).
So I still stand by that we need to change people rather than men, but thanks for pushing me to look for sources.
[1]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...
[2]: http://www.ifau.se/Upload/pdf/se/2011/r-11-26-Paverkar-chefe... (Swedish)
But you are right - it’s not an exclusively male problem, and woman are perfectly capable of discriminating against other women, and do, frequently, and often unconsciously.
In the end society as a whole needs to change how it views women, and how it acts upon those views.
A problem might exist, but targeting the wrong target won't fix it, stop blaming the "higher ups" for decisions (conscious or not) taken by the ones that took those decisions.
I very much doubt there is a company where the CEO made a explicit rule for the HR don't hire any women.
But I can see your point, let's just assume it was the HR person that threw out the resume. And since we're in assumption land, let's assume the HR person was a woman.
Because men vastly outnumber women in executive and management positions in business, esp. in the highest levels of business/corporate hierarchy.
Of course, combating misogyny and patriarchy doesn't mean only men will have attitudes changed, but let's not pretend about the numbers of the situation.
This is the problem, not (only) men's attitudes. The most screwed up part is that this inequality often holds even in female dominated professions, like librarians and teachers. I'm into forcing companies to do things rather than waiting for the attitudes of millions to change, esp. when the effect of that attitude only increases the income and options of the people whose attitudes you are trying to change.
Institute quotas and penalize companies if they don't make them. In the beginning, companies may have to hire women that are less talented than the men that are available to them, but if the positions are there, women in general will up their games to compete with each other for them. It's basic economics.
Do you see the irony in this statement?
This was true even when I managed hiring at a company of 50 people or so. At companies smaller than that, I've usually been the one to have a first look at resumes for my team.
HR tends to be the first line of defence between a job seeker and a hiring manager. The majority also conduct the phone interview and occasionally the first face to face interview.
Finally, who do you think hires other HR staff? So, yes. Human resource people are hiring managers. More so than most.
HR tends to be the first line of defence between a job seeker and a hiring manager
From my experience (longer than tptacek's) there are BFE (big freaking enterprises) that use HR to screen, but in every one of those, if an external applicant could find a hiring manager, HR reduced to a pro-forma deal.
Even at the executive hiring level, if HR is meaningfully involved, it is with a specialist hired to do nothing but that.
As a "first line of defence" they are the opposite of qualified. External candidates and internal hiring managers find ways around them if they are at all involved. Otherwise, the result is not filled with qualified folks.
We have HR. They don't screen.
I might suggest ratcheting back "incredibly uninformed".
The vast majority of established organisations with 100+ staff have a HR department and in Europe, the HR department usually screens CV's and are regularly involved in phone screening and/or first stage interviews.
Role % Women
================================ =======
Human Resource Managers 72.7
Human Resource Workers 71.8
Human resources assistants [...] 82.7Human Resources Workers 71.8% women
Human Resources Assistants 82.7% women
It does not mean that the implication is true.
Either way, HR didn't hate him because he was beautiful, and there are conceivable reasons why even a gender balanced HR department might screen out candidates posting their "beautiful" photos along with an applicatiom that don't involve petty jealously.
If photos are relatively rare in a culture receiving applications or the photos used are glamorous model applications, one could even argue that it's a reasonable alarm about a person's willingness to nakedly milk their looks. Even if that isn't the case, a non-partisan observer might [over]correct a perceived (and often real) tendency for beautiful people to receive more favourable treatment in some environments. Maybe they could apply the same criteria to tall men too...
Are you suggesting that as a hobby, a career, or?
Who has the time or inclination to do that?
"It can definitely be done"
As a practical matter I would personally worry more about other things than spending time reversing established thought process and bias.
Now of course if someone wants to start a movement or a non-profit toward this cause (and somehow be able to earn a living from that) that's fine. Or if they decide this is a cause they believe in and instead of spending leisure time on something else that's fine as well.
For example, many people on HN care about privacy and government intrusion. They don't need to be convinced as to why it's important to speak up about the NSA and the US treatment of Edward Snowden. People who care feel it's a personal imperative, so they do something about it.
I personally have the time and the inclination. Because it's something I care about. Maybe you don't care about it, that's your personal feeling, so you won't take the time. But I'm sure that there are other things in your life that you care about, and you do invest time in those things.
It's absolutely fine not to care about every social cause out there. I don't think we can expect everyone to care about everything. Just pick those things which matter most to you and work to do something about them.
As for a movement, there are a few out there that I'm aware of - in particular I am a big fan of the work of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP).
I'm impressed with your reply and the way it is phrased. Not typical for HN (and other places) where you can and do get jumped on because people feel differently or feel you have to care about what they care about or what a crowd thinks is important. Very well put.
"But I'm sure that there are other things in your life"
This really is one of my core problems with people judging. They don't know the complete picture and focus on one vary small thing and make their judgement from that.
For example maybe someone doesn't like recyling (and never recycles) but is free with their time and help in another area that has much greater personal and societal benefits.
People spend a lot of time communicating. Mutual teaching (gossip, storytelling, etc) is the core of human society.
I will try to find the citation.
my anegdotal evidence is most women I knew found female peers a pain in the ass and explicitely admitted they in general prefer to work with men.
(Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent is also excellent - one woman's experiences disguised as a man. Sounds potentially lightweight or biased, is neither.)
The first step is to get the candidates CV and work history, and then re-enter that information into a generic form. Only crucial information should be entered in this step, leave out the candidates gender, marital status, age, the name of their school(s), the names of previous employers, etc. The second step is to pass this "sanitized" information on to someone else to make the actual decision as to whether or not the candidate should be interviewed.
The two step process is repeated in the interview process. Only objective information is taken down by the interviewer, and again this is passed on to someone else, who can make a value judgement about the candidate without their judgement being colored by the candidates gender, race, looks, height, perfume or whatever else is considered to be extraneous information.
There are studies showing that the unconscious effect exists. But it's definitely conscious at times.
I know a few people in HR in Silicon Valley, and here are a few things they've heard from actual hiring managers:
"You don't have any kids? Great, we can work you harder!"
"If he had to reschedule the phone interview because his kid is sick, I don't want to move forward hiring him. He obviously has his priorities wrong."
"I don't know, she's at just about the age most women get pregnant. Don't we have a guy we could interview?"
:-(
I work at a company notorious for poor work\life balance, and nobody has ever said to me 'we can work <person> harder' in any context.
They say things like 'We value people who are commited to growing the company. If a candidate shows us he's willing to go the extra mile to finish the project he's working on, that's a definite positive indicator."
The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination.
I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why.
[1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...
But since there probably aren't many two-year-olds applying for jobs nowadays the comment is still relevant.
Thank you for the update and chuckle!
Someone who wasn't born a US citizen would only get assigned an SSN with their green card or work visa, and I'd imagine the prefix would indicate their first place of residence in the US.
So the most you can get from a pre-2011 SSN is that someone lived in some particular state in some particular year, and that information is likely inferable from the resume anyway.
Quoting from the Social Security office: "Must my child have a Social Security number? No. Getting a Social Security number for your newborn is voluntary. But, it is a good idea to get a number when your child is born. You can apply for a Social Security number for your baby when you apply for your baby’s birth certificate."
A couple of decades back, the law was changed to require the SSN for any claimed dependents. Most people, of course, want that ~ $4,000 deduction, so hospitals often distribute the birth registration form.
For what it's worth, I was also born in the 1970s, but didn't get my SSN until jr. high, as I recall.
It could be a hash of the persons name, too, but then the public would have to learn what a hash was...
NI number works well in the UK, because it's convenient (and the original suggestion was specifically for the UK.) A similar system could be used anywhere.
That gets supplied when sending a resume?
Considering that doing that is an invaluable tool to people lacking "real" work experience, either recently or in general, I think that could end up hurting a lot of people.
Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant.
Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social biases, those biases still are real and business value can be extracted from them).
Also, once a shop commits to a particular gender choice, it might be inclined to stick to it exclusively. For instance, I heard a first-hand story from a local grocery store about why exactly it avoids hiring men (especially attractive ones) for clerks - because it leads to relationships forming between co-workers, which usually end with people left jealous and/or angry at each other. I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one.
I'm not responsible for hiring decisions right now, but if I were then one thing I wouldn't want to be anonymized are names. I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;).
Allow me. It's illegal for an employer to discriminate against applicants based on gender when it doesn't serve a direct business purpose. (Actors, Models, Priests, etc.)
While I can sympathize and understand their reasons, I can not condone their solution.
You can't legislate away reality...
That is a problem. Denying said value is not necessarily the best solution, but some solution is necessary.
If there was a protocol\industry agreed standard for doing hashing of names on applications, then you could still do this.
The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start?
This was an issue with many orchestras - they ultimately made the auditions physically blind. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/povertydisc/readi...
However, in cases where the quality of in-person interaction is a major part of what you're trying to assess — like for a team programming environment — it's going to be pretty hard to do anything comparable.
Obviously some level of programming expertise is required, but once you've crossed that minimum threshold, personal communication becomes a larger and larger share of an employees value.
In fact telephone, or skype, interviews for the first round is actually becoming standard in many fields.
Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).
And sometimes, the early career applicants adds the employers of their PARENTS in their CVs !!!
Whether you like the fact that a surprisingly large number of university student has academics for parents, it is still there, and if you want an intelligent person, it might act as a decent filter to look for intelligent parents, especially is said person does not have much experience otherwise yet.
My company, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history.
They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profiles. Should the candidate accept, we reveal contact information to both parties and help schedule the interview.
While we're still fairly early stage, we're aiming to expose bias at different points in the hiring process using this approach, and at the very least help employers understand their own biases. Acceptance is the first step to a solution, no?
Unfortunately there are many ways in which a person may be unfairly discriminated when looking for a job, than there are protected classes in the law.
In particular, I wouldn't necessarily expect that line to imply anything about a male candidate's commitment to the work/job, but just write it off as a misguided attempt to look "well rounded." So, shit, I'm worse than I thought.
If a man is married with kids - then he's got more commitment to work because he's got the responsibility of a family depending on his income.
If a woman is married with kids - the she's got less commitment to work because she's got the responsibility for the well-being of a family depending on her attention.
But, of course, if the applicant is qualified I should try to figure out why in the job interview, not by projecting some made up story on the resume.
If you're going to be giving me dirty looks for working less than 50 hours, have an unspoken mandatory happy hour attendance policy, 24x7 oncall, etc, I don't want to waste the time of both parties by interviewing with you.
We were specifically looking at hiring-related gender bias among different education levels. Our study showed non-statistically significant bias among those without a bachelor's degree, and statistically significant at a moderate correlation level among bachelor's degree holders. The worst were the subjects with graduate degrees; not only was it a strong relationship at a statistically significant level, it was as extreme as our methodology could detect. And it went both ways (e.g., a female identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a mechanic position, but a male identified applicant wouldn't be considered for a nursing position either).
Respondents weren't supposed to put specific information on their responses, but one prominent individual did. Our curiosity got the best of us, so after we input and calculated our metrics, we looked at the identifiable subject's responses. This individual was in charge of EEO and non-discrimination policies at a research 1 institution, and she was the most gender discriminatory individual in the study!!!
Worthless comment then, carry on.
Or, if that's too much work, just use affirmative action.
I don't think that would be enough, but we'd be far better off if we could get to that point.
The best solution typically wins. There is no way to fake talent when an actual job-related problem needs to be solved and then a solution sold to a team of folks.
There are issues with this approach too: somebody else could help the candidate, the presentation style, etc. Picking the right problem to solve is important, as is deciding ahead of time what is the criteria for selection.
Some companies like Google do this (link: http://www.google.com/jobs/students/joining/)
and then there are languages, like Nordics and Slavic, where the last name reveals your gender - Sigmundsdottir (daughter of Sigmund), Politkowskaja (f) vs. Politkowski (m), etc.
I wouldn't know that Sigmundsdottir would be revealing the gender, and many other wouldn't either. (I'm not saying that it can't be improved even further)
Edit: I have a slavic last name that doesn't reveal my gender (on the balkans, last names are the same for both male/female)
Some of the best developers and managers I had the luck to work with were women.
Quotas.
Don't give me guff about "the best person for the job". You've been picking the best man for the job.
"The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student."
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...
Quotas really are quite a multifaceted fix.
- Directly and immediately drive up numbers.
- Create a demand for women that pulls the supply.
- Create a supply of women leaders with experience and skills.
- And create somewhere for them to go, so they don't get discouraged and quit.
- Change people's mental image of working with/for women from abstract and theoretical to specific and personal. Overwrite their stereotypes with actual experience. This goes for both men and women.
- reinforces prejudice at an everyday level as the group whoa re being quota-ed down resent losing their jobs to people who can't do them.
- sends a signal that excellence doesn't matter and that what you are is more important than who you are.
In a list of really silly suggestions to reduce prejudice, quotas are the stand-out silliest. We surely want to increase the number of any discriminated-against group because there is a level of untapped excellence in that group; if we get rid of prejudice then we can access that excellence. Quotas go against that idea; you reduce the level of excellence in the field overall, retard development and competitiveness and reinforce the prejudice that you're trying to combat!
- Cause some coworkers to resent a person for being hired just to fill a quota rather than on merit.
If you want 50% of qualified candidates to be women, you have to find the nerdy girls in middle school with the aptitude and give them the latitude to develop the obsession the way boys can. Nobody who starts in college because they're chasing dollar signs is going to be very good.
The solution to discrimination is not more/different discrimination.
Discrimination is prejudice plus power. Men are the ones with the power right now and "sexism against men" can not exist. Not in this society.
Come up with a list of MRA talking points and I'll laugh at you.
Noun:
1) The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, esp. on the grounds of race, age, or sex.
2) Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.
Hmmmm.... nothing in there about power.
sex·ism /ˈsekˌsizəm/
Noun:
1) Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
Sure... it says typically against women. But if sexism against men can not exist then that definition would have to say always... not typically. So you might not want to accept it... but your statements are wrong... plain and simple... wrong. You can't just make your own definitions for words and then project them onto everyone.
Quotas discriminate. Period. If the rule says you must have 50% women and 50% men, when it comes time to hire a new person, you absolutely will have to take the gender of that person into account in order to make sure you stay within the quota. I have absolutely no idea how reasonable people can think quotas are anything but discrimination.
I'm not part of the MRA. But go ahead and lump me into the MRA group if that is what you need to do so you can laugh at me. I really don't care. Because that would just be one more thing you are doing to water down the real issues. You do your cause no good to be like that. Overuse of words that used to mean something is becoming the butt of jokes! You are making them a joke. Go laugh at that. Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Eventually no one will listen anymore.
Demand will drive supply, if needs be. Lack of demand has certainly driven it down.
Assuming that currently 20% of programmers are women, would 60% of the current programmer population (or 75% of current male programmers) have to go unemployed until more women had entered the workforce? Following from my first question: if we think paying men and women differently is a-okay, what would this 25/75 split do to the salary of male programmers? How would this affect gender relations in the workplace?
Would these same quotas apply to universities as well? How would the market react to universities making cuts in graduation rates to accommodate occasional fluctuations in the woman student population?
What kind of grace periods and permitted lag would be allowed? If I fired a woman, would I have to fire a man to make up for it that same day? That same week? That same month? Would I just have to refill that position with another woman? What if I decided to eliminate that role entirely?
I am not convinced that you have put thought into your proposal. It makes for a good sound bite and I don't doubt that your intentions are noble, but it is not a good idea.
Most universities actually have more women students overall. So applying quotas to all fields would reduce female enrollment in many of them.
How on earth is this kind of discrimination not conscious, when the only difference in a written resume is the assumption that the person is female?
And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect.
What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.