During the interview, they had mentioned that they were having trouble expanding at their headquarters due to lack of available qualified employees. Gee. I wonder why.
Weekly hour expectations for salaried exempt workers is already a suspect practice, in my view, but expecting work outside of normal business hours is definitely selecting against candidates who are not unmarried and childless. Schools, preschools, and day care businesses operate based on normal business hours. Generally, if your spouse works, you want to come and go at the same times of day. You don't want to live the rest of your life in cubicle farms.
Maybe the tech industry is not racist. Maybe there is just one particular demographic that just cares less about exploitative work arrangements. Maybe that demographic has historically had less reason to distrust authority. Maybe the quality selected for is not age, race, or sex, but sheer naivete.
The education system is part of the tech industry as a whole, and, of course, there's a feedback loop at play that reinforces the tech stereotypes over time. So even if no one person in the tech industry is consciously trying to discriminate against women, the industry in aggregate can play that role. I would argue that the numbers alone demonstrate a gender bias.
The women in tech who I've talked with about this issue certainly don't feel that they have an unfair advantage, and I've heard some pretty interesting criticisms. A couple examples:
- senior technical talent hiring practices are typically defined by men (since the industry is predominantly male), so the selection criteria for career progression is likely to have male-oriented biases.
- it's more socially awkward for a man and woman to get together for a drink after work in a career capacity, so it's correspondingly harder for a woman to share in the bonding experiences that build career-long relationships. (And no, I'm not just referring to our common "brogrammer" after-work partying stereotype -- the ritual of meeting up after work for a drink is probably as old as work itself.)
the author of the article pretty much calls everyone in tech a racists and sexist
I certainly didn't get that from the article. The article quoted someone who thinks that Silicon Valley investment scene is an "old boy's club", and says:
"The tech industry is notoriously ageist. It often shuns women, minorities, and others who don’t fit into the rising “brogrammer” culture."
I don't really buy into the last clause of that sentence, but IMO the percentage of women and certain minorities speaks for itself. I also believe (hope?) that, as I mentioned above, this bias can be attributed to unconscious bias in the industry as a whole, rather than overt -isms. I think that this is something we can help to fix, but a critical first step is to acknowledge that the diversity profile of the tech industry doesn't match up to the population as a whole, and that at a certain point that leads to practices that are self-reinforcing.