←back to thread

219 points thisisit | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.234s | source
Show context
lostmsu ◴[] No.16126641[source]
There's one important datapoint in this article: "The Bamboo Ceiling".

When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive promotions.

Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.

This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially discriminated group of people.

replies(5): >>16126781 #>>16126794 #>>16127061 #>>16127979 #>>16138507 #
geofft ◴[] No.16126794[source]
This is the allegation of the Ellis, Pease, and Wisuri lawsuit against Google - that Google does okay at hiring women, but slots them into lower positions and gives them fewer promotions than men. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-... The NYT's report on the leaked #talkpay spreadsheet seems to show that pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...

The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level playing field.

replies(3): >>16126943 #>>16127042 #>>16127247 #
ThrustVectoring ◴[] No.16127042[source]
Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate against men to fix it?
replies(4): >>16127199 #>>16127225 #>>16127243 #>>16127479 #
friedButter ◴[] No.16127225[source]
The general opinion online is that women being promoted slower than men is a problem, and in high paying white collar professions, women being underrepresented at any level is a "bad thing". Make sure you dont use your real identity to question that, you might get blacklisted from ever working at Google :P
replies(1): >>16127297 #
krastanov ◴[] No.16127297[source]
I am not certain whether this is sarcasm or whether you are just a troll trying to provoke a reaction, but in case it is neither: How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation?

You can try strawman arguments like "they are not equally qualified" or "reverse sexism" or "they are doing it to themselves by not negotiating", but a cursory look at any reproducible social sciences review disproves those (laziness to not use google or google scholar is a tiresome excuse).

replies(3): >>16127340 #>>16127492 #>>16127833 #
1. friedButter ◴[] No.16127340[source]
>How is it not bad that when two people are equally qualified but one of them is treated poorly based on gender/ethnicity/orientation?

"equally qualified" is not an objective, measurable quantity, which is the whole cause of the issue... If dev productivity could be unambiguously measured and ranked, the issue of late promotions,etc would never have been raised.

These are fuzzy metrics, and what you consider poor\unfiar treatment, I may consider fair (and vice versa)..