Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

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.

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.

> you can still maintain the discrimination

But what is their incentive to "maintain" discrimination. Even under a charitable interpretation, it seems to imply there is a group at the top which actively hates women and wants to suppress their influence? Maybe there is, Google is pretty scary and is in bed with the government https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782..., but I think it would be good to dissect that statement to see what it points to.

You do not need to hate women to be sexist. You do not even need to be aware that you have biases for those biases to be affecting how you act.

Check out the literature on "implicit bias". While there are problems in some social sciences, this particular research area has a lot of high-quality reproduced studies. Of course, it is only the start of the conversation and there are many caveats, but I believe it will address your comment.