Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

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.

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.

But "reality" does not seem to be sexist, rather our biases and tribalism is sexist (and racist and plenty of other -ist). When high-quality reproducible research has observed phenomena like "stereotype threat" and "implicit bias" it is worthwhile to spend some of our idle time on thinking how to address this unfairness. Even if we do it simply so that we have a wider applicant pool from which to pick high-quality employees.