we have no idea what happened. it's possible the 3 men were sitting together talking while the woman boss was sitting farther away. it seems that whenever a mistake happens it must be because of your sex or race and nothing else.
But this sounds like a real mistake someone can make... how do you know which groups of people are together? If they're spaced apart enough it's not hard mistake them as separate groups. Not to mention you don't know what the assistant's tone was or whether or not the author was misinterpreting the situation. Honestly, that blog post feels like bait for a forced debate based on an anecdote with little to no information/evidence of anything.
I find it illuminating that there are comments alternately explaining that his happened because she wasn't standing close enough to the group or that it's just simple Bayesian probability that black women aren't important.
I'd really like to see a debate between these two groups. Like both agree that nothing wrong happened, but who has the best explanation why it's all ok?
But this woman's career was not held back. She was the head of the department. So, if this story is evidence of anything at all, it's that this sort of bias doesn't matter. That being said, I don't think this story is evidence of much of anything.
To forgive implies that someone is sorry for what happened. Non-apologies as mentioned in the post tends to mean that they aren't actually sorry, and just don't want to deal with the discomfort of being called out.
If nothing else, because people who screw up should have better manners.
You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off, and you immediately do and say "sorry" -> I forgive, forget, move on.
You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off and you delay, express surprise, finally do, and then explain, at length, that you didn't notice, aren't that heavy, meant nothing by it, but you're sorry if I'm offended (and it's the third time it's happened this year) -> kind of a big deal, because I'm getting very tired of this cp.
I don't really agree with your sentiment at all, but I think that the discussion that can come from it is really valuable, so I hope your comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion.
If you trained a neural network to recognize "high powered tech executives", it will likely start picking up on features associated with 30 to 40 year old (mostly white) males wearing sweaters or "business casual" attire. It probably would report a low value if you showed it a minority female. (Google "tech executive" on Google images to test this out.)
Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future.
There are only two solutions:
(1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect it.
(2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases.
Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.
While micro-aggressions suck, I agree with your sentiment. This is the problem with PC, it is treating the symptoms without addressing the fundamental causes.
The people who run tech companies are mostly similar demographics. They make a lot of short-sighted decisions.
Make your leadership pool more diverse in gender, race, and (more importantly) life experience and things will change. An artificial solution is only going to be top down, engineered by the very execs who have limited experience.
The bigger problem is the self-perpetuating vortex that is Silicon Valley. Mix it up.
Couldn't agree more. The solution isn't to make this assistant apologize profusely. It's a reasonable mistake to make. Women of color are extraordinarily unusual in this position.
This isn't an instance of bias. It's a mistake based on simple base rate prevalence. No harm was done here and no harm was meant. Now, that doesn't mean that all forms of what people have taken to calling 'microaggressions' are harmless - some of them are harmful. This is just pretty clearly not one of them.
I think treating (1) by lowering requirements is bad because now people will stereotype that that person got there on ez mode.
(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That might get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?
The whole point is changing it in such a way that everyone "wants" to do these in-demand jobs. Chinese students aren't unhappy with their job choices.
Edit:
I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.
We could similarly restrict all food production to rice and people would get used to it and even enjoy it, but that doesn't mean it is a solution towards a more diverse diet.
You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?
Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because
a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone
We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc
B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.
Option 3 is to re-train. Every time we see a woman of color think to ourselves "She's probably a powerful executive" and every time we see a white man in a suit we think "he's probably an executive assistant." Like a visualization technique.
The reality is that we're all biased but we're also malleable. If we understand how our biases manifest, we also understand that biases are pretty resilient to reason and goals. They need to be re-trained or manipulated (like through priming and other bias inducing mechanisms.)
This is what bothers me about unconscious bias training. They show that everyone is biased. But the solutions fail to acknowledge that the system can't change just through positive intention.
Standing out of the crowd has benefits and drawbacks.
You might not expect the black female to be a "high powered tech executive", but on the other hand, when you see the whole list of "high powered tech executives", you will probably remember the black female better than any random 40 year old white male.
I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We had person Y from that course and they were bad".
It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on the color characteristic and project from sparse examples.
I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone could come up with a solution.
I believe there's nothing wrong with coming up with biases based on evaluating a person's technical abilities for a job role. (Isn't that the whole point?) You know the part where the requirements mention a skill set you should possess. If a person with a particular skill set/course wasn't able to perform as expected, then maybe that is not what you want.
However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really solve this. Or so I believe.
And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill set to perform the job properly.
This incident looks horrible, and it's sad how terrifically disrespectful the administrative assistant was towards the department head.
Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well:
>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.
There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)?
Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background.
What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men?
Are you being sarcastic? I repeated multiple times in my analysis that I think there most definitely is a problem with the tech industry, and I don't believe the answer is "women just don't like computers".
I think the question I'm positing here is very reasonable, given how other fields have been able to improve their situations dramatically. I don't know the answer to my question, that's why I asked it.
The answer is the legal field at some point acknowledged a problem and made an effort to recruit more women. The tech field is still mostly wrestling with no problem here status.
Objectively, if it's true that women need to perform much better than men to get promoted, then being a woman who struggles with the material in a male dominated field would suck, and maybe you did her a favor.
I think the cycle can be broken if current practitioners can find young women who are willing to work extra hard (harder than their male peers) and give those women as much tutoring as they can handle (I certainly can't study for a full day, and I guess this plan requires studying overtime) so they can ace tests/projects, advance in the industry, change norms and people's expectations from women and make it easier for the next generation of women. There will be accusations of favoritism but as long as it's clear that they succeed because they worked hard and did the work themselves and not because they were helped, the accusations shouldn't get anywhere. Basically, I'm against favoring women over more qualified (or even as-qualified) men, but helping women become the most qualified candidate is definitely fair game.
I don't think this kind of thing is isolated to the tech industry. Edith Cooper at Goldman Sachs shared this recently:
"I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter. I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs.
I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn). I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1]
Sorry, but why are we immediately assuming this wasn't an accident/unintentional? Did I miss the part where the admin assistant took off their KKK costume and stick-on Adolf Hitler moustache before shaking everyone's hand?
Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive?
I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand, apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her much.
38 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadThe post is about bias, and people are guilty of their own biases in perspective.
I'd really like to see a debate between these two groups. Like both agree that nothing wrong happened, but who has the best explanation why it's all ok?
If it happens all of the time (and this type of thing seems to) then that makes it a big deal.
You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off, and you immediately do and say "sorry" -> I forgive, forget, move on.
You step on my foot, I notice and ask you to get off and you delay, express surprise, finally do, and then explain, at length, that you didn't notice, aren't that heavy, meant nothing by it, but you're sorry if I'm offended (and it's the third time it's happened this year) -> kind of a big deal, because I'm getting very tired of this cp.
Human beings are really advanced neural networks, trained on years of sensory data, along with lots of bias factors. This is why things like sexism and racism are often self-perpetuating. People aren't used to commonly seeing a female, minority woman in a high position, so they don't expect it, and therefore that expectation becomes part of their bias in the future.
There are only two solutions:
(1) Do things to create more minority female tech executives, so we all expect it.
(2) Do things to make people better at hiding their biases.
Obviously, we need to do both if this situation is ever going to change.
Make your leadership pool more diverse in gender, race, and (more importantly) life experience and things will change. An artificial solution is only going to be top down, engineered by the very execs who have limited experience.
The bigger problem is the self-perpetuating vortex that is Silicon Valley. Mix it up.
This isn't an instance of bias. It's a mistake based on simple base rate prevalence. No harm was done here and no harm was meant. Now, that doesn't mean that all forms of what people have taken to calling 'microaggressions' are harmless - some of them are harmful. This is just pretty clearly not one of them.
(2) is bad because people will inevitably make accidental genuine mistakes and it perpetuates the whole hostile PC culture where people are afraid of talking about anything and everything. If there is no social punishment then enforcing is impossible.
I think the solution is in changing culture. I.E.: make it like China or former USSR. People got jobs in in-demand fields, not in what they were interested in.
Most qualified people rose to the top primarily based on aptitude alone. That way there would be no need for thought police.
That sounds like a totalitarian state that nobody wants to live in. That might get rid of the thought police but you then you have job police, yeah?
Edit:
I think the easiest way is to simply not force people to self-answer an abstract question of "What are you interested in?" First of all, it's almost impossible to answer it correctly because there is no way you can sample all possible career paths. Secondly, if they don't ask themselves this question, they'll find interesting things in the general job area they're given.
You are fundamentally talking about increasing diversity in one area by reducing choice in another. Isn't that antithetical?
edit: your edit makes more sense :)
Regarding food vs jobs, I think it's not a very good analogy because
a) almost every job has a lot to it that could be interesting for anyone
We are not limiting all jobs to "Wordpress site template maintainer for small e-commerce sites" or "MySQL DB engineer specializing in scaling and indexing databases with mostly JSON-based tables". If you are a front-end web dev, you could choose to end up specializing in front-end driven analytics or SVG drawing or something higher-level like d3 plotting or anything in HTML5 games or photoshop-to-code conversion or migrate to photoshop-based design etc etc
B) The goal is not to maximize diversity of food or diversity of jobs. I am not implying avoiding increasing specialization.
The reality is that we're all biased but we're also malleable. If we understand how our biases manifest, we also understand that biases are pretty resilient to reason and goals. They need to be re-trained or manipulated (like through priming and other bias inducing mechanisms.)
This is what bothers me about unconscious bias training. They show that everyone is biased. But the solutions fail to acknowledge that the system can't change just through positive intention.
You might not expect the black female to be a "high powered tech executive", but on the other hand, when you see the whole list of "high powered tech executives", you will probably remember the black female better than any random 40 year old white male.
I'm hiring heavily atm, and one obvious thing I look at is what degree the person has. I've noticed that I've started to go "oh, they did that course. We had person Y from that course and they were bad".
It's such a subconscious thing on such a non-obvious attribution that it made me even more aware of how people make racist assumptions because they group on the color characteristic and project from sparse examples.
I don't know what the solution is, but it would be a good thing if someone could come up with a solution.
However, IMHO, it becomes discriminatory when you base all of your arguments off of one data point. A class can be made up of a lot of different type of people with differing views on how to solve problems etc. When I start to drift away in such situations, I tend to look for more data points. A deeper analysis into what culmination of factors might have caused this, can really solve this. Or so I believe.
And to be fair, you did hire the other person with the same course. So, maybe it is a fit. Just that the other person may have lacked other abilities/skill set to perform the job properly.
Events like this often serve (understandably) as explanations for why the tech industry's gender ratio is so heavily skewed. The data, while empirical, seems to be there as well:
>Kieran Snyder interviewed over 700 women who left the tech industry. Almost all of them said that they enjoyed the work itself. It was the work environment that drove them out. And six out of seven have no plans to return.
There's one thing I am genuinely confused by though. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why a woman might want to leave an industry after being treated this way. However, _why is it_ that the tech industry _specifically_ has not evolved like other high paying, high knowledge, and high value fields (principally: medicine and law)?
Medicine and law were both fields traditionally dominated by old white men, that's a simple fact. Another fact is that gender discrimination, harassment, and all of the issues attributed to the tech industry today were also rampant in medicine and law while the gender ratio was so skewed. Yet for some reason, these fields were able to move towards parity, and the gender issues they experience now are a shadow of what they were previously. By gender, roughly equal numbers of women enter medicine as men, for example [0]. If I were to walk into the office of a doctor or lawyer today, I honestly would not be surprised to see a man or woman of any race/background.
What is it about technology, or the tech industry, that is not like medicine or law? While incidents of harassment and discrimination are terrible and deserve the strongest condemnation, I don't think they are the answer for our gender ratio problem. Why is it that while women outnumber men (a lead which grows every year) in graduation rates from colleges, the ratio of CS students in those same colleges is extraordinarily skewed towards men?
[0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-graduate...
I think the question I'm positing here is very reasonable, given how other fields have been able to improve their situations dramatically. I don't know the answer to my question, that's why I asked it.
In college one of my classmates was not understanding the material, and I asked her if she thought she really wanted to do CS...
The thing is, a bunch of other guys were also not understanding the material, and I didn't say anything to them.
I still think about it from time to time, and wherever you are, I'm sorry M. I don't think I can fix that, but I can speak up now.
I think the cycle can be broken if current practitioners can find young women who are willing to work extra hard (harder than their male peers) and give those women as much tutoring as they can handle (I certainly can't study for a full day, and I guess this plan requires studying overtime) so they can ace tests/projects, advance in the industry, change norms and people's expectations from women and make it easier for the next generation of women. There will be accusations of favoritism but as long as it's clear that they succeed because they worked hard and did the work themselves and not because they were helped, the accusations shouldn't get anywhere. Basically, I'm against favoring women over more qualified (or even as-qualified) men, but helping women become the most qualified candidate is definitely fair game.
"I am a black woman, a mother, a wife and a professional. I am the daughter of a dentist and a sister to four siblings. I’m a runner, a golfer and a knitter. I graduated from an Ivy League school and earned an MBA. I’ve spent the past 30 years working on Wall Street, half of those as a partner at Goldman Sachs.
I am frequently asked “what country are you from” (I grew up in Brooklyn). I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to “run” the meeting) and have been mistaken as the coat check receptionist at my son’s school event. And, on the flip side, it’s also been suggested to me that I’m not “black black”because of the success I have had, or even where I live ... People frequently assumed I was the most junior person in the room, when in fact, I was the most senior. I constantly needed to share my credentials when nobody else had to share theirs ..." [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/edith-cooper-goldman-sachs-on...
Have we really reached the point as a society where we immediately assume every social faux-pas has some sort of vague racist/sexist motive?
I'd be totally on board if this was something that genuinely damaged or demeaned this woman, but it clearly isn't - someone didn't shake her hand, apologised, then presumably shook her hand. If that's going to cause her to fall to pieces and give up on life as the author and most people commenting here would have us believe, then this blog post isn't really going to help her much.