Why would a parent knowingly disown and put their gay child out on the street, risking criminal charges and effectively wasting however many years of effort they put into raising their child? I don't know, but ~40% of the homeless American youth population identifies as LGBT. (Source: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/americas-shame-4...) Happened to a friend of mine as a teenager. People are not always rational actors. Firing someone over their sexual orientation is extremely rare, but not unheard of. (A handful of anecdotes: http://www.advocate.com/year-review/2013/12/18/meet-people-f...)
Luckily though, my former boss had similar opinions to you and I was completely fine. I've since moved to California and established myself as a solid developer, so it's not even a serious issue on my radar anymore. I would just switch to a better workplace now if I was concerned.
I'm still processing your upstream comments, but anecdotally, when I got to spend about a year on the street, Imma gonna to say that in central Texas, there were a lot of people with mental challenges (which is sad) and a whole lot more with drug issues (which is a different problem, and separately sad), and either of them would have swung any way you asked for their next hit. I am not going to claim that this experience is representative in any way.
Maybe the methodology was incorrect or the sample unrepresentative, my only personal experience with it is the one friend.
I'm probably so far right as to make Rush Limbaugh un-listenable (to me) because: 1) he's irritating and repetitive, and 2) too far left. :-) (that's kinda/sorta a joke)
But I've gotta say that even though they were outnumbered (80/20?), females made up at least half, if not more, of my top developers in a start up in the late 90s. And from what I understood (I was afraid to ask), half of the female developers were homosexual. The point is: I would have had to have been insane to fire them. It would have knocked $20M (maybe $200M) off my market cap the very same day!
I guess I need to thank you. I have a lot to learn about the way that the world works...
(thank yOU!)
To be fair, the internship and his mentorship were both invaluable to me, I was very lucky to be hired, I don't want to make it sound like a sob story. Firing over sexual orientation isn't really tracked so there's no hard numbers, but IME it is incredibly rare--never happened to me or anyone that i personally know, to the best of my knowledge. My concern could have been (probably was? your anecdote brings N up to 2, anyway) completely irrational, like the above poster was wondering.
Hah. Reminds of the story about the time Eisenhower reportedly tried to root out lesbian members of the armed forces: https://books.google.com/books?id=HO7IKU79zgAC&lpg=PA47&ots=...
In aggregate, upstream, you are saying: 1) No: I am not treating them equally, even if I think I am, and 2) Females have some real needs/concerns that I should care about.
Now that I know that I am inadequate to this task - what should I do to be better?
FWIW, this is personally my ideal working environment. I can't speak for women in general, and I'm not a moral authority, but this is exactly the kind of treatment I want from my coworkers.
>what should I do to be better?
I don't know, honestly. I know that's an inadequate response, but I'm not sure how to appropriately address ingrained societal sexism either. As far as subconscious bias in hiring goes, having rubrics and standardized interviews goes a long way at eliminating it. I'd theorize that standardized metrics for performance reviews would help on that front, too, though I don't think that's been studied.
If you browse the million and one women in tech posts out there you can see people talking about it at length, though I would be wary of taking somebody's opinion as truth just because they're female, and I would be doubly wary of taking a tech blogger at her word vs an actual female engineer. Your personal set of ethics re: equality of opportunity vs outcome also plays into what you "should do" quite a lot. Some suggestions (like formalized hiring rubrics) are completely valid whether or not you believe in equality of opportunity vs outcome, but others (like instituting diversity quotas in hiring) are not.
This blog post is well cited and worth a read, it has a few good suggestions IMO: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...
And this personal anecdote is a positive story, which I think is just good to keep in mind (that not all individual women necessarily feel or have been through the standard negative Women in Tech narrative): http://lea.verou.me/2015/12/my-positive-experience-as-a-woma...