Ad men sacked to improve gender pay gap win sex discrimination claim
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
How did HR get so much power? Most of them are barely out of University and at least at my org are a homogenous group of white women.
It's simple group psychology that an extremely uniform group is likely heavily biasing itself for more of that extremely uniform demographic. If that extremely uniform group is of one specific race, gender, or sexuality, that might be a yellow (or red) flag.
Mostly by citing requirements for legal compliance, followed by minimizing liability and'industry standards'.
Technologists would be wise to use these tools with more skill.
Fascinating! I have not yet had a chance to hear it admitted openly. Usually the implication is that the appropriate skills and experience can be found in any demographic (e.g.: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1400665677501853696)
I also used to be on several hiring committees and it was very obvious that HR essentially forced non-white-males to be hired in some instances.
This is not some "white men have it hard" diatribe. Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall. But at least in tech they seem to have swung so far the other way that there is some discrimination against white males. I'm not mad, we all have to play the hands we're dealt and honestly being born a white male is about as good as it gets with regards to demographics. Just sharing my anecdotes.
Privilege is a word loaded with connotations about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
White privilege isn't about being upper class because you're white. It's about the advantages a white person has over non-white people of the same station.
A white person in a poor neighborhood is on the whole more likely to be able to pull "themselves" out of poverty, because, the systems and power structures in place have white people in power, or have systems that are fair on their face, but still lead to higher white hire rates or social mobility.
Nobody is disputing that some white people have it bad, they're simply pointing out that all else about your social status being equal, being white provides tremendous advantage over being non-white.
Also, it is extremely frustrating that people quickly start to include race when the discussion is about gender. As I said racial inequality is an entirely different thing from gender inequality. Police shoots black people more, white people get paid more. There, white privilege! But, Police shoots men more, men get paid more. Who is privileged? See the difference? Most of the problems black people face are also problems men face more than women, so you can't talk about those two as if they were the same.
s/white/male/g and the point largely still stands with mildly adjusted examples.
I'd argue overall it is on the whole easier to be a man in society than a woman for similar reasons (i.e. men have been in charge of power structures for longer and entrenched assumptions abound).
I hadn't thought about the perspective that men are more often killed by police than by women, and probably for similar reasons (i.e. subconsciously viewing men as more dangerous than women), but by and large as a man I don't fear getting shot by police on a traffic stop.
It could definitely be harder to break into a traditionally female field, as an example, though for sure.
Overall I feel the "male privilege" would be more pronounced than any "female privilege", though.
This is actually what intersectionality describes: we each have our own unique sets of advantages and disadvantages through the lenses of our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
In the vast majority of cases a straight white male is going to have the fewest disadvantages and most advantages in western society, because it's been designed for centuries around the straight white male as the power-wielder.
Successful products that will work for diverse people need diverse engineers to build them. Hiring only "the best" leads to hiring mostly only people from the largest majority group, because that's how statistics work. And that leads to ridiculous product fails like facial recognition that doesn't recognize non-white faces.
"Go work, go broke" stands true.
Time and again I witnessed girls in my school classes in the 70s and 80s treated disrespectfully and condescendingly by teachers so boys of my age were exposed to these attitudes and I'm sure some were influenced by them.
I have two daughters and when they were about 9 and 10 my brother bought them a model combustion engine. When we told one of my uncles he snorted and said "Hasn't he noticed they're Girls!". That was about 8 years ago, and that uncle of mine has 3 daughters. Of course my kids loved the model and wouldn't let anyone else touch it, they spent hours working on it.
I'm pretty confident the current climate is much, much more open to women choosing their own path but it's still not perfect. There are still a lot of men in positions of power or influence with attitudes they learned many decades ago. Actually a fair few women too, many older ladies have regrettably regressive attitudes. They're there in families and work places influencing expectations, promoting biased thinking and giving boy's toys to boys and girl's toys to girls.
Women tend not to reach university in tech, so the blame would be on parents anyway.
> but it's still not perfect
What would "perfect" look like?
I do think time will solve this if there are indeed that many women interested in tech. There is still a possibility that those women are exceptions though. And this "positive" discrimination sets everyone back.
Don't penalize other men because you are unsure about educating your daughters. It is natural to be defensive here, but that is for you to deconstruct.
>What would "perfect" look like?
The best we can hope for would probably be enough awareness of positive role models, and access to encouragement and opportunities, to effectively counteract the inevitable discouragements and adverse influences. Not perfect but it might have to do.
I'm not at all for positive discrimination, I hope I didn't give that impression. I don't think it's necessary. I do believe white men still enjoy a lot of advantages, or at least face a lot fewer obstacles, than even white girls and that's based on personal observation and experience. I was replying to a comment that white girls do not have fewer privileges than white men, and I think that's thoroughly misconceived. It's better than it was, but misogynistic attitudes are still very much out there.
- Wow, example that came up just today. My wife and I were discussing plans for a renovation to our house with an architect. They guy pretty much refused to look at my wife and addresses his answers to me every time, even when she was asking the questions he checked it with me before answering. It was weird.
Being guided to a male or female path isn't a privilege though. Boys gets even more pushback than that if they try to enter female dominated fields. There is a male privilege in tech, sure, but this article is about the advertisement segment which is far from male dominated. So what we see here is a bunch of women pushing out men using their female privilege in that industry.
Holy fucking shit I cannot stand the echo chamber that is tech sometimes. Get out of your bubble and try to experience the world outside of reading about it on HN. There are worse things than being denied a job because of bullshit HR policies.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
This means your example of white privilege is invalid. Do you have any other?
The sign of privilege is being unaware of it, because you're not regularly confronted with adversity. What is the worst adversity you've faced in your life as a white male? Mine is maybe being denied a lucrative job. Boo fucking hoo for me.
However your original claim was wrong and deserved to be called out. You said:
"When I get pulled over for speeding I don't have to worry about getting shot like black men do."
which is an absolute statement. In fact, you do have to worry about getting shot. I knew perfectly well you'd make a statistical argument in return, and also that it would be irrelevant given the strength of your original claim. There is no "white privilege" that means US police won't shoot you. They will do so if they feel the need, or perhaps even if they don't. The primary determinator of that is nonetheless your own actions, like whether you're armed or on drugs at the time.
But it also doesn't make sense to use this one isolated statistic in the context we're debating. After all, if you want to use getting shot by the police to define your hierarchy of privilege then the poorest European is vastly more privileged than the richest American will ever be, implying that Europeans should never be hired for jobs when an American could be hired instead. That wouldn't make sense.
Now, none of the above will land home with you. But I want you to consider something else. When you try to justify racism and sexism against white men like you are doing above, you're not just slapping yourself in the face, you're slapping the rest of us too. You're justifying us being denied jobs, including those of us who don't even live in America, because this ridiculous self-harming ideology gets exported via American HR departments, management and cultural production to the rest of the world. That's how you end up with people marching in London saying "hands up don't shoot" even though British police are almost always unarmed and the UK doesn't have a problem with police shootings.
By insisting that arbitrarily chosen differences in outcome with deep and complex socioeconomic causes are all reduced to "white man bad" you are deservedly opening yourself to harsh criticism, not merely because it's a racist and sexist viewpoint, but also because it directly harms the lives of those around you. By all means, stop applying for lucrative jobs if you feel so guilty about existing, but for goodness sake don't insist that those same harms befall the innocent.
> When you try to justify racism and sexism against white men like you are doing above, you're not just slapping yourself in the face, you're slapping the rest of us too.
Yes, I did choose an absolute example. You're not wrong about that. The part you're missing is that you sound tone-deaf. To quote a famous movie: "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole." Are you the guy that says "all lives matter" instead of "black lives matter?" It's like you don't get the bigger picture. Yes, the problems you point out are real - they're also trivial. And if you want to make a mountain out of a molehill I can't stop you, but you come across as an entitled jerk.
The point isn't white men are bad. The point is white men are clueless that others are suffering more than them and are only focusing on themselves when others need help more than they do. It's selfish. It's similar to billionaires complaining about taxes. You also conveniently avoided my question - what's the greatest adversity you've faced as a white male? Because that's the perspective you're lacking.
FWIW I actually appreciate you writing a long response. Anyway, agree to disagree.
But even if we just focus on the USA, the situation and causes of some parts of the black population's outcomes are so complex that reducing it to "white people don't care enough" just doesn't make sense. White men don't make black men get divorced at a much higher rate, to pick just one example.
Greatest adversity I've faced "as a white male"? I ignored the question because it makes no sense to me. I don't know what it means, grammatically. I've faced all sorts of adversities and was a white male whilst those things were happening but that's not what you mean is it? How about being incorrectly accused of being racist? That's happened a couple of times. Whether that happened "as a white male" I cannot say, but I really doubt it would have happened had I been black. But then maybe it would have been. Who can know?
Only if you limit privilege to negative reward (suffer less discrimination and exclusion) instead of positive reward (getting actual benefits) and as you say, the tide is turning. Positive reward is still mainly tied to class and generational wealth.
> I'm not mad
Do you think it makes sense for a for-profit enterprise to have hiring policies based on the political sensibilities of the staff, let alone mainly those of SJW middle class white women?
I would recommend to scrap that noble suffering story because it just isn't really true. No company will give you anything.
You aren't privileged, you are discriminated against.
Fast forward a few years, and when looking at internal transfers you'll hear "don't worry, he's a white/asian male, so you know he's here on merit". First time I heard that I was shocked.
> Obviously as a white male I experience incredible privilege overall.
Go tell that to the trailer trash white kid who last saw his mother with a needle in her arm when he was a teenager, never met his father and managed to somehow make it in tech thanks to Community College and scholarships.
This is outright illegal here, so I sent anonymously a screenshot of that to our government. The person that replied was a female judge, that said what the company is doing is fixing historical distortions so it is fine.
Thing is... it is still illegal (in fact companies here that really need a specific gender, for example when hiring female airport security so they can deal with female passengers and whatnot, companies go through crazy legal hoops, because our gender discrimination law has no exception, no loophole, nothing).
Responsiveness to cultural norms is in part a function of courts having to maintain some minimum level of perceived legitimacy with the public.
To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law.
Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.
The way I interpreted your post was that you were saying a law should just be changed by the whims of the populace without a proper process in place.
But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.
Laws should not impose morality.
We often pretend they are different, or draw a distinction between behaviour constrained by laws and that constrained by personal morals, however the question of what laws to create and how they should be formulated are moral questions.
Although actually neither the right or left hand side rules are arbitrary. They were each intended to better serve a moral objective.
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Why-do-the-British-dri...
I'm not sure we need to reduce all norms to 'morality'. But if we think of morality in a really broad way, like 'humans (or other sapient creatures) seeking to satisfy preferences or impose additional structure on nature or society for their own purposes in a universalizable/principled (i.e., fair) way', then definitely: laws should always be motivated in some way by morality.
That's different from the claim (which I'm not saying you've made) that this relationship means that laws should always simply 'encode' moral norms in some direct sense, which imo is a common (and mistaken) simplification.
But yeah I think we're on the same page.
Look at what happened with James Damore. His memo didn't contain the incriminating ideas or language the people who wanted to get rid of him would have needed, so they simply invented it, claiming his memo said women programmers are worse at it than men when it said no such thing. Media blanketed the news with this false claim even though the document was public and anyone could download and read it for themselves. The only news outlet I saw cover this story correctly was Breitbart, who also ended up as a result with lots of leaked screenshots from disaffected Googlers talking about internal racial and sexual discrimination against "white" (+Asian) men.
That's...not how at-will employment works.
Literally millions of men have died to save women and children from Titanic times, or in wars, if not still (just look at all the construction, electrical, mining jobs where there's no regard for "diversity" or lost lives)... Can we fix that "historical distortion" too? :eyeroll:
I hope this comes up when she's up for reelection.
Worst thing is, the CEO wasn't even a culture warrior. He just seemed to be afraid of board members and/or radicalized employees who were.
The thing to understand is, these people aren't ignorant of the law. It's plebs like us who are ignorant of the law. The people doing this are well aware that their ideological allies have taken over most government institutions, including the ones that supposedly protect people from this, and are not interested in enforcement of the law unless it elevates women and minorities. The law is not what's written, it's what's enforced. These ad guys are a rare exception where the law was enforced as written, but even then, they literally had a written presentation that said the female CEO planned to "obliterate" white men from their team and were fired two days after objecting to it, yet it took so long to get a judgement that their former employer technically no longer exists. Three years for them to get any kind of justice, and other men who were sacked as part of their "diversity" drive ended up settling out of court.
That's the penalty for cases where people admit to what they're doing in writing, and present it to the whole firm. Good luck getting any justice in cases where it's less obvious than that.
HR only appears to have power because they are going along with the prevailing political trends [1,2,3]. If they tried to oppose them, or go in the opposite direction, you would quickly see how empty their power is.
[1] White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it - https://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/white_men_must_be_stopped_t...
[2] the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” - https://www.city-journal.org/lockheed-martins-woke-industria...
[3] Another slide suggests “try to be less white” with tips including “be less oppressive,” “listen,” “believe” and “break with white solidarity.” - https://nypost.com/2021/02/23/coca-cola-diversity-training-u...
I've always wondered that, too. I thought "The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions" had some interesting inputs on this question (https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3322830/Dobbin_S...).
They become more pronounced the bigger the employer because the reality gets lost in translation.
Once you are on the job though you quickly realize what a terrible job it is and after a time leverage it into something else.
Black women in the US are what about 7% of the population?
So most likely any random HR interview is with a younger white woman.
Well, a similar line of reasoning is sometimes used to explain why there are more men in coding roles than women and it's widely criticized as inadequate at best.
Non-technical leadership expects them to be in charge of hiring.
If HR has the final say in hiring for technical position, your company has serious issues and I wouldn't hold onto it's stock.
It is, however, a clear sign that your engineering-based company is NOT long for this world. Time to find a new employer.
It's a tough ask for businesses - they either replace their existing, presumably qualified staff due to their inherent characteristics being unfashionable, or they create new positions and fill those with people with other characteristics for purely statistical purposes.
Doing the latter exacerbates the "fifth column" situation that in turn increases the chance of situations like that in the OP.
Seems like a poisoned chalice from the first sip, but I may be biased due to my inherent characteristics.
Those are not the only options.
For example, here's another thing they could do: increase pay for positions in which women are over-represented.
I'm not advocating for or against that. But let's not pretend that all solutions require changing the structure or composition of the team.
The perversion here is the assumption that the next minority you hire is a complete stand-in for the implicitly-assumed minority who missed out before, leading to the existing imbalance.
It's like fighting fire with flood rains, and not recognizing the difference between a forest-fire and camp-fire.
You can’t fix sexism with just a hiring policy but you can absolutely fix the effect of your company having no diversity with one.
I’ve heard people argue that such action provides a spark for further change. Like brings a new perspective to a group that cascades into more positive effects.
It comes to mind the idea of “black children needing black superhero role models” or similarly for girls or other groups. I wonder to what extent this merely reinforces a racist ideology. Why can’t the role model be of any colour?
How deep is it, truly, that the tribal behaviour based on group similarities, are ingrained in humans.
Interestingly, amongst the well educated, or the wealthy, a different selection criteria is established.
Because that's just not how it works. You're assuming that the important thing is the role model's race, gender, sexuality. It's about having a character that is like you. How they look is just one small part of it. If you have a movie script where the main character is a white suburbanite man and once it's fully written make his skin color black it doesn't suddenly become good representation.
So I don't buy "this is not how it works".
It's still reasonable to wonder why the vast majority of role models are white men, and think about redressing that a bit. The problem is we sometimes get dreck like the Batwoman TV show or Captain Marvel where diversity became a creative shackle; but then we also can get the Wonder Woman* and Black Panther movies where diversity was realised as a creative opportunity. The important thing is to maintain artistic integrity.
* And yes I'm aware of the irony given the origins of the character.
Racism does bad things. So then we try and fix the negative effects of racism. We practice a new form of "good racism." But it's still racism. And all it does is create more racism, despite our good intentions to roll back the negative effects of racism.
We do the same with sexism. And agism. And any other form of differentiationism.
And those that benefit not from one state or the other, but rather the flux of transitioning from one state to the other, flock to, and encourage the correctionism.
You are right. We cannot fight racism and sexism with more racism and sexism.
As a trans woman I think I have a unique perspective here, having literally seen both sides of this issue. I would have agreed with you at one point in my life, but I see things differently now.
It kind of bothers me to see straight cis white men get all worked up about things like this. You think this is unfair? You have absolutely no concept of what it's like to be a marginalized minority. They've had so much handed to them their whole lives, yet the second they have to deal with the kind of thing that minorities have to deal with they make a big fuss.
The world is unfair, deal with. We all have to every damn day and no one listens to us when we cry about it.
Also, grouping "cis" in with all that is nonsense. Esp trans women, who seem to think they don't have all the benefits of being male. (Because biology is, in fact, real)
The statement is that “women make x¢ on the dollar that men make.
You can “explain away” much of the gender gap by accounting for all sorts of things like career choices, aggressiveness of switching jobs and seeking promotions, experience levels, etc.. But that doesn’t make the problem go away or those things not issues unto themselves.
One of the factors you control for is job title. When you only compare people with the same title the wage gap shrinks a bit. For some reason people interpret this as "Great! Not a problem. Moving on." when it completely ignores that as a group women holding lower paying job titles is itself indicative of a problem -- career paths that are dominated by women are seen as less valuable and girls are socially pressured away from more lucrative careers (you know like software engineering where every woman in our field including myself can tell you stories of being the only girl in her class) by parents, academic advisors, the school and workplace culture the fields cultivate and pushed into "softer", "more nurturing", "more creative" career paths compared to boys.
Which it itself a problem for boys because boys who want to go into things like art, music, design, writing, fashion, social work, are mercilessly pressured away from it where girls are more likely to be encouraged. The patriarchy hurts everyone folks.
In general men are more likely to value social status because a man with a high career title is more attractive to women, whereas a woman's title does not increase her ability to find a husband.
In fact, women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves. Is it any surprise men want to climb the ladder more.
Just look at the charts. Honestly, failure to understand this simple aspect of human nature is the reason for a lot of social ill, ranging from 'incels' to the disastrous egalitarian social policies.
The second study (with a smaller but believed to be more representative sample) asked slightly different questions, and concluded that there was some statistical significance on "Makes at least as much money as I do" and "Has a successful career," which don't by themselves support the hypothesis that "women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves" (though I can agree that it waggles its eyebrows and points in that direction; perhaps suggesting follow-up studies).
Most people across the world wouldn't raise their eyebrows, since such claims are pretty much universal throughout most civilizations.
The [citation needed] for that is the stuff of multiple lifetimes of research.
(For example, when the citation was provided on the claim a few layers upthread, it indeed was revealed to be wanting, as the bulk of its data relied on Internet polls).
If you follow your thought, you would need to discriminate against the privileged group you have identified. This will cause a rift between groups that get penalized and those that get advantages, obviously.
Basic toxic middle management strategy to cause strive among your minions so that they don't pester you. This is what you are mirroring 1:1.
Fake women (in tech) are pushing other women to the real (coding) fronts... why is that?
Are guys doing the same?
Whither the NBA?
How about modeling agencies?
Hollywood is overwhelmingly white.
There are a lot of troublesome parts. But the sooner we start, the sooner we get to better equality.
Odds are good that the outliers will cluster in your most over represented group, this group will then have a pay discrepancy with other groups.
A company can correct this by banning the practices that lead to outliers, ensuring outliers are evenly represented across groups, and by eliminating those with outlier compensation. In firms that lock in compensation for long periods such as through partnerships or equity comp ensuring equal distribution of outlier compensation can be complex and difficult.
director kept Mad Men reputation of shitty management... pay gap is a reflection of shitty management that is causing bad hiring practice.