Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

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(Rereading, I'm not actually sure we disagree, but the tone of the parent post seems to be that I can't change things because people won't change, ...?)

I'm in tech, I work on fixing tech.

> the intentional push for more of any specific demographic seems strange to me I believe the skewed demographics is a reflection of actions and pressures I don't agree with. I think there is pretty-open discrimination and steering of qualified candidates away from the field. (Read the news, sadly.) I'm morally against that. The demographics are an imperfect measure of our progress, but in my opinion it's a useful indicator.

> Shitty people are going to exist everywhere regardless Yeah, and in my workplace I'm against shitty behavior.

Without speaking to whether this is true or not, the parent's argument seems to me to be a kind of "whataboutism".

I don't choose to spend my time working to improve the work environment in other fields, not because I don't care but because I can't do everything.

I'm unsure what you're trying to express in this reply. It seems we do agree in general viewpoint, just perhaps we have different ways of expressing that view. Discrimination definitely happens, but I have yet to see one example of "pretty open discrimination" that hasn't resulted in an all out PR disaster for the org involved ,your "Read the news" statement supports that. If discrimination were a common occurrence it wouldn't be news worthy. If anything it seems that discrimination is beginning to become more frequent in the other direction, where certain demographics who are less qualified are hired over other, more competent, candidates simply for the sake of "diversity". Not to say that's very common either, both are IME exceedingly rare. Glad that you're against shitty behavior, I am as well. Most people are. That doesn't have much to do with my comment though.

My close friend interned at a small embedded devices company and was the only woman besides a part time HR employee. People made comments about the HR employee when she wasn't around.

Is this "pretty open discrimination"? It certainly doesn't make the cut for news. But yes it's very uncomfortable to be the only woman in that situation, people wok look at you for approval for their comments.

People talk about other people all the time - regardless of gender. I would guarantee they talked about male employees as well but your friend likely didn't mentally catalogue those discussions because they weren't relevant to her. Confirmation bias is very real. Maybe this one specific anecdote you're providing really was an example of rampant discrimination - I don't know - either way it certainly isn't indicative of the entirety of the industry. I could share many anecdotes of my own that I could interpret as people discriminating against me specifically - but I doubt that's the case. Instead it's people just being people. This is another issue, I think that these movement often make women and minorities attribute "normal" negative behavior to be explicitly driven by discrimination or x-ism rather than it just being par for the course.

No, discrimination and x-ism is not neccesary to make an environment that women don't want to work at, only sufficient.

People being regular-shitty, combined with context, like making comments about the appearance and intelligence of the only other woman in the office, can create an inhospitable environment that forces women out. Companies that wish to hire and retain women should proactively create a hospitable environment or situations like above will occur.

The bigger thing is that it seems like you don't see return on investment into creating these better environments. Do you feel that diversity initiatives are wholly unnecessary or just poorly designed/targeted?

As I've said multiple times in this comment section - I'm all for creating an accepting and inclusive environment. Diversity initiatives aren't that. I think that explicit diversity initiatives are indicative of a bad work center that can't attract or keep their desired talent without explicitly targeting specific groups. I don't think that these diversity initiatives do anything to really affect change in an organizations culture and are PR stunts to make people feel good. At worst, they're harmful to everyone - including minorities. At best, they're a waste of time and resources. If your organization has actively promoted a toxic culture from it's inception and just now wishes to change things then it has a lot more work to do than a "diversity initiative".

Regardless, my original stance was more aimed at the societal push of "get x demographic into tech". I'm not going to retype my thoughts on that - go read the other comments of mine in this comments section to get a clearer picture.

The “news” can be considered an iceberg situation. What you see regarding discrimination are just the salacious ones that capture headlines. There’s so much day-to-day discrimination and sexism that doesn’t hit the papers. Consider that it took almost a decade if not more before we started hearing problems with Google execs which is one of the most likely companies where such problems are to grab headlines (executives being invoked being the salacious bit to grab headlines).

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