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Is There Still Racism in IT Hiring Practices?
noahz asks: "Today [now three days ago] in the United States marks Martin Luther King Day, remembering the birthday - and legacy - of the great civil rights leader. It's been over 40 years since his march on Washington, back when IT was still in its infancy and was exclusively a white, male field. But, how much progress has been made in the IT world? I recently had a recruiter tell me that I would have no problem finding a job in the current economy - not because I am enthusastic, well-educated and have good experience - but because I am caucasian - 'white'. This particular recruiter insisted that his years experience has led him to this conclusion - but I wonder: what the collective experience of the Slashdot readership has found?"
Funny.. I had a recruiter tell me just the opposite -- that I would have an easier time getting a particular job with a particular company if I was NOT white. So to answer your question - Yes, there is apparently still racism in IT hiring.
Your claim is that the Equal Opportunity Act requires employers to hire less qualified workers if they are minorities, and that this explains why you weren't hired.
These claims are false. Please check for yourself.
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I recently interviewed for an Oracle DBA job where the hiring manager told me we was really hoping to find an Indian (from India, not a Native American) who was an Oracle certified DBA because he could get away with paying $25K per year less salary for someone geeky enough to eat, sleep, drink and live the insides of an Oracle database, work long hours with no chance of actually getting to use all the comp hours he'd accrue, and the Indian wouldn't mind working in a wide open, noisy office area that didn't even even have cubicle dividers between the desks. This was in Dallas, TX.
No joke.
Posting anonymously for a reason...
... unless they are perfect English speaking, tall, men.
... I even asked that outright for both the short and female examples.
I work primarily in the IT contracting arena for the US Federal government, in Washington DC. My employer has everything from network admins to programmers to technical writers. We are extremely diverse (ie, not all white) -- our CEO is a minority. We really don't give a rat's a$$ about your race, creed, etc.
That being said, some of the government managers we try to place people with are extremely racists, biased, etc. My current government manager has rejected candidates for numerous reasons which I consider wrong:
* didn't speak fluent English (he was Russian, but spoke well enough)
* were too short
* were female (my manager is female, very odd!)
And they get away with it. Businesses like my employer are in it purely for the profit, make no mistake. There is a huge amount of cash flowing out of the Federal government right now for contractors, and we can't fill seats fast enough
And none of them were rejected because of their skill sets
So yes, it still happens. Part of the problem is that people are afraid to speak up (myself included).
I would say racism in hiring persists -- subtly -- in academia. My hopeful prediction is that it will disappear in the next ten to twenty years. It is not longer blatant; more a question of the accumulation of subtle factors over the years. (Also, IMO, sexism is a problem as well, and much more obvious -- some think racism is anathama, but have no problem in discriminating against women.)
Racism is much more blatant at the undergraduate and graduate levels of education (i.e., before you go on the academic job market.) In many cases, it is the result of underprepared minority students not being given the attention and training they need to get up to speed after admissions offices have "taken a chance" on students they think are bright but poorly prepared.
Our universities are some of the most successful institutions in the country; it is natural that politicians would like to shift the burden of solving racism at much earlier levels (elementary, grade and high-school education) to the universities.
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At one point in my career I was a team leader for an IT group, both my manager (a woman) and I interviewed a female candidate and both I (for technical reasons) and my mgr (for personality reasons) didn't think that we should hire this candidate.
Our second line manager said we needed to hire this candidate as a matter of diversity (the IT group was 10 guys of varying races).
It wasn't like we couldn't find qualified candidates, it's just that they were all men, and when a woman came along our 2nd line manager forced us to hire her.
This woman didn't know how to reboot a solaris box and later took out one of our larger SANs.
To this day when I interview somebody, I tell my peers/mgmt that if somebody isn't qualified, I won't recommend them 'no matter what our diversity training requires'
"When I was looking for jobs in the early 1990's, I saw a number of posted positions which explicitly stated that only minority applicants would be considered; no white males need apply."
Except under what I imagine are very very limited circumstances, this was illegal under the Equal Opportunity Act. You could have reported those ads (which, forgive me, I very much believe did not exist), and received a very generous settlement from the company. You would have had no trouble receiving assistance from groups such as the Institute of Justice (a libertarian civil liberties group) in doing so.
Check out how universities recruit and promote tenure track professors. You can be the most qualified and experienced chemist in the world, but no matter how many doctorates you have, if you are a white male good luck finding a position as an Associate Professor anywhere in the USA. Usually the second paragraph of every posting will read "Minorities and women are encouraged to apply.".
I am a postdoc in physics, and know a great deal about minorities in science. I know perhaps a hundred or more professors; only one of them is black. You are now officially making up facts.
Please note that the phrase "minorities and women are encouraged to apply" does not mean "we will not give this job to white men", nor does it mean "we will preferrentially choose minorities or women in favor of equally or greater qualified men." It means that Universities wish to encourage minorities and women to apply for the job. Why would they have to do this? See my next response.
When I ran my own business, I hired people I could trust -- friends of the boss, people I went to college with, people with connections -- of whatever color or gender. So tell me again why I am incorrect to explain my own actions?
My guess is that, unless you are a statistical freak and making the rather non-leap assumption that you are white, that your friends came preferrentially from white races. If you hired only people you knew in a personal manner, you would automatically be guilty of promoting and continuing racism in workplace hiring.
There was a guy who I worked with who was fired, when I talked to him later he ranted on and on about the only reason he lost his job was because he was of mixed race, because his grandmother was Haitian.
It is strange to use the firing of a mixed race worker as evidence that racism does not exist.
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Why should I.T. be different from any other field? I would expect racism to be a live and well in the US (albeit just below the surface).
I am of African decent (aka Black for those you who need a translation) and just recently moved to the US from Canada. I have lived in England, Canada, the Caribbean and Africa.
Excluding Africa and the Caribbean, I have found the US to be the one country that has made the most advances in "Equal Opportunities". There are countless examples of Africans descendents working at all levels within the IT industry, from Al Zolar (CEO Lotus Notes/ IBM Division) to your local "deskside" support guy. Are we representative of the larger African/US population? I doubt it, but then again we are hardly at the back of the bus!
In1image - PHD, MSc, BSc
Ok. Here's one. I don't know too much about insidehighered.com, but I doubt it's a front for the aryan brotherhood.
/., so RTFA is right out. ;->), white female candidate was one of the finalists for a job. Employer's EOO ADDED a male african-american candidate to the finalist pool. White female came in second from the top[1], while african-american came in second from the bottom. University gave the job to the african-american "candidate". Here's a link [pdf, you've been warned] to the decision by the seventh circuit to allow the case to proceed. So does she sound like she qualifies as "one good man or woman"?
:-P) that the number is between 1% and 2% (If it were under 1%, I would have expected the site to say so), it appears that there are between 910 and 1819 [less than 2%, after all ;->] reverse discrimination claims working thier way through the EEOC at the moment.
/me dons asbestos suit.
In summary (because this is
Then there is the case of University of California Regents v Bakke[2]. Where it was held that the UC system had discriminated against a white applicant by admitting lesser-qualified minority applicants. Yeah, that's academic reverse discrimination as opposed to employment. And it was back in the 70's so it's completely irrelevant... Except that the exact same issue came before SCOTUS again in 1996. Unless you think PBS is an angry blogger. There have been a host of similar decisions handed down over the last few years, btw.
In a more general way, this site [3] points out in #12, that "less than 2 percent of the 91,000 employment discrimination cases pending before the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission are reverse discrimination cases." Working on the assumption (because I'm too lazy to mine for the actual numbers
I don't really have a dog in the fight, and to the best of my knowledge have never been passed over for a job based on either my race or my gender. Nor do I know anyone IRL who has claimed to have been so discriminated against. But you asked for proof of "even one" example. While implying that such was a high burden. Btw, google is your friend.
A now await the flames and downmods.
[1] I'm personally curious where #1 fits into all this, but that's another issue.
[2] I don't think that Findlaw counts as an angry blogger-especially as it is just the literal SCOTUS decision.
[3] Which appears to be dismissive of the idea of reverse discrimination, btw.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
I admit up front, I have a name that is foreign. You wouldn't be able to put your finger on it, but it's Middle Eastern in origin. Point of fact, is that my parents are Pakistani, and that's where my name comes from.
I was fortunate enough to land a job last year thru a friend of a friend -- and it's worked out great. I am well respected, well treated, reasonably well paid (but we'd all like some more, wouldn't we?), and people know the quality of my work not based on my skin color (which by the way, is brown) but the delivery of my work.
After I got hired for this position, I still had the automated emails coming back to me from the CareerBuilders, HotJobs, Monster etc.. So for my own experiment I changed the name on my resume to read William Johannsen (or something to that effect.. very "white") and left everythign else identical and changed the email to something else so I wouldn't spam up my inbox.
It's amazing how many more emails I recieved. At first, I thought it may have been a fluke, so I sent to jobs I prior applied to under my real name and got denied or got no response. I got responses from them as well. Granted, not everybody sent a response and I don't want to give the illusion that everybody is racist or whatever.... but seeing is believing. If I changed my name to John Smith or whatever tomorrow, I believe opportunities would be far greater than if I stuck with my real name.
Is this a 'scientific' experiment? Not in the slightest... it was to satisfy my curiousity and I did it for only a month because I grew bored of doing it knowing that I wouldn't accept any of the jobs, even though some of them were decent. It just didnt make sense since I had already started to build a niche where I was.
I should note, that on the bottom on my resume with my real name, I'd put US CITIZEN on it, because my name tends probably to associate more with people who need H1 Visas or something that come from India or wherever... and I'm sure this is a distraction to a lot of employers who are not willing to sponsor somebody.
Either way... those are the depressing results of my small non-scientific experiment. You can take away from it what you will, but under my own view, I really do think chances improve if you have a white name.. I'm sure a white face only helps further but obviously I can't find any information to the contrary on that.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Accents.
Not necessarily.
I am from the American South. Thus, I grew up experiencing whites to have a certain set of accents and blacks to have another set accents. With a *high* degree of accuracy, I could pick out the highly, "middle" and poorly educated of both races.
So, it was a great shock to me when I got out into the Real World and had hundreds of hours of long-distance phonecons with people up North who had "white" accents, but turned out to be black.
You can imagine that I'm much more cautious about labeling someone "black" based upon their accent.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It happens. When doing a round of layoffs, I was once instructed (2002) by HR to select only middle-aged white males, because "they can't sue." Back in 1998, when doing a lot of hiring, I was instructed to "prefer" minorities when evaluating candidates to increase our diversity. If you think discrimination against non-minorities does not ever happen, you should get out more.
That reverse discimination card is overplayed
There is no "reverse discrimination." Discrimination is discrimination. Period.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
One of my coworker was always facing discrimination because of his skin color. All his talent, knowledge, experience was overlooked in front of a white chic, who was miserably dependent on him for performing her duties.
Having stayed there, I have seen numerous examples. Canada is hell for Immigrants.
hilarious
Well sir, it's illegal here too. But that doesn't stop them. Several times now, I've been passed over for operator/typing at a medium sized company, where I've been the only person out of the entire hiring group to pass the grammar test(which meant you didn't get to take the other tests) then got a decent 70wpm typing and passed the customer relation test barely. I know people who work there , suddenly a large group of black people are "new" and they never even got tested, they can't type(required 30 wpm) or spell. I was sent a letter stating "your skills are not what ************* is looking for." I knew typing and spelling were skills, but did not know being black was, guess I'll have to train.
I have nothing against black people, no reason to. I do have something against companies screwing over qualified people cause they honestly filled out the race portion of the forms.
Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be in a position to hire some developpers. A number of résumés where presented to me and I had to select from them. I interviewed and ended up selecting: an Iranian, a Check, a Chinese and a Pakistani (all of whom were recent immigrants). Here's what I got: a very dedicated, creative team who built software that allowed me to slaughter my competition. Competition who, as it turns out, happened to be racist and politically motivated. If I had chosen the same route as my competitors and let my judgement be clouded by neanderthal thinking, success would have eluded my organization. So, if you are the competition, by all means, please be racist, 'cause, if you do, I'm coming to beat you!!
*** Don't be dull.***
Umm, childhood IQ tests can't test above 180, furthermore if your IQ is 190 you might want to get hold of Mensa and the Guinness Book of Records because that would make you the brightest man in the world.
Wow.... I never imagined that I'd get this many replies.......
I don't usually respond to heated subjects like this as I know it tends to either bring out the worst in people, or like I said they basically say, "Show me."
I never stated that I don't care about other's opinions; please show me how I implied that.
I am merely stating fact at things I have done. Whether or not you believe them doesn't really matter to me as I am still going to get up in the morning, go to work, make lots of money, pick up something nice for my wife on the way home and do the same thing tomorrow. (Except for the picking something, that could spoil her!)
My wife read this and was hurt (for about 3 shakes (props if you know what that refers to!)), but she did agree that I may have come off sounding a bit arrogant and I'm not at all (except in most any FPS, I will kill all who stand before me!).
I have an ego, like anyone, however to put it into context, I'm only considered of *average* intelligence where I work, so it's not like I pull John Nash's all day and write state tables on windows all day (I use Linux!).
It's just that I wanted to make those out there who think I am not capable of great things, simply because of my color or background, understand that I can.
I'm glad that this discussion hasn't degenerated into a flame war or worse, as it's one of the more interesting "Ask Slashdot" I've read. Not because of the content but the views expressed. I don't know about the rest of you but I've only seen a few replies with absolutes. The responses, like the topic itself, have been many interesting shades of grey.
Am I "pounding a podium", hell yes! Sometimes it's the only way to get someone's attention.
Looking at these replies, I'd say I have.
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
Im a Dutchie working in the IT field as a systems-/networkadmin for a detaching agency. I've recently found that The Netherlands (which used to be known as *the* most open multicultural country) sadly still knows many racist streaks in IT.
:P
My current assignment is for the government of the largest city in The Netherlands, and there are several external IT-ers running around here. One of them was Indonesian (he became a private contracter and left), another is Turkish, one is a Brit and the rest is native Dutch. We all work in the IT departement and we lunch together every day, having the most interesting conversations. Eventually the topic of racism came up (Muslims are a hot topic in The Netherlands at the moment) and i was stunned to find out that the Turkish guy had actually changed his name to a more West-European one to have an easier time getting a job here!
He shared his experiences about how he had submitted 2 different resume's to the same jobopening and changing only his full name (his real name is very obviously foreign). The version with a typical Dutch name enthusiastically got invited for an interview while the original version of his resume got shot down almost instantly. Nothing else was changed, all the skills, education etcetera was all exactly the same on both resumes. This was not a one-time event tho. Both the Indonesian guy and the Turkish had similar experiences. They had also experienced the same reaction over the phone, so its not just a burocracy-thing. And this is supposed to be "the" multicultural nation?
The whole racial thing is such an alien concept to me, it apparently makes me naive
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
I don't have any newspaper account of such things, but if you're interested, I can share a personal account with you instead.
A friend of mine was up for a promotion at her workplace (incidentally not in the IT industry). She was told by her manager that there weren't any other realistic candidates for the position and she was sure to get it. However, the person named ended up being another woman, who not only worked in a different department, but did not even have a college degree (stated as one of the minimum requirements for the position). My friend was shocked and confused.
Eventually, she learned from her manager that the other woman was black, and had threatened to sue under the Equal Opportunity Act if not given the job. She probably would not have won, but the company did not have the resources to defend itself against such a lawsuit, so they gave in to her demands.
As many people have already stated, discrimination is discrimination regardless of who is practicing it, or whom they are practicing it against. The sad fact is, you cannot legislate racism out of existence. The EOCC levels the playing field only in the sense that it facilitates racism for everybody, instead of just the majority.
Blacks were on the North American continent nearly as long as the first Europeans who "discovered" it. I'm sure the blacks at that time would have been happy to assist in the founding of the U.S. but they were not given the right to do some, partly because blacks were considered to be a fraction of a man and all.
One of the main principles of the U.S. Constitution is the idea of individual liberty and property rights for "all" which in the 18th century meant wealthy white landowners. Eventually, other groups were included in this definition of "all" but blacks were one group who were essentially excluded from this group until about 40 years ago.
The roughly 200 years of black exclusion from politics, property rights,and education has had a detrimental affect on blacks. Likewise, European dominance of Africa and Middle East for several centuries has had a detrimental affect on people in those regions as well.
The U.S. was founded on idealistic principles and philosophies but the dirty side of that fiction is that the nation was developed at the exploitation of the poor and those who had no rights because they were not U.S. citizens. Fortunately people of any race born in the U.S. are now considered citizens of this nation. Unfortunately, the U.S.'s history of class and race exclusion permeates throughout the nation as such exclusion does in most parts of the world.
I'm posting anonymously becuase I can provide a very real example but don't want attribution. My mother is a director of Human Resources at a major company and there was a minority worker who consistently performed poorly. This worker failed QC all the time and most of her work was returned or had to be redone by other employees. Because of regulatory requirements, my mother was forced to document all of these problems for several months before she could fire this person. When the person was finally fired, my mother was immediately accused of racism and sexism (despite the obvious fact that my mother is a woman). She literally has to bend over backwards to fire a minority because of all the paperwork involved. She's had to spend hours learning laws and she's had to take numerous tests to verify that she can comply with all the requirements for firing someone who is a minority. So while this isn't a "newspaper account" this is one instance I know of personally.
There's the case of my girlfriend's employer. They had an employee who decided she didn't like her work schedule, so she stopped coming to work. Because she was black it took 6 months of meetings, finally agreeing to change her schedule to something she wanted, and then another 3 months of putting up with her terrible job performance before they had enough to fire her. 9 months they paid her because she was black. Another cow-orker missed 2 days of work and was fired right away. He was white.
You ask for documentation but really this sort of stuff is in a lot of large companies and not getting documented at all because the same people terrified of a civil rights lawsuit are also terrified the overly qualified white guy they just turned down in favor of a mediocre black guy will sue as well. It's all ridiculous and it's all because of the current laws.
I replied to my own post since my first one was getting buried.
Wow.... I never imagined that I'd get this many replies.......
I don't usually respond to heated subjects like this as I know it tends to either bring out the worst in people, or like I said they basically say, "Show me."
I never stated that I don't care about other's opinions; please show me how I implied that.
I am merely stating fact at things I have done. Whether or not you believe them doesn't really matter to me as I am still going to get up in the morning, go to work, make lots of money, pick up something nice for my wife on the way home and do the same thing tomorrow. (Except for the picking something, that could spoil her!)
My wife read this and was hurt (for about 3 shakes (props if you know what that refers to!)), but she did agree that I may have come off sounding a bit arrogant and I'm not at all (except in most any FPS, I will kill all who stand before me!).
I have an ego, like anyone, however to put it into context, I'm only considered of *average* intelligence where I work, so it's not like I pull John Nash's all day and write state tables on windows all day (I use Linux!).
It's just that I wanted to make those out there who think I am not capable of great things, simply because of my color or background, understand that I can.
I'm glad that this discussion hasn't degenerated into a flame war or worse, as it's one of the more interesting "Ask Slashdot" I've read. Not because of the content but the views expressed. I don't know about the rest of you but I've only seen a few replies with absolutes. The responses, like the topic itself, have been many interesting shades of gray.
Am I "pounding a podium", hell yes! Sometimes it's the only way to get someone's attention.
Looking at these replies, I'd say I have.
P.S. - To the Korean person who blew a gasket. What? I think you are misunderstanding me. Please elaborate on your point more. I could tell you were upset over something, and you said that Japanese don't consider other's cultures... I think. The company I work for isn't Japanese it's just that word took the Japanese out of my post. (Yes, I DO proof everything I post.) In any case I'd like to hear more of what you have to say.
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet