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Amazon Embodies the Gender Gap in Tech
New submitter chpoot writes: "The Guardian reveals the gender breakdown among Amazon's management 'S Team.' At one end of the team of 132 are 12 secretaries. All are female. At the other end are 12 who report directly to Jeff Bezos. All are male. Of the 119 remaining when Bezos and the secretaries are put to one side, 18 are female. Amazon, of course, grew out of book selling. Book selling, publishing, and writing have all a fairly admirable tradition of employing women. In its attempts to overthrow traditional book selling, Amazon seems to have been particularly successful in subverting that part of the tradition."
And here I'd always heard that Amazon women were particularly cutthroat..
There's also a surprisingly low percentage of female garbage collectors.
Since that particular job requires very little education, it would be far easier to start there when trying to close the gender gap.
Why aren't we?
It is a cut throat business they run
The most qualified people rose to the top, regardless of their sex.
Amazon, nor any other company, owes it to gender ideologies to fulfill their delusion of complete gender equality.
Some genders are more skilled in certain areas and less skilled in others. Deal with it.
about how few females are truck drivers?? or garbage collectors? or oil field workers? or (insert other industry here)
Why does it seem that tech is being unfairly beat up because of a apparent lack of women? the lack of women does not automatically mean that there is some sexist agenda, It could simply mean that there are A - not enough women wanting to be in the field or B - better qualified candidates who happen to be male.
Females wanted equality, I define equality by giving the job to the best candidate, not an artificial quota of genders in each position
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Perhaps the person who wrote it does not have English as his(her?) first language, but it does not parse at all. Go read the story the summary is based on if you want to make heads or tails of this.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Amazon is not in the same business as traditional bookselling. Amazon is a tech company which sells books (among other things). As a result, the characteristics needed in its employees are those of a tech company, not those of a book company. I used to work as a bookstore manager. If you look at the types of jobs that are typically dominated by women and the types of jobs which are typically dominated by men, you discover that those jobs require different characteristics. Bookstores and publishers require a mix of those characteristics, as a result, you have a fairly even distribution between the sexes.
I tried to explain why Amazon does not need to have more women executives, unlike bookstores and publishers, but I cannot quite put it into words. I do not think Amazon would be hurt by having more women executives. It is just that the nature of the company is such that men are more likely to have the characteristics which cause them to rise to executive positions.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
At one end of the team of 132 are 12 secretaries. All are female. At the other end are 12 who report directly to Jeff Bezos. All are male. Of the 119 remaining when Bezos and the secretaries are put to one side, 18 are female.
I don't know what i'm supposed to be picturing here? what is the significance of the ends? are employees implicitly linear? is it particularly damning that the secretaries are all put on one end instead of being allowed to freely mingle with the other 120 team members? Do the 12 team members who report to Bezos somehow balance out the 12 secretaries? why are there 12 of both? Why are they at the other end? do they never get to see the secretaries being so far away? Is this just a super complicated way of saying that out of 132 team members 30 of them are female and the most important 12 members are all male?
Are any of them hot?
Or it could be amazingly appropriate. That corporation wants only females willing to chop their own breasts off to be in the "team".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Evidence shows that more women in senior management leads to better corporate performance, a boost to the bottom line, and allows businesses to tap into new insights about their customers"
Tell that to HP, Yahoo, Gnome, etc. So yeah, citation needed. Oh wait, never mind:
"The Society has been criticised by business groups for comparing average pay for full-time men with average-pay for part-time women to highlight the disparity, and a lack of transparency in making their methodology clear."
I'll just say it out loud for everyone. Most women are not that aggressive. Most men are. Often it's a detriment in the modern world. Where it's not is in leading business. Why are most HR departments filled with women? Because women and men are in fact different and our gender does affect how well we perform and enjoy certain tasks. We have equal opportunity laws because most is not all. There are women that make great executives and they should have the chance to show it. But to expect very specific roles in a single company to be gender equal numerically is just stupid. Are we going to accuse Etsy of sexism because the majority of their customers/stores are run by females?
Until every last man is cast forth into unemployment and dependence on the state, and only women occupy positions of power, it's an endless holocaust against progress!!!
My office tries to maintain a gender balance in management... the performance bar is set lower for the women, it's quite obvious.
Congratulations. The ignorance factor among your management will all but guarantee a lawsuit.
From the men.
I know I'd be rather pissed if my job was somehow harder only because I was a male in management. Why does she get a break?
(Yeah, it's practically funny to see how quickly that shit can turn, isn't it..)
Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.
Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.
Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay community (bears/cubs) and old taverns for men only are the target of public outcry and lawsuits. It's the same with race; who would put "White-owned company" on their website? Total hypocrisy.
lucm, indeed.
there would be more women it IT. Seems that IT is not an attractive career option for the ladies. BFD. Interior design is not an attractive career option for men, BFD. I worked in IT for 30+ years, but wouldn't do it again. Too much sitting, too much listening to incompetent management, too many clueless users who didn't know what they wanted or needed and couldn't be bothered to figure it out ("how do I know what I want until I see what I get"), never-ending software updates, greedy and incompetent vendors. But it did pay pretty well.
the reality is, women are just as capable as men. the _only_ issue is, the _current_ talent pool is deeper on the male side. this is rapidly changing, look at the pipeline. 20 years from now equality will happen organically.
enough said
There is a documentary from Norway that sheds light on this type of situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70
If you are interested in gender differences, it is worth 38 minutes of your time.
Too-long-will-not-read version: There are things we should change now to bring pay into a gender balance, there are vestiges of past practices that will "take care of themselves" over time which will bring gender pay into balance, and there may be things which should not be "fixed" just for the sake of achieving gender balance because the "fix" will be worse than the "disease."
Long version:
The gender gap will only close so far, here's why:
* As long as we live in a society where more women prefer to halt or "downsize" their career in favor of their family than men, women's average career opportunities will be lower.
* As long as we live in a society where child-rearing after divorces falls more on women than on men, the women who have to reduce their work hours or drop out of college so they can raise their kids will drag down the average career opportunities for women.
* It will take generations to "bleed out" the vestiges of past discrimination. If today's boys and girls see that their grandmothers or great-grandmothers were nurses and teachers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doctors and headmasters, they will notice and may choose a career path accordingly.
* If today's boys see elementary-school-teaching as female-dominated, they are more likely to grow up thinking that the job is "beneath them" and not worthy of being paid well.
* Some jobs, such as being an administrative assistant or schoolteacher, are much more tolerant of long career breaks than others, such as science and engineering. They are also much easier to get into as a second career. This means the talent pool of those who could become trained for the job in less than 2 years if they wanted to resume that career or switch to that career is larger, which in turn means wages may be lower.
Here are some other factors that are likely to give one gender an advantage over another but the advantage could just as easily be a women's advantage as a man's.
* As long as we live in a society where girls are "steered" towards certain career fields and men towards others, then unless by chance the average salaries and other career opportunities in "women-dominated careers" is the same as in "men-dominated careers," one gender or the other will have a statistical "advantage" at any given time.
* If - and I'm not saying there is, but if - there is a gender-specific biological preference for certain types of work and that preference isn't countered by some other force such as encouraging people to have careers outside of their gender's statistical preference, there will likely be one gender with a more average pay and career opportunities than the other at any given time.
* There are certain jobs that women, on average, are simply more qualified to do than men, and vice-versa. Fortunately, many of these, such as being a professional football player or professional soprano vocalist, are so low in numbers that they don't sway the averages. Others, such as certain jobs in the military and law enforcement that require strength and endurance standards that men on average are better able to meet, are common enough that the lack of a 50/50 balance in these careers will affect the "average" ratio of pay for men and women. If jobs that are male- or for that matter female-dominated are stepping-stones to other careers, such as becoming a General in the Army, then the effects will be felt for a much longer period of time.
These lists are by no means complete.
Some of these things will take care of themselves over time. Others will require deliberate effort to overcome. Others, such as the (hypothetical?) gender-specific biological preferences for certain types of work, should probably be accepted as not worth "fixing" as the "fix" - encouraging people to take on career paths that would not naturally be their first choice, merely to achieve some statistical balance - is probably worse than the "disease" - having a small, permanent imbalance in male- to female- average earnings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You do a Naturalistic fallacy[1]. Only because it is natural for something, it does not mean that it's a valid excuse. By the same argument you could argue that racial discrimination is natural and therefore it's not a problem. What you described is exactly why we have laws against discrimination of minorities, i.e. precisely because minorities are perceived as something different and get a different treatment for no valid reason.
Now there are valid reasons to have a special treatment for woman, for example, in the field of sport, or in case of the workspace, in heavy lifting. There is an anatomical difference between woman and man's bodies, that's why it's perfectly reasonable to have woman and man compete separate or to hire male workers. But there is no such difference in mental capabilities.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
All the studies I have seen on gender, race, sexual leanings, age or any other attribute all make the basic assumption that all the qualified individuals, from all groups, all want the same things and are equally motivated to get it. And therefore any discrepancy between the number holders of those positions and the size of the group they came from *must* be due to some sort of discrimination or favouritism.
Has anyone seen any contemporary (within the last 10 years or so) studies that can assert the validity, or otherwise, of this basic assumption?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is management. What does that have to do with IT?
Is hiring someone because they have a vagina any less sexist than NOT hiring them because they have one?
-Styopa
Where are the male grade schools teachers? Arguably a teacher is much more important to society as a whole than another code monkey. Call centers are another notable example of few men in the job.
The Venn diagram for "WOMAN" && "STRONG" && "NO EDUCATION" is smaller than the same for "MAN".
And?
Our garbage collection service has a truck that hooks into an arm on the large garbage can they give us. The truck picks it up with the garbage person only jostling it into place slightly (sometimes not even that).'
Anything very large or heavy, they just leave behind... there are union rules on what they can lift you know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Correlation is not causation.
Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize that label by over using it until it means nothing, hmmm? Responsible and honest people would want to ensure their perception of the situation at Amazon actually showed sexism or hatred of women before attempting to slander and shame their business practices. I don't see any evidence of sexism at all, all I see is more social justice shame being heaped for political reasons. To say that Amazon is a Book Seller which is traditionally Women Territory and ignoring how sexist that sounds and how unlike a book store Amazon is would be fucking insane, and yet there it is, right in TFS!
If there is sexism let's root it out, fine, but before we go sensationally bat-shit crazy and jump the gun let's just do a quick informal reality check: Ever try talking tech to women? What's your experience, do equal percentage of women vs men enjoy really geeking out about technology? It's my experience that more men do than women. OK, take a deep breath. Now, let's just ENTERTAIN THE CONSIDERATION that men and women may like doing different things; Disproving that is key to proving sexism exist... So, why isn't the professional offense league trying to do just that? It's just like when social justice warriors drone on and on about the lack of minorities in positions of influence and then forget to correct for the fact that 77% of the USA is white: You get out what you put in, geniuses. If women have equal opportunities but are not applying for the jobs that they don't want to do then you won't find them in said workforce. That's not sexism, it's free will.
Where's the ONE STUDY, just ONE flipping survey even that shows the degrees that women vs men enjoy and desire various jobs? Mightn't that be the FIRST FUCKING STEP to showing whether or not society is sexist or people just want to do different things? There are very few male romance novelists -- You can even use a pen-name, so there's no barrier to entry -- but it's not sexist that more women want to do that job than men... 40 years of feminism, but they still don't have any evidence that women aren't just exercising their right to select the more people friendly jobs they typically prefer. What are they trying to say? That decades of the social justice war have been completely pointless? Really? "Let's test the Null Hypothesis before being heinously slanderous," said no social justice warrior ever. Equal opportunity won't produce equal outcome because behavioral sex differences exist. Notably: Women are more extroverted (outgoing, socially interactive) than men and more developed and more egalitarian societies yield greater sex differences. The greater behavioral difference is probably because the people are freer to choose what they want to do instead of what they have to do to make money.
The gender pay gap doesn't exist, and it hasn't existed for around four decades. There's also no shortage of STEM workers. You see, if Amazon and other companies are shamed into having a 50/50 M:F hiring ratios regardless of the percentage of q
That's the situation we have at work. I work at an IT department, and we are all men. Why? Because that's basically all that apply. In the last round of hiring there weren't any women. Ok well I could be clear that I can't say that for sure: The three candidates we picked to interview were all men, and the names on the resumes of the other 20-ish that made it past HR sounded male. We don't ask for pictures or anything so there could have been women in that mix, I don't know. Also I don't know who HR filtered, as they don't pass those on (hence the filtering).
We have had a woman work for us before. Our previous web dev was a woman. She was the only woman to apply, and she was hired (not because she was a woman, because she was the best). However, after about a year her fiance took a job in New York and she moved off with him. In the next round of hiring for that, it was all men.
We can't hire people who don't apply. We really don't have the opportunity to discriminate based on gender because there are just almost no female applicants. I suppose, in theory, HR could be discriminating on our behalf but I find that unlikely because:
1) We are a large state agency and thus have very strong anti-discrimination/EEO rules.
2) HR has quite a few women on staff, perhaps the majority.
3) Most importantly: All HR really does is check qualifications and pass on resumes that seem to meet the minimums for the job. They tend to know fuck-all about the position, it is just match our minimums list vs the resume.
So ya, 100% of the IT people in our college are male, and about 90% of the secretaries are female. Well, in the case of IT, that's because of who applies. We can't go and make women apply.
Ah, a merger of the "smelly nerd" hypothesis and the "misogynistic nerd" hypothesis.
First: brogrammers. They're a hoax. They've always been a hoax. And an obvious one; the image is in fact diametrically opposed to the smelly basement-dwelling neckbearded geek stereotype, which is kind of the point. So if you are blaming brogramming for the lack of women in tech, you're either completely ignorant or your agenda matters more than the facts.
As for the asocial nerd stereotype, it has somewhat more to back it up, though it's an exaggeration as all sterotypes are. But it's so much that asocial nerds don't like women.... it's that women don't like asocial nerds.
First we're told that historically women were brutally mistreated, now you say that they've never had it worse. Are they ever going to learn and start their own companies? Yes, some of them do, and no one has any problem with them. It's the ones infinitely bitching and asking for unearned advantages against better qualified men that men justifiably are annoyed with. As long as they get away with it women will not develop technical skills, it's just plain inefficient.
Just wondering what the racial breakdown comes out to be. I mean, if we're so concerned about equality, shouldn't we also be concerned with racial makeup and, hell, sexual orientation/gender identification as well?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
* It will take generations to "bleed out" the vestiges of past discrimination. If today's boys and girls see that their grandmothers or great-grandmothers were nurses and teachers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doctors and headmasters, they will notice and may choose a career path accordingly.
Our grandmothers were programmers, that doesn't really seem to have made a difference.
The only thing different about J.K. Rowling's pen name from her real name is that she made up a middle initial. The reason that she went with initials rather than her first name (Joanne) was because the publisher thought young boys (the original target market for the book) might not want to buy a book written by a woman. At the time there were already MANY established women fantasy writers (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Ursula LeGuin, and on and on). So, they did not have her use her initials to "prove women could write fantasy."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Unfortunately, while starting your own tech company might mitigate peer perception problems in the workplace, you instantly are dealing with a far, far greater problem - the perceptions of your customers and your financiers, be they banks, VCs, or friends and relatives.
In fact, you get second order effects, where VCs won't invest, even when they believe you're completely capable, because they know that customers will question the competency of women founders. Since they're in it to make money, they completely rationally discriminate.
But it's still discrimination.
The other thing is that women like to claim they're paid less than men which begs the question why would companies hire men if they could pay women less?
(1) "women like to claim"? Come on, the statistics are iron-clad. How about "women are paid less than men for the same job". Period. Now, sure you can have lots of arguments about *why*, but don't even try to pretend the stats aren't clear. What's next "scientists like to claim evolution is real"?
(2) Companies are made of people. And those people have the same tics (especially where things don't have a perfect metric to make comparison easy) as the rest of us.
(3) Also, people like to hire like. I'm a techie, and I enjoy geek culture. But none of the women I work with, all of whom are exceedingly competent, are geeks, especially enjoy geek culture, or love tech for its own sake. Nor do they need to in order to be exceptionally valuable programmers. However, I've seen them occasionally overlooked because they lack all the "tells" of geek prowess. Certainly, if I was hiring, I could easily pass them over for someone who "speaks my language".
So, no, I don't expect a revolution in hiring any time soon.
The patriarchy is so insidious that it will inefficiently hire men at the cost of their own profits.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
And just like racial affirmative action, it will always take just a little longer before we can get rid of the special help.
Or, to put it in terms understandable on this site:
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Their sons are still living in them?
Where did it say that women were disproportionately represented in book selling? It just said that it was admirable.
I have no idea the gender breakdown of "traditional" book sales, by the way. Literally I have no guess. This is not something I have ever paid attention to.
If you ask a feminist, they would say they got stopped years before being in a position to create the next innovative tech startup, because school discourages them from learning math, science, and technology. That's why I don't really get these arguments. Feminists argue that women are somehow discouraged by peers for being bossy or good at math or science turning them away from these things. If that's true, why do we expect for then to have equal presence in the work place? There's not enough qualified applicants. When it comes to most careers (especially in STEM) you need to be passionate about what you're doing to be good. You won't want to be a programmer if you get bored after 20 minutes, and that means even if you somehow get qualified for a job, you'll hate it. So if women's passion is already squashed by high school, what makes you think that they will regain this passion in college, and then surpass their male counter parts who've been passionate for longer? I mean, it's getting better, but we shouldn't expect every company to have females at the highest levels, there's just not enough qualified women to go around.
Our recycling truck has that, but they just got it last year and they can't use it on the narrow streets in the township. It's a recent development, and it let them reduce the workforce - not exactly an opportunity for all those educated women to line up for trash jobs :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I disagree, it isn't a myth, it's an outright lie and they know it. http://www.humanevents.com/201...
Gender baiting along with race baiting from this administration.